Simply Fly

Author: Gopinath, Capt G R

• ‘Entrepreneur is one who creates wealth where it did not exist earlier by creating a new market and a new customer. They create something new, something different, they change and transmute values; and on a size and scale that will impact society.’

• While young I was arrogant, dogmatic, argumentative, delinquent, intolerant towards others’ failings but tolerant of my own; selfish, short tempered and would fly into a rage and may have appeared a ‘pompous fool’ to elders and even my contemporaries.

• I have done various things I regret, but I make an effort not to let them fret me; I say to myself that it is not I who did them, but a different I that I was then. I injured some, but since I could not repair the injuries I had done I have tried to make amends by benefitting others.

• Gorur lies on the fringes of Malnad, which means the ‘land of hills’ and also the ‘land of rains’ in Kannada.

• He said, quoting Tagore, ‘Real education is in life’s experiences; school is like a jail,’

• He reminded me of the great Bertrand Russel. Perhaps some element of boredom is a necessary ingredient in life.

• No great achievement is possible without persistent work … that certain good things are not possible except where there is a certain degree of monotony.

• As Albert Camus said, ‘Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me: it was radiant with sunlight’

• the Indian Army was training the Mukti Bahini to overthrow the Pakistan Army and to ensure that the refugees from East Pakistan (formerly East Bengal in undivided India) were able to return safely to their country.

• As those four men carried me on their backs, I realized and I remembered Einstein’s words that our lives depended on the labour of others—past and living, in significant measure.

• I however felt the need to go ‘beyond the woods and beyond borders’; longed for adventure. The safest place for a ship is in the harbour, but ships are built for sailing.

• Brig. Narahari had however taught me an important lesson in life in the process: of looking beyond the obvious ‘black’ and ‘white’ of life and judge people and situations in the fair light of reason and tolerance.

• I was somewhat ruthless in punishing corrupt people but this incident helped me realize that one need not always punish an erring person in order to drive home a message. It helped me see the need to give people a second chance.

• Again, as Emerson said, ‘Farming is man’s first calling. It is the original calling of his race. The food which was not, he causes to be. All trade rests at last on his primitive activity. The first farmer was the first man.’

• before I knew it, I had already solved the first problem of an entrepreneur: raising funds for a project.

• As the physicist Richard Feynman said: ‘I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.’

• All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.

• Subsequently I discovered the first rule of farming: Do not clear up the land.

• I also felt my conceit peg down a notch because till then I had entertained the implicit belief that my adventure had been quite unique.

• Thinking is the capital; enterprise is the way; hard work is the solution.

• Nobody denied me help and all promised to get back to me but nobody actually did.

• My father had once defined a good friend as one who stands by you when you are in need of money.

• ‘Men are cruel but man is kind’,

• Those rare moments when I was able to suspend the hubris of being me, and became part of nature that was transforming itself all around me.

• I found that people would always wait for someone else to take the initiative.

• If faced with something unfair don’t sit back and moan and wallow in melancholy; revolt and fight against it!

• If you are buying cattle you check their teeth for age. You need to check if a cow is good for milk and if an ox is fit for draught.

• An important lesson I learnt from nature was that a successful harvest is directly related to the presence of an optimum number of insects in the cultivated field.

• One definition, ascribed to Ralph Waldo Emerson, is: ‘A weed is a plant whose useful properties have not been discovered yet’.

• The ants are the biggest foragers of the soil. They create the soil even as they look for food.

• I realized that whatever ‘was not ecologically sound, was not economically viable in the long run.’

• ‘What is low-cost is eco-friendly and conversely many eco-friendly practices are low-cost.’

• If something is not ecologically sound, it is not economically viable.

• However, the genius of Kurien lay in getting the farmers to organize under a cooperative society and derive the benefits of production and distribution of milk and milk products without the intervention of middlemen.

• There is also the overwhelming tradition of ‘grease monkeys’ in India where 90 per cent of all mechanics joined the trade as ‘runaway’ apprentices

• I saw that people like Kasturi succeeded because they had the courage, the determination, the energy, relentless persistence, and hard work without despair, to do more and do better every day.

• Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman.

