My abrupt decision to leave Lagos in mid-1994 was probably not the best. Nigeria was going through the afternath of yet another military coup and even tough General Sani Abacha, the new Head of State seemed to be not in control. Labour unrest, student riots, non availability of bare essentials, petroleum shortages, power outages, and unending instances of violent armed robbery were making life a living hell. Having lived in Lagos since 1981, I had experienced three earlier coups, 2 Armed Robberies and a car theft, but now I was not able to cope and wanted out. I took the decision to quit without consulting Tiny and Mohit, and simply served them an ultimatum. While I still needed to give a long notice, which eventually extended to over a year, Tiny and Mohit barely got time to even think about how their life was going to change. The school session in India had already started and no decent school would want to give admission to a new unknown student in Class XI two months into the session. At the same time,Tiny was the Vice Principal of the Indian School in Lagos, a position of considerable responsibility, and abandoning it at short notice was totally unprofessional. Obviously, there was considerable bitterness at home over my sudden and irreversible decision taken without a thought as to what the consequences for them would be. But Mohit’s future was at stake, so Tiny and Mohit were rushed into leaving for India as soon as they could to try and get school admission for Mohit.
Ultimately, it was through the efforts of Daddy, and his association over the years with several prestigious schools in Noida that we were able to secure admission for Mohit in Class XI in Vishwa Bharti School. It was not exactly Mohit’s first choice (that was DPS), but the nice school basketball court certainly helped and Mohit started attending there.
A year later he made the school proud when he topped the class in the Class XII Board Exams and his name is on the Honour’s List.
Being a IITian myself, and seeing Mohit’s exemplary academic performance in school, I was certain he would have no difficulty in clearing the JEE, but when he didn’t, he was pretty devastated and I was totally disappointed too. To add insult to injury, many of his former classmates from Lagos, most of them average students, walked into IIT on the NRI Quota, something he too would have been eligible for had we not left Lagos. Obviously, he felt my decision to just leave like that had deprived him of this opportunity.
But then life and destiny have their own plans. Mohit got admission into the DY Patil College of Engineering in Pune, where during the course he connected with a classmate Viveka. They are now married and have given us two lovely grandsons. We now joke with Mohit that this would not have happened had we not left Lagos or had he joined the IIT. Mohit’s lack of success in the JEE prompted him to work really hard for the CAT, and he successfully qualified for all the 5 IIMs (there were only the prestigious 5 then), finally zeroing in on IIM Bangalore to complete his MBA in Finance in the Class of 2002.
On my part I continued at my post in Nigeria dedicatedly, right till the one-year notice was almost over. The rationale behind the long notice had been to hand over properly to my colleague, who was very happy doing his own work and was most reluctant to take on the additional responsibility. His department of sales and marketing was important so he wasn’t really being pushed into taking over my work as an additional responsibility either. He was doing his work, I was doing my work, tomorrow was far away and nobody except me seemed to want to think about what would happen once I left. The weeks kept passing and the one year notice that I had agreed to was coming to an end. I booked my return flight for a month down the line and I firmly let them know that I would not be staying beyond that date. It was time to start the briefing-debriefing exercise. Things moved a wee bit, whatever handing over could be done was done in the last couple of weeks, and I flew out in April 1994. Before I left, Karan inquired of me if I had made any plans once I returned to India, I had none, and he asked me to stay available in case something came up. I agreed, as long as it did not mean a return to Nigeria. That would be awkward. Tiny had left her job, a new Vice Principal had since been appointed and while the school would happily take her back, to expect that they would reinstate her by removing the newly appointed one was not likely. Same for me; to return to work at my former position while relieving a colleague who had taken over my position was not a workable option.
Karan and I stayed in touch and some weeks later, he enquired if I would be interested in taking charge of a new Liaison Office he wished to open in Singapore. He felt this would be useful for effective co-ordination between Nigeria and our Far East vendors, primarily Sony Corporation. I readily agreed. Mohit was now in Class XII and Tiny wanted to be with him at this crucial juncture, rather than in Singapore. His Class XII board exams were far too important. Besides, she was also looking at starting work once again and in fact soon picked up a teaching position in Cambridge School, Noida. Anyway, as for me, I moved into Singapore fairly quickly thereafter to get the One Man Office going.
