Barmering Around – Part 2
Every Trilogy Has a Dark
Middle
“KARACHI!!??” desperately
exclaimed in a deeply-disappointed, almost horrified holler…”I thought this was
the flight to VEGAS!!”
Most good things come in threes.
The Holy Trinity, the Three Musketeers, Threesomes (particularly entertaining
that one), and everyone knows any good tale/play/script/disaster is best
executed in three acts (thanks Shakespeare and George Lucas) – the middle act
serving as the nadir..that dark point where the audience is left in
near-despair amidst the enfolding darkness of disaster and a seemingly
no-light-at-the-end-the-farm conclusion. We all need King Lear’s dive into
near-dementia, Skywalker’s hand falling into the abyss, light-sabred-off by his
newly-found father in Empire Strikes Back, to provide balance to a masterly
trilogy. Trust me though, it isn’t quite as much fun when you are in the middle
of it. So here we are, thrown into Part 2….
Nov 2010 - Flight EK602: Dubai
to Karachi. 6pm on Thursday.
…“I thought this was the flight
to VEGAS!!”. Probably not the right thing to say surrounded by a large
crowd of quiet, dour and quite religious-looking Pakistani travellers, awaiting
boarding of the heavily-laden aircraft to the commercial-hub and “safest part
of Pakistan”. Heads turned, eyes widened, mouths crinkled in disgust, the scene
was set for a squirming two hour flight…seems our fellow passengers had not
quite caught-on to the irony of the wittily (strongly subjective opinion)
delivered observation – oops, great start to the trip. Even more worrisome was
the very intimate proximity certain fellow passengers enjoyed maintaining –
“personal space” was not high-on the list of the pre-flight check. The
Vegas-lover wistfully pondered why he really wasn’t heading there instead.
“Boarding now” – pre-sensing the announcement, an instantaneous mad-rush of
Tahrir-Square-like-proportion toward the frightened-looking Emirates staff
manning the gate – too late, Sin City would have to wait.
The start of the weekend in the
UAE is normally a veritable cornucopia of family-laden greetings or
alcohol-fuelled attempted gropings –depends if you are an ex-pat in desperate
need of touching-reality-in-the-region, or one of the few and increasingly rare
indigenous Emiratis. Neither was the case for these two Karachi-bound intrepid
“problem-solvers”, taking their umpteen trip to visit the oh-so-promising lands
of their agriculture endeavour. Hopes were high. Expectations were rapidly
lowering. Tensions had been raised in the last several days and there were
hard-nosed discussions with the farming team ahead of them…but these two
professionals had dealt with multi-billion-dollar-negotiations and prevailed,
they had duelled with the best the financial world had to offer and vanquished
– what match would a collection of Pakistani foremen prove to be in the face of
these slick, wily corporate titans..what match indeed?? Yep, turns out those
poor, unsuspecting fools were doomed – and the foremen were in for an
entertaining display of ignorance to boot.
EK602 was making its final
approach to Quaid-E-Azam Karachi Int’l. The flight crew paced up and down the
cabin making last-minute checks. A kerfuffle originating from further down the
plane, firm requests from one of the feistier stewardesses could be overheard,
increasing into a panicked plea “to stop doing that NOW!” – the two wearied
would-be-farmers could hardly bare to look around, anticipating the worse,
unfortunately still shocked with what met their bewildered eyes – a
cross-legged figure sat in the middle-of-the-aisle, blanket draped over his
head, bowed towards the floor, smoke rising from below his visible
shoulders…was he trying to detonate an improvised explosive device?..had he
been meditating and achieved a state of controlled-combustion?..no..the
stewardess yanked the blanket off his head and found the passenger….calmly
puffing away on a cigarette!!. His expression almost denoting surprise that he
had been caught, despite his crafty disguise! If getting there was half the
fun…
Abu Dhabi – June 2010
The business had been up and
running for several months. The members of the “hAy Team” had aged several
years. One member in particular had begun his farming experience a youthful
looking Emirati gentleman..seldom smiling as it was before to be honest.. but
had now descended into a rather accurate rendition of what one might
imagine Dante’s Inferno to look like if imprinted on a person’s face. The
“overseer” issue had been resolved by a rapid expedition to the
farming-mountains of Lebanon, the promise of riches, the romance of farming
God’s land and a hell-of-a-lot-of-lies and “missing” details. At this point in
the tale, he was uncomfortably ensconced on the farm, a private porta-cabin at
his disposal (luxury edition mind you), an extra-large can of mosquitoe
repellant, endless acres of running-ground for a lovely (ahem) brisk morning
jog and nothing but a mobile to connect him to someone that spoke his
language…but hey..he was still alive.