• Albert Camus’s Myth of the Sisyphus.

• I would think of the first sentence from Oliver Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield: ‘I was ever of the opinion that the honest man who married and brought up a large family, did more service than he who continued single and talked of population.’

• ‘There are only two tragedies in life: to have and to have not,’

• It is interesting to observe why an unemployed village youth becomes a party worker. As party workers, they get fed every day and have something to keep them occupied and dreaming of future positions of power.

• People advised me to contest from Malleshwaram or Basavanagudi in Bengaluru, or from Hassan city. These had large Brahmin populations.

• The Gavipuram temple for instance, is nearly 2000 years old: it’s a temple within a cave.

• Some fifty-five years ago an Iyengar gentleman came to Bengaluru and set up a bakery in Vishveshvarapuram in Basavanagudi which became very famous. The owner named it V.B. Bakery.

• A visit to Bengaluru is incomplete without a visit to the Lalbaug, the gardens laid out by Tipu Sultan in 1776, MTR, the legendary Udupi Hotel, and the Iyengar Bakeries.

• Happiness is a mirage if you look at it as a destination to arrive at. If you take joy in the everyday things of life, you will never need to embark on a journey towards an elusive destination.

• Happiness is no pinnacle to be attained. It doesn’t exist as a destination and is meaningful only as a journey.

• I can see the truth of Somerset Maugham’s words when he wrote, ‘Often life is influenced by and steered by chance events.’

• Life is driven by chance events. The direction it takes is often determined by simple decisions like taking one road or one turn at a corner rather than another. Sometimes a casual decision to watch a play and not go to the shopping mall might make a big difference.

• Most of us will fall apart if we don’t have work to do, which is an anchor, necessary for happiness.

• Human beings need to work, but individuals need to reason and discover for themselves the unique secret of the kind of work that suits them, is productive, and makes them happy in the long-term. More people these days are unhappy at work than ever before. Most of our waking hours are spent at work. The majority looks at only one consequence of that work as the most worthwhile: money. Money is one or more steps removed from happiness. Only for the miser, who counts his money before going to bed or looks at the interest accruing to his savings bank account, can money be an end in itself. For the rest, it is what money can bring and buy that matters.

• Mysore silk is among the most famous and is produced by a variety of worms native to Karnataka,

• what did China do to become what it is today?

• Henry Mintzberg, a friend and one of the greatest management thinkers of our times. Mintzberg said, ‘All great businesses involve only two things. One is having a great idea. Two is having great people around you.’

• Your business will succeed only when you can’t pay your rent, you can’t pay salaries, you can’t buy your wife a sari, and you can’t pay your children’s school fees. Then you will learn to innovate. You will be forced to improve. Nothing breeds invention like necessity. Necessity will ensure you do not become complacent. You will be unable to sleep because your business may go bankrupt. This is how your business will succeed. Any other way of setting up a venture is a recipe for disaster.’

• Bertrand Russell once said, ‘In all healthy affairs it’s a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.’

• As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, ‘The inquiry leads us to that source, at once the essence of genius, of virtue, and of life, which we call spontaneity or instinct.’

• All battles are essentially fought in the mind, and it is what happens there that makes or breaks us. Action is another fantastic antidote to despair.

• Singapore had become the regional headquarters for most multinational companies and especially for aviation majors.

• At about the same time, during 1997–98, the world’s financial market seriously disrupted by the Asian currency crisis.

• I usually read all agreements and contracts. Regardless of how good a lawyer you have, it is better you read it yourself, word by word. What you don’t understand you ask to be explained to you. A trained eye looks at it in a trained way. You have a fresh eye and that helps. You can even overrule the lawyer or consultant. If you leave everything to others, things will never get

• Shakespeare said, ‘Indecision is in itself grief.’

• If you wish to advance into the infinite, explore the finite in all directions. —Johann Wolfgang Goethe

• While the Sindhis and Gujaratis, besides setting up their businesses in the major cities across India, also ventured overseas to set up business colonies, the Marwaris remained largely rooted to Indian soil, penetrating the farthest corners of the country. They command a presence in the remotest taluq headquarters and even at the southernmost tip of India.