Sadly, business in Nigeria was at its worst after the coup and there was hardly any trade activity. Even though I had a Home-Office, I kept to the discipline of waking up on time, dressing appropriately, moving to my study – my office- making phone calls, and so on. This was 1995, mobile phones were still not so common – only pagers. I didn’t even have a decent computer till much later. There was no email, no internet, not even dial up. Only Fax and Telex. So it was pretty tough passing time all alone, especially with no work. I suggested to Karan that I go back to India – hardly 3 hours away – and I come back when there really was something to do. Things never did get better in the short term and I returned to Singapore a few months later, this time with Tiny, only to close the establishment and wind up operations. By end 1995 I was back in India, for good. I was 45 years old. I had to move forward.
Over the next few months, I liquidated some real estate assets, established a company, bought a small office in Connaught Place, renovated and furnished it at great cost, bought 4 Telephone Land Lines (no mobiles, remember) under a Lightning Scheme, bought a car, took up a number of agencies and franchises, employed a couple of sales people and tried to get things rolling. I felt I was an expert what with my Nigeria experience and all. But I hadn’t reckoned that the Nigerians who have the sad reputation of being cheats are in fact far more honest than the average local. All those whom I trusted ripped me off. Vendors dumped their dead stock on me and collected payments, customers gave me post-dated cheques which bounced, I signed and paid for exclusive dealership and distributor agreements with companies that I later discovered existed only on paper. When I decided to sub-let a part of my office space for some extra inflow, the tenants misused the electricity and Air Conditioners, often leaving them on needlessly. Some simply disappeared with rents outstanding. It was like sitting in the town square with an open suitcase of money and just letting people take their pick at it. All in all, over the next 12 months, I had literally doled out all my savings, cleaned my bank accounts, and was flat broke. My parents, especially my mother, would often be in tears when she would hear me talking from home on the phone to one or the other regarding moneys they owed to the company and then seeing how helpless I was.
But then yet another Godsend came my way from Karan once again. This time more along the lines I was familiar with. Karan was keen on expanding his Sony business into neighboring Ghana, and wanted me to handle it. While I had been busy losing money, Tiny had been doing well for herself in a steady teaching job at Cambridge School. With her experience as a Vice Principal in Nigeria, a prominent school chain – Amity School – showed an interest in appointing her as an Administrator for Noida, and the offer for the position came through at just the same time as Karan’s offer to me. So a dilemma once again. This time I was not going to force any decision on her, especially one that would jeopardize her career path, but she felt that me alone in Ghana, she alone here would not be such a good idea. So she explained to Amity about the new opening for me to move to Ghana in a few months, that it was important that she went along too, hence declining their offer even though there were some months before we leave so that they can still appoint one of the other candidates they had interviewed, a gesture which they sincerely appreciated. Cambridge School too agreed to let her continue right till whenever she was ready to leave for Ghana, even though they knew she eventually would as soon as things fell into place.
Thus began our move to Ghana. Karan felt that I should immediately make a feasibility visit to Ghana to see how things were, whether it was workable, and whether I was okay moving there. On 9th December 1996 I landed in Accra for the first time. I remember that date well because it was the day Jerry John Rawlings was elected President of Ghana for his second term and there were celebration rallies all around the next day. I found Accra to be a beautiful place, with greenery and low density, quite like Lutyen’s Delhi, safe, no power or water shortage, pleasant and happy people. I believed I would like it here. Yatinder Kaura, one of my former colleagues from Lagos hopped across too (a 45minutes flight) and we spent the next one week together in Accra, devouring the city and exploring and seeing other business establishments and making the necessary enquiries and getting some facts and figures about costs and rentals and so on. Upon my return to India, I let Karan know that I would be happy to come to Accra, and it was agreed that Yatinder would go back to Accra in due course to file the necessary paper work to set up a company in Ghana and we would start moving forward. No need for me to come to Accra for all these initial formalities. Once all this was complete and our company formally registered in Ghana, I moved to Accra on a more permanent basis in May 1997. Thus began our second innings in West Africa which eventually went on for another 14 years.
