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Steve Jobs was all of sixteen when he met Stephen Wozniak. What resulted was Apple.

When Sergey Brin and Larry Page met at Stanford, they were in their early twenties. They were soon to start Google.

Today’s teenagers are our smartest generation yet. They are tomorrow’s entrepreneurs, investors, managers, policy makers, watchdogs and of course, consumers. But do you know what the corporate and business world is all about? How do businesses touch everyone’s lives? What really makes an entrepreneur tick? How does the engine of a company run? Who is a social entrepreneur?

And why do we need the world of business — is business good or bad for us?

If you are curious, come join me and a group of smart teenagers on their exciting voyage of discovery, and in the process, get yourself a teen MBA!

The credit largely goes to Arundhati and Jagadish Raja, celebrated thespians and founder of Jagriti Theatre. They worked with the students for a few days prior to prepare them for a dramatized presentation of the book. I am thrilled because the students got to work with these two great artists and learn a few things first-hand from them. It was humbling to see how involved both Arundhati and Jagadish were. In addition, they pulled in young actor Rebecca to help the students put up their performance.

Come the day of the launch, Jagriti theatre was packed to capacity. There were proud parents of the 31 students, aunts and uncles and a few grannies too. The evening started with a quick word from Arundhati and then publisher Udayan Mitra of Penguin. Then came the really interesting part; 8 of the 31 students who had been part of “Business with Bagchi” last year, spoke about their experiences and read their favourite part of the book. I did a short question and answer session with parents and the wonderful surprise was the presence of Dr. Bindu Hari, Vice chairman of NPS institutions who made a spontaneous speech to tell everyone how pleased she was. Later, Jagadish Raja thanked everyone and we all had tea and snacks.

Post launch, the book has done quite well, thanks to very encouraging response from buyers. It is already No. 2 in Business Standard’s Best Seller List. It is also “Book of the Month” at Crosswords and MM, the airport stores chain. Book reviews have started coming in and I will post them for you as they do; meanwhile, please enjoy the launch photographs and I hope you have been able to get your hands, on a copy already.

Jagadish Raja

Arundati Raja

Dr. Bindu Hari

A packed Jagriti Theatre

Serious Preparation

Arundhati Raja rehearsing the students for the big day

Megha Harish reading from the book

A group picture with the NPS students

Book reading by the students

Then my mind went back to 2001, it was just after 9/11 had taken place.

Our venture-capitalist friend VG Siddhartha had dropped in with a very senior investment banker from Japan. The gentleman was quite worried about the future of the industry. He asked me, what did I think would happen? He really wanted to know. But here I was, just a start-up entrepreneur, how could I predict the fate of the world? It wasn’t that I wasn’t worried, but how much could I worry? We had people to pay, customers whose existing work needed to be completed and delivered and investors to be taken care of someday,even as all prospective business had come to halt. I listened to the man and then told him what came straight from my heart. I asked him, what would a farmer do if monsoon failed?

What would he do if everything went well but just a week before the harvest is to come home, a cyclone ravages his standing crop?

The man would simply watch the destruction, feel the pain, the hurt, feel the failure of his year of hard work in the face of a force with whom he has no personal enmity.

Then the man would just go home, wait for the next season and start all over again.

Farmers have known the drill for 3600 years now!

For an entrepreneur, the enterprise is a piece of land. One must relate to and respect it the same way a farmer relates to, and respects, his land.

I do not know if my explanation helped the investment banker, a man given to numbers, listening to trade analysts and constantly scrounging the computer screen until life and money become one and the same.

But my spontaneous explanation to him keeps coming back to me in many different ways every now and then.

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A year or so after that conversation, I planted my first banana plant, lovingly carried from friend’s farm. Every few weeks, the little thing brought out a new leaf. Young banana leaves are very pretty; they have this lovely green that is uniquely their own. Every morning, I sat by Susmita’s kitchen window with my morning tea and watched the newest leaf unfold. It was a bond between me and the banana plant; as if it was proudly, lovingly, showing off how she was growing up. Like a child showing off the report card to a parent. It was a living report card

Then one day, when I returned home, I was devastated to see the lovely young plant shredded to the ground. What happened? A rogue monkey had come and torn the plant to the ground in a matter of minutes. Mindlessly, without any provocation.I felt very sad for the plant. The tree had no enmity with anyone, certainly not with the unreasonable animal that killed it. It had done no one any harm. That night, when I went to bed, in a somewhat selfish manner, I also felt sad for myself. But before falling asleep, a thought came to my mind: it was about the plight of thousands of farmers whose standing crop gets eaten by wild animals and sometimes, just gets ravaged. What they do, I wondered before falling asleep.

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The interesting thing about setbacks is that sooner or later, most of us get over them. Until of course the next big one comes along and then we question the sanity of solace. This happened soon enough.In 2004 Susmita and I finally had our Bose music system. We had craved for it all our lives and finally it was there. We loved its reverberating sound, its clarity, its sheer magnificent rendering of every note and string that created orchestra effect in the house. Then one evening, the transformer next door exploded, sending 440 volts of angry spikes to every appliance at home and the innards of the music system just melted in their onslaught. It was very upsetting for us. Unlike the ignorant daily-wage worker who had singed the mango tree or the monkey, this was institutional failure of the electricity board. We felt angry and helpless and the whole thing was so avoidable and simply unjust.

That feeling paled into insignificance within weeks of the music system’s melt-down; the 2004 Tsunami hit India and without a moment’s notice, its fury wiped off 18000 human lives, mostly poor people who had no issues with the ocean and the earth and not content with the destruction of lives, the angry wavesdisplaced an additional 600,000 people from their hearth. And here I was, saddened by the negligent act of the electricity supply board that had destroyed my music system.

The New Year dawned just a week after the Tsunami. I was at my usual place in Susmita’s kitchen one early morning alternating between my cup of tea and the newspaper. Then I saw a miracle as my eyes had drifted momentarily from the newspaper.

A small offshoot was announcing its arrival where once the banana plant stood. Very delicate, very innocent, almost powerless in the face of a tremendous number of variables that even a Nobel Prize winning economist cannot predict. Nonetheless, it was there. It was there because it did not know the variables.

Thank you for reading my blog dear friends and do send your love to the singed mango tree.

Reviewed by Karthik P, at Indiaplaza.com

This is to offer my profound apologies that a lot of spam has reached those of you who subscribe to my blog. I cannot tell you how sorry I am. It seems this has been going on for a while and had it not been for friend Prashant Mehra, I would have never known. How I wish one of you would have pulled me up much earlier!

Due to a technical oversight, whenever any changes (and not just a fresh post) were made, like a quote or something similar, it got pushed to your mailbox. Additionally, I am told, you got mails with links included from social media websites especially Digg.

My team is looking into a permanent fix for this. Meanwhile, if you had any other irritating experience with the blog, please notify me.

Once again, I am very sorry for what you have endured all this time.

I will resume writing for you very soon.

Subroto Bagchi