The Pink Papers

It was sometime in 1995 when I first saw the pink papers in Gupta uncle’s house, it was instant love. Crisp, elegant, typography, still smelling of fresh ink on pressed paper. Gupta uncle as we called him was always kind to me, lending me those papers, as I used to relish them, in awe of this work of art. But what intrigued me most was the op-ed section, with this girl sketched on the center of the page and the author speaking about labor economics and the future of women. The power of words and the subject of economics all framed in the pink papers made a surreal dream of success. Could, I ever publish an editorial in that pink paper? Could I be the economist who could sketch that girl? I had no idea then about the art section and the gifted illustrators working in media. And how writing and art were two separate skills.

I was not happy with what I was doing, managing a team of 100 (tailors), running an ancillary house for fashion apparel exporters, a fabrication unit, one of the biggest in Delhi, with reams of fabric cloth, Cotton Veil to Brocade, to Georgette, to Seersucker, you name it, at 21 I knew more about fabric, it’s processing, and it’s throw away culture in America than any 21 year old out there. We used to spread the fabric with meticulous precision on a 10-meter table, arranging it neatly like paper, placing paper patterns, arranging it into a foot-thick fluffy fabric layer, cutting it with a special machine, making it into bundles of complete units, and distribute it to the tailors, who were ready to kill it, churning more than a 1000 pieces a day, a labor of love and survival. The whole factory would be strewn with Katran (pieces of cloth), half stitched, full stitched, stacked, and many times stained with Betel leaf stains, the tobacco addiction that many of the karigars enjoyed. They could not of course smoke in a textile factory, but they could chew paan. The jackets, or the style, which sometimes was a dress, sometimes an elite wedding gown, and sometimes a shirt was a colorful site, how a rectangular kilometer-long fabric transformed into tons of finished apparel was always a miracle. We supplied to Otto, Karstadt, J. C. Penny, and many other global buyers.

It made money, but something was amiss. I did not see myself growing old doing that. I felt I had to study more, and this was not my future. I wanted to become the pink paper economist. So I went to my teacher, a top-notch tech sales expert, who worked for NIIT, a large technology company in India. Mandeep Singh evoked respect. His wife was a doctor. He was well-traveled. Spoke softly. I made an appointment. The email was new in those days. I reached his South Delhi office at Safdurjung Enclave and shared with him my predicament. “I am split between two choices - Fashion Technology and Finance. I have been admitted to two schools, one is the best fashion school in the country, which could take me into running my own fashion label, a subject I am comfortable with, and on the other side is Finance. These pink papers haunt me. I can’t sleep. They tell me that I should learn economics and finance.” I confessed. “Mukul do something intellectual. Go for finance”.

And this is how in 1995, I rebooted my fashion career into finance, enamored by the pink papers, which urged me to become an expert and express an opinion. So I ended up getting admitted into ICFAI Business School (IBS). An entrance exam, a group discussion, and an interview. It does not matter where you go in India, to a business school or a grocery store, there is always a line. So, I lined up for admission to IBS Hyderabad and enrolled myself to go to Mumbai, the financial capital of India.

6 months in Mumbai, humid, sticky, crammed, everything that had to go bad went bad. From a room in Delhi to staying with a friend in Andheri, and later as a paying guest accommodation in Thane (a city outside Mumbai). I was spending more time on the road than in the class. My love for finance was up for a rude awakening. I was more sick than well. My early days of becoming a financial expert were quite frail. The 101’s were easy, and being in Mumbai made me feel real, I also made good friends, and it was quite exciting, but my extremely sensitive Tonsillitis and street food were killing me. My roommates used to joke "Mukul you need to tie a makeshift sink with you with a water heater, with a place for salt storage so that you can do salt water gargles anywhere and anytime you want". I lost weight and felt that there was no finance, if I died, and going back home to Delhi, and getting my Tonsillitis removed might be a better idea before embarking on a lifelong journey in finance.

I asked for a transfer to Delhi. And I was back in the Mehrauli campus as a day boarder. My class was full of brilliant engineers. I was back to homemade warm food. It was good fun, but still extremely competitive. But at least now I was not dying. There was accounting, there was corporate finance, and then there was International finance. I was amazed how when it came to swap pricing, arbitrage, and options, I had an edge. Even the best in the class sometimes used to come down home or call me to their home for help. Naturally, I was pumped that I might have something in me that the world of finance wanted. The idea of quantitative finance was still new. I loved the models. Delhi was comfort but then I had not yet really been baptized. If I had to do something meaningful, I had to go back to Mumbai.