Hundreds of hours had been spent
on “conference calls” (read: shouting matches), in the middle of hot, humid,
sticky Middle-East evenings, merrily-dancing-round…and round…in endless
circles trying to understand the very business they themselves had created.
Occasional movements, rather lurches - made in the name of progress –
sporadically achieved by a brief pause for air and enough blood reaching each
participants brain for long-enough to make a logical decision. The presence of
a crackly-near-incomprehensible-accent in the form of Falah, our
man-in-Karachi, calling from the fairytale-like farming lands complicating
matters and successfully aggravating with subsequent unprintable renditions of
abuse.
Water Everywhere!
The major issue was flooding.
That’s right. Flooding. We’re not talking a slight over-flow of water in the
backyard here, necessitating a call to the plumber, a couple of yanks and
problem solved. No..think SuperStorm Sandy being made to look like a
whimpering-3-yr-old-tutu-wearing-ballerina compared to the floods we’re dealing
with here. Who would have thought too much water was bad for a
farm. On that note, who would have thought a bunch of investment bankers would
be good at farming? Oh well. Too much water, not so good.
“What about the money we spent
on irrigating the land!?” screamed the elder-member of the hAy-Team. Normally
such a reticent, content and easy-going character, his demeanour – not to
mention increasingly impressive smoking capacity – had taken on a
newly-twisted-life. He only spoke in degrees of shrieks now. A low shriek for
when things were simply unbelievable - “No work today because I have car crash
and cow fall on my head from truck”. A medium shriek for when Falah really
irked him - “No work today because army make surprise raid for the farm” and a
shriek - more a cry filled with demonic undertone, undulating into a frequency
that only dogs and other certain wildlife have the evolved capacity to hear,
gloriously exhibited now, “You said you knew exactly where to dig the flood
canals and that the water would prove one of our best assets!”. A long pause
with nothing but the sound of car-horns and daily-Karachi-life blazing away in
the background (note to reader: Falah should have been on the farm and said he
was. The farm is over 100km away from Karachi and dead-quiet). Falah finally
retorts, “No problem sir, we still have 30% of the land not-flooded, very good
for us, other farms lose all. We are very lucky.”
The rapidly depleting Emirati
could take no more, “Lucky? LUCKY!? You think we are lucky? We’ve piled-in our
entire inventory of seed and fertiliser into land that is now 70% useless.
We’ve burnt through 18 months of earmarked capital in 6 months, we were
promised our first shipment over 3 months ago and now you are telling us that
we cannot even ship a single tonne of alfalfa until the end of the year!?. How
exactly is that lucky FALAH??”
Falah seemingly paused to
prepare his answer here. He surely understood the disappointment and vehemently
incredulous position his employers were taking. There had been a clear,
well-planned and viable business plan with an equally well thought-out budget
in place. He and his farming team understood the basics of accounting and
cost-control. Didn’t they? “There is no problem my friends. Alfalfa will come
in few months for surety. You send more money, we fix problem.”
Protein-levels
Thinking back, a slight
prediction of problems to come may have been the initial agriculture-related
foray made by a couple of the team members several months prior. They had
sourced, from related Pakistan farm-land, what was thought to be a high-quality
flour and presented it to the best-know-baker in town. After several expensive
transportation exercises and testing procedures, the conclusion was presented
to the eagerly awaiting duo sat in the kitchens of the impressive baking
operation, set-up by a passionately French master-baker “zee problem izz dat
zeee brrrread simpleee turrrns to GOOOOE.” The always optimistic and normally
gregarious member of the future hAy-Team, more used to biting into a succulent
croissant at a power-breakfast than sitting in a heaving industrial-kitchen,
covered in dustings of airy-white-flour, thought he had heard wrong, “sorry, it
turns to what?”. “Gooe. you know it iz goeeeyyy. I put eet into zee oven, et
voila, eet turns to gooe.”
The flour was low-quality and
gooey. Now our farm was turning to gooe.
Run Tractor Run!!
Costs were spiralling out of
control. Even with the overseer in place. It wasn’t his fault. We had vastly
underestimated the cacophony of corruption, natural disasters, incompetence and
sheer bad-luck we would endure. Mobile phones and their calling-charges seemed
more expensive than chartering NASA’s space shuttle to hop from London to Nice.
Food and water inventories were rising even though as we increased our
“mechanisation”, we apparently had less people working on the farm. And as we
purchased more machinery, our diesel costs (already astronomical and capable of
financing the Harvard MBAs of half of Karachi University’s students) were
beginning to resemble the figure for Qatar’s GDP.
Our competitive advantages of,
“fertile location”, “low labour cost” and “low and speedy transportation to
market” were being made laughably redundant by oblique “polticial costs”.
Everything surrounding our farm that had been unaccounted for was related to a
“political cost”. Why was our cost of diesel increasing so rapidly? Well, that
would be because we had caught the attention of the local-councillor-equivalent
who had decided he would impose a new “diesel tax” on our company’s purchases.
