The Oriental Octopus, the restaurant serving east Asian food at India Habitat Centre, was packed the Friday afternoon Minister for Company Affairs, Prem Chand Gupta, chose to have lunch with Business Standard.
We fought our way into the noisy, overwhelmingly magenta restaurant feeling a little bit as if we'd been pitchforked into the rowdy dining hall of a boarding school.
Oriental Octopus is not the place for private candle-light meals. Next to our table, a bejewelled gaggle of chattering ladies was elbow-deep in hakka noodles and swapping in painful detail, the experience of a bikini wax and how to mitigate the pain.
Behind us, a famous fusion singer was being subjected to an intense sales pitch, and we couldn't help hearing conversation that wafted our way. "Want to hear passion," was uttered in a throaty growl as someone trilled: "hello-o-o. hel-ll-ooo" for a waiter.
We exchanged glances as we sat down. I sank down would be a better description because the dinette sofas at Oriental Octopus are dark and deep, just like the poet promised.
We cleared our throats "" because you needed to talk loudly "" and looked around. No one was paying any attention to us, so we postponed ordering and began talking.
P C Gupta was just 20 on September 9, 1969, when he landed in Hong Kong. It was the last day of the British Colony's liberal visa regime. He had a degree in economics from Hissar University.
The $ 100 he had in his pocket represented his entire worldly possession. And yet he felt the world was at his feet.
Hong Kong presented strange sights and sounds to the young man who joined an export firm as a junior clerk. If he had stayed on in Bhiwani, his home town, he would probably have joined the family business and led a quiet prosperous life.
But his experience of doing business overseas, beginning with Hong Kong and then west Asia and Africa, taught him that the complacency and arrogance that is peculiarly Indian (and that we like to treasure) was completely misplaced.
You needed to be cosmopolitan, unorthodox and fathom the Chinese mind to be able to do business in Hong Kong.
Cosmopolitan, did I say? Gupta, I found, is a pure vegetarian as the waiter, high on the spirits on Oriental Octopus, waltzed across to take our order.
He ordered the pedestrian hot-and-sour soup, I had the Thai Tom Yum Koong. We ordered vegetables in hot garlic sauce and some Thai green curry. Steamed rice accompanied this austere repast.
I asked Gupta what the difference between the Chinese and the Indian ways of doing business was. He considered and answered slowly that as the business was run by the family, it was not very professional.
In the climate of the 1960s and 1970s, whether it was the Ambanis, or the Birlas, all business represented was the multifarious activities of different families.
Your product was not geared to the developments in the market "" you sold what you had, customised it for the maximum possible margin and the higher the margin, the more successful your business.
In Hong Kong, or China for that matter, it was the volumes that mattered. He explained: the Chinese produce 200 million tonnes of steel.
India produces 32 million tonnes. Even when they were not producing so much, the Chinese created the infrastructure for 200 million tonnes and then went on to fulfil capacity.
In those days, Gupta said, Hong Kong was still a colony but even then, raw materials came from mainland China. In Guangzhou and Shenzen, the Chinese created free trade zones and a massive infrastructure for assembly "" because manpower in Hong Kong was scarce and expensive.
So the seeds of the development of Hong Kong as the centre for non-resident Chinese to repatriate the dollars that fuelled China's current miracle were laid early on.
Working in Hong Kong was very different because you had to think laterally about making money, he said. In India, working with foreign currencies was still taboo.
But in Hong Kong, it was working with different currencies and leveraging them to your advantage was one way to make money. "Our imports were in Swiss Francs and Japanese Yen. So we had to be sensitive to fluctuations and price our goods accordingly," he said.
Within a year of reaching Hong Kong, he had launched his own business of assembling watches that were sold to Africa.
Another big difference was financing. If volumes were to be high and margins low, you needed finance. "In India, even today, finance from banks is not possible" he said.
He cited the example of the Christmas tree. In January, just after Christmas in Europe and America was over, meetings would be called in Hong Kong, designs of Christmas trees submitted, prices fixed and production begun.
"Till July-August, the Chinese would produce Christmas trees like hell. In September, they would be packed and shipped by sea. In November, they would be received in the US in the public or private godowns. By the end of November, early December, Christmas trees from Hong Kong would flood every retail store in the US or Europe."
"The principal on which the Chinese worked was: 'if Chinese Christmas trees don't touch US seashores in November, then you won't see Christmas trees in the US." But, in India, he said the outlook was very different.
Only now were people beginning to plan so much ahead. Otherwise, "we would be worried about a tsunami, what if there was a 9/11. Too many what ifs," he said.
We spoke of the visit of Chinese premier, Wen Jiabao. Gupta's personal feeling was that while free trade was all very well, India needed to be a bit cautious in entering into economic arrangements with China because they needed such a mechanism more than India did.
Our food arrived. The waiter decided to be sociable. Every dish ladled on our plates was accompanied by a short dissertation on it, rendering conversation impossible.
"Vegetables in hot garlic sauce, suh," said the waiter. I mentally added the sound of heels clicking.
Finally, he went away. The conversation shifted to the Department of Company Affairs. Gupta described the change he had brought in the Companies Law Act.
While the previous law mandated a minimum of 50 per cent of the board being independent directors, he had changed that to "up to 50 per cent". You don't even give your house on rent to a person you don't trust.
How can you give your company to people you don't know just because the law commands you to do so?" he asked. In many companies, financial institutions appoint their own directors.
Are these independent or not?" he asked. The ministry is looking at all this, he said.
I asked him about another controversial issue, that of compensation. "In large companies, the issue is best decided by the board, shareholders and stake-holders.
Not government," he said. He shared a whole lot of new initiatives that he is going to bring about: seeking an end to infructuous litigation between the government and companies, cases that had been going on for years altogether, an e-governance move that would eliminate the need for companies to visit the office of the Registrar of Companies.
I asked him a question that I'd been waiting to ask all afternoon. I spoke slowly and chose my words. "You're mandated to protect shareholders. And yet, allegations were made that shareholders of Reliance Industries Limited did not get their due. Do you not think you need to intervene to protect shareholder interest?" He was brief.
"There were some complaints that files were missing. We found nothing like that. We've done our part of the work," he said. "But you haven't acted on the allegation," I said.
"How do you know," he countered. "So you're saying no violations of the law have taken place," I said. "I'm not saying that. It is not proper for me to discuss individual cases," he said.
I grinned. The minister was copping out. He smiled. We left it there.
As we walked out, I explained to him that I didn't ask him a single question about Bihar because there was more to him than an RJD minister.
"Rabri Devi is going to be our chief minister. You just watch," he said. Some things don't change.
