Rama with his bow - he is a warrior. Rama is an incarnation of Vishnu, and is the protagonist of the Ramayana.
The Capitol Hotel: Aug. 9th
Moving day! After 6 months of struggle, we are finally moving Apple’s engineering into the Capitol Hotel in downtown Bangalore.
Moving has been an extraordinary struggle. The biggest challenge has been negotiating with the hotel management to get our facility built in a timely manner with at least some hint of livability. We have had to work with the General Manager (the good guy), and an unseen Managing Director (the bad guy). They have had our deposit money for four months, but have only finished our rooms after major threats.
Of course delay in India is inevitable. The real reasons are never clear. We had ordered a blue carpet and burgundy chairs. We are getting a lime green carpet, and orange chairs. An unfortunate contrast. The blue carpet had to be trucked from New Delhi, about 2 weeks away. Midway through the journey the truck got caught in the monsoon, and all of its contents were "destroyed". No doubt local villagers salvaged the carpets. Somewhere in Andhra Pradesh there now lies a village of houses of thatched huts and mud walls with wall-to-wall blue carpeting. Actually, I believe it’s a convenient excuse by the hotel’s Managing Director to bring down the cost some more.
The Managing Director of the hotel has proven himself to be a legendary "lala". The concept of a lala is, I think, unique to India. A lala is a businessman who manages through craftiness, stinginess, and clever "gyp-pping" to turn a small business into a large one. He pays his employees poorly, cheats his customers, and lies well. However, if he is shrewd enough he can build a large enough business. The Capitol’s owner is such a man - by scrimping wherever possible, whenever possible, he has built a five floor hotel from a village restaurant.
As a result of his management style, he has a 40% employee turnover, and his restaurant, which he likes to believe is a world famous 5 star, is so bad that I refuse to take any important person there. How bad is it?
One of my employees took his wife with him to shop for vegetables at City Market. City Market is an open-air street market where the vendors literally spread their vegetables out on the street (not in carts, or in stalls, but on the asphalt itself). My employee’s wife saw some vegetables that she wanted to buy, and was told they were five rupees a kilo. To bargain the price down, she told the subsi-wallah that it was six in the evening, and that if he didn’t sell the vegetables, they were probably going to rot. "After all, it was a hot day and they weren’t going to get any better under the sun. Why not sell them for three rupees." "No Madam, I can’t sell them for three rupees, you will have to pay five". The haggling went on for a while, and stopped when the subsi-wallah replied, "Madam if the vegetables rot, I will sell them tomorrow for three rupees to the Capitol Hotel."
The ace in my hand is that I am a big shot in Bangalore. Every big shot that comes to my office will know about the Capitol Hotel, and its problems. Suitably armed with this influence, I am making some headway with the lala. Still, I make sure to introduce every CEO/Managing Director who visits to the Capitol Hotel’s General Manager. It’s going to be a long stay..