My tenure in India had taught all of us a lot. First and foremost, retirement is something that needs to be carefully planned and even more carefully executed. We had left Nigeria on a whim, without any careful thought, assuming the corpus we had accumulated would be adequate. Foolish and unplanned spending, unbudgeted expenditure, and lack of business acumen had run us through it in less than two years. This time we resolved not to make the same mistakes again. Financial expert Mohit helped us draw up a Retirement Plan and for the first time, we actually had a number as to the corpus we would need to be able to see us through for say, the next 25 years. The figure numbed us, but it didn’t take us long to realize that it was correct. Now we had a goal, something that we could actually work towards. Fortunately, God was more than kind and luck was on our side too. The Sony Centres we started from the ground upwards did very well and were profitable. Both Sony and Karan were happy with the way the operations were going on, and we had pretty much a free hand in managing the establishment. Tiny and I complemented each other, she doing the planning and merchandising and me doing the administration, finance, and compliance. With both Tiny and me working, we could see we were heading towards our target corpus at a fairly steady pace. One drawback of this arrangement though, was that both of us could not take leave or a vacation together. One of us always needed to be at the post.
And thus 14 years passed, life was busy, often stressful too, but we enjoyed what we were doing. There was a major sense of achievement as we continued to grow. From a single Sony Centre at Osu, we set up 4 more in Accra and one in neighbouring Tema. We could have probably done a lot more but age and fatigue were setting in and we had to slow down. Daddy passed away in 2009 and that further made us realise that time does not wait. There is no end to how long you can continue working and how much money you can amass. I felt it was time to slow the pace and spend time now doing what we would want to, not what we have to. We needed to get back to India, back to our home and families and enjoy the fruits of our lifetime of hard work. If we kept delaying, we would be too old for that. In fact all of us had matured over the years and even Karan had begun to realise the importance of succession planning, especially when a couple of our young managers met with sudden untimely deaths in Nigeria at a young age. That nothing is permanent. Change is imminent and one must accept it. So this time he was far more understanding, quite unlike when we had wanted to leave Nigeria. He realised too that a younger team would probably be more dynamic as also less expensive.
Call it luck or call it destiny, but Karan’s Sony Centres in the UK were being closed down around the same time and he was indeed able to find a relieving team to take over from us. A husband and wife team like us, who had worked with him in London for 10 years and therefore shared the right rapport. So the departure from Ghana was far more organised. Of course I still had to give a year’s notice, hand hold the new team for a few months while still there and for many years thereafter over the phone and mail. But no complaints on that. In fact only heartfelt gratitude to Karan for appreciating our hard work, honesty and sincerity and having given us this second lease of working life. This tenure gave us far more pleasure than the tenure in Nigeria.
And no regrets post our return to Indian either. We have spent lots of time traveling through India, from Ladakh in the North, to Kerala in the south, from Sikkim in the East to Satara in the West – we have traveled through a lot of India at our own pace and often in our own car, self-driven by me, and enjoyed it. Varanasi, Jaipur, Udaipur, Pushkar, Jaisalmer, Darjeeling – some of India’s most desirable travel destinations which we have always wanted to experience. I have over 12,000 photographs in my Google Photos Account taken at the various places we visited. I have been able to acquire and use good new automobiles which I change every couple of years, and indulge in my passion for Long Drives. My passion for gadgets too continues unabated. Ten years into retirement now and it’s been good so far. Till Covid.
Yes, the departure from Nigeria was abrupt but all in all I think it caused life to change in way which would probably not have been possible had we stayed on in 1994. It has been all for the better for all of us. Which is why both Tiny and I always start our day with a Thank You God. . . . for everything.