Month and Year: September 1985
By the time September rolled in, my capital had grown to a point where my time was becoming far more valuable than my manual labor.
Waking up at four in the morning to deliver newspapers for one hundred and fifty rupees a month was no longer mathematically viable.
I officially resigned from the paperboy job, handing the route over to a local neighborhood kid and giving him my old delivery bag.
However, I did not want to lose the physical stamina I had built over the past few months.
I still woke up at five in the morning, but instead of cycling with heavy loads, I started jogging.
I would jog from my house in Mylapore straight down to the Marina Beach promenade, run a solid five kilometers along the coast as the sun rose over the Bay of Bengal, and run back.
But cardio wasn’t enough.
In the cutthroat business world I was preparing to enter, physical intimidation and self-defense were critical assets.
I sought out Master Rajendran, a highly respected martial arts teacher who ran a traditional gurukulam near the Kapaleeshwarar Temple.
He was a master of two ancient Tamil martial arts: Silambam and Varma Kalai.
Silambam is a weapon-based martial art centered around the use of a bamboo staff.
It teaches extreme agility, footwork, and spatial awareness.
Varma Kalai is much more dangerous; it is the art of vital points.
It focuses on striking specific pressure points on the human body to paralyze, disable, or even kill an opponent, while also possessing deep roots in Siddha medicine for healing.
I paid his modest monthly fee and joined the early morning batch.
Master Rajendran was a strict disciplinarian.
We practiced on the red dirt, swinging heavy staffs, learning how to block, parry, and strike with lethal precision.
The training was grueling, but with my adult discipline and young body, I absorbed the techniques rapidly.
I wanted to forge my body into a weapon, ensuring that I would never be physically vulnerable to the thugs and syndicates that often plagued Indian business disputes.
After washing up and grabbing a quick lunch, I used my freed afternoon hours to conduct deep market research.
I surveyed the Sowcarpet wholesale markets and the Ambattur industrial estates, looking for manufacturing ideas.
I knew I needed a labor-intensive industry to build political clout.
After weeks of observing supply trucks and interviewing small factory owners, I identified the perfect sector: plastics, specifically polymer granules.
In 1985, India was on the cusp of a massive material revolution.
For centuries, Indian households had relied on brass, copper, and aluminum for their buckets, mugs, pipes, and storage containers.
But plastics were rapidly invading the market.
They were cheaper, lighter, and didn’t rust.
The demand for plastic injection molding and extrusion products was exploding.
However, India had a severe bottleneck: raw materials.
The country did not have enough domestic petrochemical capacity to produce High-Density Polyethylene (HDPE), Low-Density Polyethylene (LDPE), and Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) granules.
Companies like IPCL (Indian Petrochemicals Corporation Limited) existed, but they could not meet even a fraction of the domestic demand.
As a result, small and medium plastic manufacturers in Ambattur and Guindy were starved for raw materials.
They relied heavily on imports.
Polymer granules were dirt cheap in international markets like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the Middle East because those regions had massive refining capacities.
If I could import these granules in bulk and supply them to the local manufacturers in Chennai, I would control their supply chain.
It was the perfect entry point into manufacturing without having to set up heavy machinery myself initially.
I took local buses to the Ambattur Industrial Estate, walking through the dusty lanes filled with the smell of hot, melting plastic and the rhythmic thumping of injection molding machines.
I spoke to the factory managers, understanding their pain points.
The Tamil Nadu market was ripe for disruption.
I decided I would start an import-export trading house specializing in polymer granules.
But executing this was a logistical nightmare.
Importing anything into India in 1985 meant fighting the infamous ‘License Raj’.
The bureaucracy was intentionally designed to strangle imports to protect foreign exchange reserves.
I needed an Importer Exporter Code (IEC), clearance from the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) under the Foreign Exchange Regulation Act (FERA), and specific Open General Licenses (OGL).
I couldn’t do this alone.
I was an eighteen-year-old college student.
I needed a proxy, a highly capable assistant who understood banking, spoke fluent English, and knew how to navigate government offices.
Through Rajesh at the Sowcarpet accounting firm, I had recently met a man named Vikram, who had visited Rajesh many times during his work.
He was twenty-six years old, a former junior manager at the Citibank branch on Club House Road.
Citibank was one of the few elite foreign banks operating in Chennai at the time, handling massive corporate accounts.
Vikram was brilliant, hardworking, and meticulously organized.
But he had a flaw: he was too honest.
He had recently been fired because he refused to cover up a documentation error made by a senior vice president, falling victim to toxic corporate office politics.
He was currently unemployed and desperate, sitting in coffee shops looking for entry-level accounting work.
He was exactly what I needed.
A banking expert with a chip on his shoulder, ready to prove himself, and with no other prospects.
I decided I was going to hire him, not as an accountant, but as the front-facing manager of my new empire.