The pink papers kept calling. So I decided to intern with the top brand of financial newspaper. Business Standard was a leading pink financial newspaper, which carried a weekly magazine called, “The Money Manager”. It was glossy paper, colorful, tucked inside the pink papers, giving it an aura. Back in 1996, it talked about structured finance and swaps, its allure was irresistible. I knew what I wanted to do in my life. I wanted to write for “The Money Manger”. So I took my summer intern brochure and headed to 5 Pratap Bhawan - New Delhi at the office of Business Standard. An industrial building, where I assumed, the printing press stood, somewhere on the ground floor, churning those brilliant artworks. I was not so interested in the mechanics of the printing press but more in the mechanics of a keyboard that word-smithed finance for fans like me.

I sat there at the reception, announcing to the lady at the desk that I was this awesome guy from this awesome school and I was here to apply for this awesome summer training to write for “The Money Manager”. The lady was polite. She told me to wait. She made a few calls, announcing to the respective decision-makers that I was there. After she made a call. She told me to wait. I sat there for 6 hours. Kanika Datta the resident editor, a woman of stature would have had so many cold callers like me every day. One needed security guards to kick out aspirants like me. Once I got a seat, I was glued to my couch. No walking around. Staying there. Saying hello to the people passing by. Daydreaming on the couch to become the special money manager special edition. Someone had to see my determination. I was willing to climb any mountain for those pink papers. Someone had to have pity on me. I had a face of “work for free to learn finance”. I sat there.

I waited for ma’am. Delhi and north India are still about “sir” and “ma’am”. Mumbai was about first names, which I was to find later. I was there waiting for Kanika Ma’am to call me in one of those rooms and hand me the opportunity. Or maybe she was waiting for the clock to tick away for the office to close and maybe to check my commitment to come tomorrow. But I was in luck. Next to the reception was another office. The person saw me a few times on his way in and out of his office. And when he saw how stubborn I was, as luck would have had it, he had pity on me. In no time, I was told that madam Kanika would see me now.

The man was an ex-IAS officer known by his pen name AKB (A. K. Bhattacharya), an elite group of individuals who pass the Indian Administrative Exam to serve in the government. He was the second in command at the paper and fortunately for me, Kanika’s boss. Someone had to see my grit, which always has a way of working out. When you decide you are going to do something, you are unstoppable. And what was 6 hours, I could sit there for 6 days, maybe 6 weeks of my 12-week internship. Nobody knows this story till now, but years later AKB called me to check an applicant's reference.

Exactly after 6 hours and 1 minute, I was in her room. With a smile and a beseeching look, I started my pink paper pitch. The three years of entrepreneurship at the fabrication unit had made me tough. She wasted no time and said, “The Money Manager is published from Mumbai, you will have to go to Mumbai”. The misery from my last trip flashed like a near-death experience in front of my eyes, and I said “Yes”. I knew I would do anything to be at "The Money Manager". So "No" was not an option. And so I was set for Mumbai, the second time around

On my first trip to Mumbai. I had first moved in with some friends from Delhi. One was a child actor aspiring to be a film director and another an aspiring film editor. After my salt gargling had soured my stay there, I moved out of Andheri and moved in as a paying guest with a business school colleague’s grandma. We called her Aaji. She lived 40 km away from the city. Everywhere you go in Mumbai, you bump into Bollywood celebrities and people from the industry. Aaji was the widow of R. V. Srikhande a famous award-winning editor. She lived alone. Her humble one-room, kitchen apartment, next to the lake was Air Bnb before Air Bnb days. I slept on the floor. She slept on the bed, which was a lot better than last time when while I was there, she had hosted another guest and it was two of us on the floor. One of us came to Mumbai to understand finance, the other to build transformers, as his first job. We ate what she made. So, there I was back again to her, wanting to spend time with my old friend. This time I did not mind the floor because she paid me back with her great food and stories. She told my Mukul, “You left hating Mumbai, you Delhi boy, now you are back again and now that you have come twice, you will come again.” I said, “No, I am here to learn, I will go back, I am not coming back.” Aaji did not live to see her forecast come true, she died before my third visit and I ended up spending 4 more years in Mumbai, working for the Bombay Stock Exchange and then later for many top financial institutions as a quantitive analyst and head of research.