Funny that. Why were we now finding it so difficult to bus in the required
manpower that was so amply available just a few weeks back? Ahh, that would be
because our ever-so-neighbourly farms had grown jealous of our operations and
had kindly decided to block the only major road into the farm with their
“broken down” tractor, making it impossible to get not only the labour in and
out of the farm but the very product they were supposed to be farming!
Then there was our incredible Head
Farmer himself. No character a writer would ever conceive of in fiction, would
compare to the ridiculous reality of this man’s ability to confound, infuriate
and pathologically lie. A few choice quotations so you can get to know
our man, Falah: “my friends, with the will of Allah it will surely be done…by
the end of the month”, repeat that one once a week, every week, for 12 months.
“For surety it will be conclusive”, I still don’t even know what that one
means. “As long as the car makes it over the rough-land in the morning without
the wheels breaking, I will make it to the farm”, I see. “I hope the workers
are not busy milking the cows tomorrow so that we can seed”, “We need some more
diesel since our last can was stolen by the neighbour”, “The neighbour’s wife
was taking a bath and all the men stopped working for the day to watch her”,
followed by, “all the workers are so shamed they go to pray and no more work
today” – most neighbours ask for a pack of sugar and offer you a cup of tea,
not effing steal your cans of diesel and bring religious shame to your workers!
The tractors we had purchased
were using more diesel than a Bugatti Veyron careering down a deserted-highway
at top-speed (that’s pretty fast if you aren’t a motor-head). There was no logical
explanation for this. No matter how we calculated it, there was simply far too
much diesel being used. An entire Panzer-division could have been fuelled with
what our agri-machinery was pumping through in a day! So in the absence of
logic, we developed suspicions that on alternate days, major tractor-racing
competitions were being held on our farm. We envisaged thousands of supporters,
of various tractor-trekking-teams with colourful names like “Kone Krushers” and
“Caterpillar Crazzees” making their way over our carefully laid plots of
alfalfa, enticed by the rumbling roar of high-powered-diesel-engines revving
amidst our mooing cows, as they headed to place their bets via the quite
lucrative book-making scheme masterminded by our Head Farmer. “Tractor racing,
what is this?”, said Falah when we once mentioned it on our daily call, “my
God, you rich Arabs people are very crazy” – oooohhhh that Falah..he had
a certain knack for irritating the shit out of us all.
Field of dreams..
Let’s swing back to the
“make-or-break” farm-visit after flight EK602. After the pleasantries and a
warm welcome – resulting in very little food or drink being consumed due to
some “delicate stomachs” possessed by the hAy-Team visiting duo, honestly, not
because they didn’t trust eating or drinking anything that was placed before
them (nah) - a full investigation of the accounts and farming practice was
undertaken. I will not bore you with the details, suffice to say the excuses
and horror-stories re-told above were amplified, permutated, grotesquely
multiplied and then retracted and re-emphasised in a totally different manner,
several times over. An exhausting experience. The conclusion was clear. We were
barely standing. We had been beaten black and blue from every conceivable
angle. Our gooey farm was a disastrous money-pit and something radical had to
be done, quick.
The one positively memorable
part of that visit, likely the high-point of the entire site-visit, was an
impromptu rendition of Russell Crow’s Gladiator barley-field scene, ambient
music providing the official soundtrack and all. Walking deep into the
long-stemmed alfalfa leaves, hands at his side, caressing the end-product of
all this grief, the earthy feel of the rustling leaves against the skin, man
and nature combined, music gracefully echoing behind him, the hAy Team member
briefly remembered what this was all about – getting back to man’s agricultural
roots and interacting with nature’s beauty. Profiting on the back of growing
from the land. A momentary state of calm and happiness washed over his soul.
Then he turned back around and was greeted by the bemused faces of a dozen
farmers and foremen, who suddenly burst into laughter.
Call back-up, now!
The potential was still there.
The hard-work had been done. Yes, the costs had spiralled. Yes, the entire
experience had been harrowing but success was still enticingly close.
Everything at that point in time was going wrong. It seemed everything was against
us. There was nothing else that could add to the disasters that had already
befallen us. King Lear’s redemption must be round the corner.
Enough was enough. We couldn’t
sit back and watch such a potentially lucrative business be destroyed in the
hands of a bunch of nincompoops - sorry, couldn’t think of another nastier
description without delving into seriously debauched language. We had made a
decision. We had done further research, made enquiries, held video-conference
calls, taken a leaf out of our global-institutional experiences, our analytical
approach to corporate restructuring, consulted with the best-of-class farming
advisors and world-leading agri-experts and decided: The hAy Team were going to
bring in the big guns…
To be continued in Part
3….