• One does not need to read ‘How-to’ books, routinely churned out by the American publishing industry, to learn how to make a success of one’s life. It is sufficient to sit with people like Ladhani and listen to their life stories.

• I remembered the words of the legendary founder of IKEA, Ingvar Kamprad, the global home furnitures chain. One of the world’s richest, he had said, ‘Whenever I write a company cheque, I only ask one question. “Can my customers afford it?” If my customers cannot afford it, I don’t write that cheque.’

• The one and only way to make anything work was to fix a date; make a commitment.

• Any form of education in the UK has the tempering influence of the arts and humanities.

• The speakers referred to A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, quite an unusual idiom of discourse.

• Ikujiro Nonaka had co-authored the well-respected book, The Knowledge-Creating Company with Hirotaka Takeuchi.

• We visited the famous Japanese garden at Shinshin-an in Kyoto where Konosuke Matsushita, the legendary founder of Panasonic, had built a guest-house.

• Masanobu Fukuoka, the global god-figure of organic farming.

• Fukuoka, whose One Straw Revolution is treated as a bible of organic farming, was probably in his mid-eighties at the time.

• Bureaucrats take their time either because they expect something or because they are ‘bureaucratic’ in the worst sense of the term.

• Arun Shourie once observed, ‘The reason why the system does not work is because all of us have our little deals.’

• If an aircraft was entering Indian airspace it needed both import permission and a YA number, which is valid for 24 hours only.

• A YA number is an international code issued by the DGCA of countries to a specific aircraft with a specific registration and serial number to enter a country’s airspace.

• The RBI rules had been freshly formulated as a reaction to a fraud which came to be known as the notorious ‘urea scam’.

• If I am unable to make the Gods above relent, I shall move Hell. —Virgil

• I was concerned that I still needed the operational clearance for commercial flying—there is nothing more useless than a helicopter sitting on the ground!

• There is a parallel between the mind of the entrepreneur and the mind of an artist. Camus described the artist’s mind to be chaotic, but the practise of art requires enormous amounts of self-discipline.

• When Aeschines spoke, they said, “How well he speaks.” But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, “Let us march against Philip.”’ The

• I once heard a speech by N. Ram, editor of The Hindu. Ram said the editor in many cases is also the owner of the publication. The editor has to position the publication like a business venture. However, the editor has also to meet the social responsibility of the media, and this is huge: to balance between income (because the publisher has to pay his staff salaries and meet the costs of production) and reporting the truth for the benefit of society.

• According to N. Ram, there is an increasingly blurring of vision between responsibility to society and responsibility to the owner or business.

• I was in the press almost every day after the launch of the helicopter company, but getting the press is not enough. You still need to advertise. The advertisement carries information to the public about the company, its contact details, telephone numbers, an idea of rates and reach, as well as an idea of what services you offer.

• the pressure of stock markets to put out quarterly profits, prompted Narayana Murthy of Infosys to observe, sympathetically but a little deprecatingly about the expectations: ‘As the CEO, you are only as good as your last quarter.’

• However, companies that focus only on near-term profits and do not invest for the long-term build an edifice with a shallow foundation.

• The work of a CEO is never finished, as they say: ‘Only Robinson Crusoe could get his work done by Friday!’

• I knew from my own assays into the countryside as a trekker and explorer that all the places worth visiting in Karnataka were a mere one to one-and-a-half hours’ journey from Bengaluru by helicopter! These included the palaces of Mysore and Srirangapattanam; the historic ruins of the capital of Vijayanagara Empire at Hampi; the bird sanctuary at Ranganathittu; the wildlife sanctuaries in Bandipur and Nagarahole; the magnificent temples at Belur and Halebid; and the colossal monolithic statue of Gomata at Shravanabelagola.

• It is an army joke that when the general comes you’ve got to take care of his wife.

• Hugh and Colleen Gantzer

• We had to devise a method to increase advertisement exposure at optimal cost. Perhaps not many start-up entrepreneurs are aware that when they are chasing a dream with a shoestring budget, they need to aim for national exposure.