So I shuttled Thane to Worli for my Internship, powered by Aaaji’s Poha (puffed rice with Veggies), and landed up in the Business Standard office in the summer of 1996. I had to report to Jayshree Bose. She was a powerhouse. Her writing had brought in financial reform. She had written and edited books for KPMG, Indian Bank’s Association, and other financial institutions. She was sitting there dressed in an elegant saree, Business Standard was initially a part of Anand Bazar Patrika, a West Bengal media company with a legacy going back to 1876. Bengalis were known for their culture, their creativity, and their brains. Rabindranath Tagore and Amartya Sen to point a few. I greeted her and introduced myself as Mukul from Delhi, sent by Kanika Ma’am to meet Jayshree Ma’am, and the first thing she told me was, "We address everyone here by their first name, so don’t use sir and ma’am again". And then she dropped the bomb. "I have these new MBAs in my team. I have no time". She was swamped with work and told me to go to the reporting division which published market commentaries every day. It took the wind out of my sails as I saw this huge mountain in front of my eyes, with Jayshree on top of it, telling me to go away.

I came all the way for nothing. I took a breath. Barely holding on to my choking heart, I told her. "I am sorry ma’am but I have come here to write in "The Money Manager" and not to work in market reporting. Please give me an opportunity". I saw myself again in a situation of monumental obstacles, a classic feature of my life, as I was to realize years later. If there was a toughest and longest way to do things, I would find it. It was the classic mathematical problem not of finding the shortest route, but the longest route. I was assigned a seat in one of the open cubicles. I felt dejected. This was day one. The second day, the same thing happened. I greeted her, smiled at her, and made sure she knew I was not going away. I had power glue and it was sticky.

Thank God for my early entrepreneurial work, I had dealt with worst. A union strike from 100 tailors, negotiating rates, threatening to leave, and these were days when I had not even started shaving. I had to squash strikes and get things done. So here I was again, selling my future capability to my current boss, convincing her to give me a chance. The story repeated for a week. The time I was willing to sit at the reception in Delhi turned back to haunt me, now I was on the bench, while the play happened in front of my eyes. I used this time, to make friends, drink chai, and mingle with the other members of the team, Niharika, Abhijeet (there were two), and Paramjit. Soon I had friendly discussions. Abhijit liked ornithology, while Paramjit loved golf. The other Abhijeet had an athletic build and was an important ally to have in Mumbai.

Niharika was the beautiful upcoming shining star of the team. She was busy. But acknowledged my presence with an occasional hello. So all I needed was one critical vote. I started taking Jayshree’s calls when she was not around, passing important messages, and became a bell boy of sorts, slowly but surely, I was not an eyesore anymore. One fine day, about two weeks from when I landed, Jayshree called me to find out what was happening. I reminded her of my dream. She relented and told me to give it a shot.

My life suddenly changed. The dark clouds disappeared. The sun started to shine and all I could see was green. I had made some intra-department friends too, some of them related well to my condition and wanted to help. I brainstormed with them topical ideas and came up with Insurance, studying the upcoming opening up of the health insurance sector to private players. It took me a week to have some meetings, do research, structure ideas, and explore the storyline and there I was with my work of art, ready for Jayshree to review. By the third week, her body language had changed and she complimented me on a good first attempt. I was on top of the world. It was clear that I had a good chance to be published in the center spread of the revered pink papers. I was so close. And then in May 1997 and later in June 1997, I was published, twice. The second time, because Niharika decided to take a vacation, and Jayshree said, "I had an opportunity to prove my mettle."

I ended up becoming not only a guest columnist for the newspaper but many other papers, eventually getting into academic work, acquiring more knowledge, becoming a practitioner, even getting an MIT fintech award, and proving to myself that no dream was impossible, all you needed was the courage to dream and then grit to stick around. The sticking part was more important. The best thing that came out of my pink paper dream was the friends I made then, friends who lived my pink paper journey with me, my best treasure that I earned because I had grit.