I took a hiatus from writing my Tea story. Today, I want to pick up my pen again.

After a successful five years in Coonoor, having oiled the machine, I began to tire of the routines of running an office.
TC Satyanath, the J. Thomas & Company’s boss in South India sensed it and decided to call me back to Cochin.

In an earlier episode, I had mentioned that Satyanath, fed up with depending on the JT head office at Calcutta to provide mid-level executives for the Cochin operations, did the unthinkable and ‘pinched’ TK Madhav, from another Tea Broking firm. Carritt Moran was  JT’s closest rival in the tea-broking business.

TK Madhav (TKM) was a year senior to me in Tea. He joined Carritt Moran in 1963, while I started with J. Thomas on 1st May 1964. Not only was TKM placed above me, but he also superseded Vijay Dudeja and Pradosh Sen, who were my seniors at JT. In those days, hiring someone from a rival firm was “not done”, and Sat (TC Satyanath) broke tradition, and the three of us felt hugely let down.

Prafull Goradia, who had left JT earlier to take over as head of Tea at Duncan Brothers, smelled an opportunity and asked Vijay Dudeja and PK Sen to start a rival tea broking company. Pradosh (PK Sen)  was a couple of years senior to me at St. Stephen’s College, Delhi. He told me later that he opted out of the plan at the last moment when he was assured that TKM would never be ‘Chairman’ as someone from Calcutta would always fill that role. With Dudeja out of the way, Pradosh’s turn would come sooner, and there would be no profit for him to jump ship!

The ‘contemporaries’ decided to call the new company Contemporary Tea Company, which began to operate in Calcutta in 1976.

I returned to Cochin the same year and got busy re-establishing life there. We moved to ‘The Parsonage’, a massive house in a large compound, but after ‘Ickesham’, our lovely home in Coonoor, this was a disappointment.

By then, Vijay Dudeja had made a successful start with Contemporary in Calcutta, mainly due to Duncan teas, of which Prafull Goradia was now fully in charge. He began working on me to join Contemporary, and I kept putting him off. We had developed a personal bond, having worked in Calcutta, London, and Cochin from 1964 onwards. He was particularly helpful during our time together at Thomas, Cumberlege, and Inskipp, London. He had come from Calcutta, and I was sent to London by JT, Cochin.

I visited Calcutta in early 1977 and was wined and dined by Vijay and Shamlu Dudeja. The JT Chairman, Dipak Roy, also called me for a drink and asked whether I wanted to move to the HO. He was keen to compensate for Dudeja’s loss. I was elated, but Satyanath would not release me!

One afternoon, Satyanath and I decided to deal with the elephant in the room.  We talked over a bottle of Scotch in the lounge beside his office. I told him that since Calcutta was no longer an option, I would have to mark time in Cochin till TKM’s retirement, which would be a long time coming.  I was, therefore, going to look for opportunities elsewhere. Satyanath thought it was the whiskey talking, and at the time, I had no idea what my words really meant!

One day, Vijay Dudeja flew into Cochin with an offer letter. The place for the salary was left blank. Vijay wanted me to fill it in! I had one condition: He would start a new company for South India with me as the Managing Director and owner of a third of the shares. At 33, that was heady stuff, and I took the plunge!

From time to time, I have wondered whether I made the right decision. I was emotionally attached to JT and had developed deep friendships with many in Calcutta and Cochin.
I would look across the aisle and watch my erstwhile colleagues enjoy their merchants’ golf and tennis tournaments while I was swinging from the chandeliers and leading an uncertain life! Being the boss is not easy, and I often felt I was wearing a crown of thorns. Moreover, naming your salary sounds great until you realize you have to earn the money to pay yourself.

When I started Contemporary in Cochin, I had to unlearn many things I had imbibed at JT. When the JT Cochin office began, we had five lots of tea in our catalogue, but the company had three cars! I foolishly rented a large car and was driven around in style. I moved my family into two suites at the Malabar Hotel, the most expensive hotel in Cochin. We stayed there for two months while our house was being remodelled at the company’s expense. An entrepreneur must first build the structure and then add on the trappings. I did things in reverse. After I finished with the trappings, there was no money to make the structure!

Forbes, Ewart, and Figgis, led by Oomen Thomas, was Cochin’s largest tea broking firm and the first to start. Next came Carritt Moran, and J. Thomas & Co., followed by Contemporary Tea Services.

The big Tea plantation companies at the time were James Finlay (later Tata Finlay, and then Tata Tea), Malayalam Plantations, which had large Tea and Rubber Plantations, A. V. Thomas, Bombay Burmah Trading Company (BBTC), Tea Estates India (a Brooke Bond company), Pierce Leslie, English & Scottish, and Jayshree Plantations (a Birla company), and so on. James Finlay and Birla had tea gardens in North India, but the others were South India-based with head offices in the UK.

Tea plantation companies were proverbially conservative and reluctant to change Brokers. JT just about managed to get support from James Finlay / Tata Tea and the Birla group because of their strong connections in Calcutta, but the others were reluctant to ditch either Forbes or Carritt Moran. If it was difficult for JT, how much more difficult would it be for a fledgling company like Contemporary?

The most bitter learning was how difficult it was to get into the clients of other brokers. A Tea producer builds an intimate relationship with his Broker, who becomes a friend, philosopher, and guide. Many Tea plantation companies have maintained this association for decades.

However, with Vijay Dudeja’s contacts and decision-making shifting, after British ownership of Plantation companies moved to Indian hands, we managed to attract some clientele. Meanwhile, the Tamil Nadu government was becoming increasingly invested in Tea, first organising factories to process green leaves from small growers (INDCOS), and later opening large tracts of forest land to plant tea to rehabilitate the Tamils returning from Sri Lanka. These plantations were under a government company called TANTEA.

This meant that bureaucrats with transferrable jobs were the decision-makers for appointing Tea Brokers. Of course, they were wined and dined lavishly, and the ‘new’ tea brokers, namely JT and Contemporary, could get business from the Indcos and Tantea. We were beginning to get some traction, but were still making losses.

After a couple of years, differences began to surface between Prafull Goradia and Vijay Dudeja, and mutual distrust began to rear its ugly head. Prafull wanted me to move to Calcutta as a fallback person should Dudeja walk away and start something on his own – which he did, but that’s a story for another time!

There was a time when I wanted to move to Calcutta, but now I had settled in and established my fiefdom in South India and did not want to start life afresh in Calcutta. Once you have gotten used to being King, it is impossible to become Crown Prince again!
I also became interested in starting a floating hotel in Cochin. That, too, is a story for another time!

So, in December 1982, I resigned from Contemporary and was replaced by my old friend Dev Menon, who had moved to Tea Broking after several years with Lipton.

Here are some pictures that you may find interesting.

From Left: Balwant Singh of Brooke Bond, TK Madhav, Saroj Madhav, Guy Landon of Harrisons & Crosfield, and T C Satyanath of J Thomas & Co.

From Left: Muthu Rajaram, T K Madhav, Shamlu Dudeja, Saroj Madhav, Vijay Dudeja, and V K Rajaram at a Contemporary Party at Taj Malbar, Cochin (in 1978).

T K Madhav and Saroj at a Contemporary party in Cochin. On the left is the late Vijay Swaminadhan.