Sardar Satnam Singh was a pioneer, he had come from the erstwhile Pakistan during the partition and settled in a quaint little town called Patiala in India, during those days quaint little towns did not exist in Punjab, "like they do now, huh?," he was city goer and hated small towns. Patiala of those days, "and it still is nowadays," was a bustling business town filled with people hoping to make it big, and Satnam Singh was one who did make it big, I knew him from the year 1975,"when I was old enough to realise who my relatives were," he was my uncle and I still remember him getting goodies for me whenever he visited us in Delhi. I was in love with my uncle, "wasn't I in love with everybody those days," but this uncle of mine was brilliant, a small wiry man, on his return from Rawalpindi on partition, he started selling fruits. Now that was a brilliant idea, if ever there was one, if the house ran out of rations, "so what if the business wasn't doing well," they could still eat fruits for dinner. Business started doing well within a couple of years, even their pets, "the house was filled with the animals," started to eat fruit.
Slowly the times began to change, the good times are always around the bend, and Satnam Singh hit them big, the fruit shop began to do brisk business, a mango for your sweetheart, a papaya for your mom and how about that pomegranate for your kid, "damn isn't there like a fruit for every occasion," he would sit on his hiney,"like I am prone to nowadays," and recite the rates to all his customers, then listen to their worries and problems, recommend a fruit for the kidney or the liver or the intestine, "people had all kind of problems," even imaginary ones that you could find a cure for either on the Internet, "which did not exist then," or with Sardar Satnam Singh. One day a lady came up to him with a unique symptom, called the disease "Protome of the Kidney," now he was no doctor but he knew that the kidney was the cleaning tool of the body and recommended a Papaya from his repertoire, later in the day he spoke to me and told me about the "Protome," I was a curious cat, "as curious as they get," and suggested that he now open a medical shop in jest.
Sardar Satnam Singh, the entrepreneur that he was, opened up a medical shop, where he stacked up medicine for all kinds of disease, the cures were all homoeopathic, he had an aversion to modern medicine, his medicines were stacked up in little bottles, in which pills of all colours sat quietly, nestling together, "quite a nest it was," the shop itself was in a market and the queues to his shop far exceeded the ones on other shops. He had build a reputation for himself and sat encashing it, a community that loved him and respected him for the struggle and hard work that he had done, "and I just loved him for the goodies." He and his family ran the medicine store for 40 years, during which time he had a clientele from all around the world, and every single one of his customers had a nice thing to say about him, "loved the way he handled the compliments," one told him he was the father of the community, to which he humbly replied," I do what I can do, I started off thinking I had to make money but realised soon it wasn't about that at all, I am here now to build relations." After 40 years in the country having made a name for himself as a refined chemist, he decided to retire and sold the shop to another famous homoeopathic Multi National Company and retired in peace to live in peace with his grand children.
Relations are what make things work.
0 comments:
Post a Comment