Saurabh Mukherjea - The Victory Project

The subject of Saurabh Mukherjea and Anupam Guptas book is high performance. They prescribe a number of steps to achieve it and narrate sparkling stories to illustrate it. This is altogether fitting, for Indians have always learnt how to live their lives from stories, and this is why India has one of the richest storytelling traditions in the world. In this spirit, I would like to narrate a couple of my favourite tales that will illustrate the fundamental principles in this book.

The first one, called The Mouse Merchant, is from an eleventh-century Shaivite Kashmiri anthology, Kathasaritsagara. It is a story about entrepreneurship, in tune with our age of start-ups, and demonstrates some of this books principles in action: simplicity, collaboration, innovation and determination. The hero of the story is a young man whose father, a merchant, had died when his mother was pregnant, and his wicked uncles had stolen his inheritance. His mother had since supported him by cleaning houses and doing other menial work. Though poor, she persuaded a teacher to instruct her son in writing and mathematics. When the boy grows up, his mother says to him, Remember, you are the son of a great merchant. Go and make a fortune. Meet Vishakhila, the richest merchant in our city, and he will give you advice.

The next day, the young man goes dutifully to the rich mans mansion. While waiting outside, he sees a dead mouse in his courtyard. When the rich merchant appears, he asks him if he can have the dead mouse. Vishakhila laughs.

People come to me for money and favours; dont you want anything?

No, sir, says the young man, and he thanks him for the dead mouse.

He sells the mouse to a widow with a cat, who lives near his house. With a few paisa that she gives him for the mouse, he buys two handfuls of channa, which he grinds and makes into little packets of snack food. With a pot of water and his snack food, he goes and stands under a shady tree at the crossroads outside the city. In the afternoon, loggers arrive from the forest, put down their bundles of timber and sit down to rest. The young man offers each of them a snack packet and water. They are grateful but since they have no money to repay his kindness, each one gives him a log of wood. On the way home, he sells one log to buy channa and stores the other logs at home. The next day he repeats the same thing, and then every day for the next three months, until the logging season stops with the arrival of the monsoon rains.

Because of its scarcity in the market, the price of timber begins to climb. His house is by now full of wood and he slowly begins to unload it in the timber market. By the end of the season, he has made a killing. He buys a shop in the timber market from his profits, and by the next season he has become a timber merchant. He also finds that he has a competitive advantage over other merchants because the loggers know him as the young man who was once kind to them at the crossroads. Since they prefer to deal with him, his market share begins to climb. Before long, he becomes the richest merchant in the timber market.