• You can never plan the future by the past. —Edmund Burke

• I recalled Napoleon Bonaparte words to the effect that it was a principle of war that it was not always canons but lightning speed that won battles.

• sinew

• They need to undertake an actuarial audit of aerial medical evacuation and work out an affordable mass premium.

• It had taken me three years to get my first helicopter; it took me a mere three minutes to get my second. It showed me how important it is to build relationships.

• Malaysia, Indonesia, and Brazil are home to the largest rain forests and serve as the lungs of the world.

• I shall be telling this with a sigh Somewhere ages and ages hence: Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less travelled by, And that has made all the difference.

• The Irrawaddy is Myanmar’s most famous river. According to Hindu mythology, Irrawaddy is the consort of the celestial elephant Airawatha.

• Myanmar is renowned for its precious stones, so I sneaked down and picked up some travel memorabilia for my wife and for Sam.

• It is impossible to miss the city because of the eye-catching cluster of the Lingaraj temple.

• A few minutes after we took off from Bhubaneshwar we flew past the famous Chilka Lake.

• The hustle brings to mind the words of the bard of Avon: they are like the ‘[t]ale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury signifying nothing.’

• Our pilots were equipped with Iridium satellite phones which allowed them to get in touch with the ATC and the company bases from anywhere at any time.

• It comprises advertising and publicity, a traveller-friendly visa issuance system, reliable and easy ticket and travel arrangements, good transport, clean lodgings, and clean water and food.

• Thinking of great adventure, I always recall Charles Lindbergh. Lindbergh was the last of the truly great aviation explorers of the twentieth century. His is a story of human courage and endurance of unimaginable proportions. He flew the Spirit of St Louis, a single-engine monoplane, solo, in an unpressurized cabin, strapped to the seat with eyes peeled for the entire duration of the flight which lasted thirty-three and a half hours.

• He crossed the Atlantic at a time when nobody before had flown that far.

• The Jomo Kenyatta International Airport is named after the first president of the country.

• The wildebeest or gnu are a kind of large antelope that are local to Africa.

• The customs officials asked us to pay duty of US$200 on that on the ground that residual fuel amounted to importing fuel into the country.

• I saw change on the ground through the worm’s viewfinder. I saw it from air, from the bird’s-eye view.

• I discovered what the glistening objects were: they were large dish antennae for television. I counted one antenna to five or six villages. They represented the new landscape of the country.

• Notwithstanding the complexity of caste and community and the regional, ethnic, and religious pulls on the electorate, the forces of a new society were active. These were the forces of a new unifying caste, that of the consumer. When two billion hands produce and there are a billion mouths to consume, liability becomes the greatest asset!

• Connor said a few conditions needed to be fulfilled for an LCC to exist: liberal rules and regulations and a conducive policy environment; high level of internet and credit card penetration, and a network of principle and alternative airports.

• I reminded myself of the saying: ‘the heart has its reasons of which the head knows nothing.’

• For the LCC to succeed, I would have to bring in consumers from Dehradun and Dharmashala to fill the Delhi–Mumbai flight. We could fly the large aircraft between metros and feed these trips with passengers flying on our smaller ATRs from the small towns and cities.

• The airlines business has three principle components: aircraft, pilots and technicians, and a hangar, maintenance facilities, and airport space. These three have to be mobilized and operationalized in optimal synchrony.

• An Udupi hotel, a fast-food restaurant, really, as I have explained earlier, is a low-cost affair. It is an excellent example of cost-cutting without sacrificing quality.

• When food is sold rather than served free the cost model becomes a revenue model; people are careful when they pay for food, there is less wastage, and less pilferage. What is a cost overhead for legacy airlines becomes a revenue source for LCC.

• Not all the water that is served complimentary is consumed. There is plenty of wastage. Passengers are more careful with the water they purchase.

• In the 1990s the government opened up the Indian skies to competition. A raft of airlines launched operations, each with the same business model and competing for the same pie. They did not look for ways of generating new passenger traffic. Competition was fierce and there was a shake-out, leaving most of them bankrupt, including East-West, NEPC, Modiluft, Damania, UB Air, and Gujarat Airways.

• The software calculated the fare on the basis of simple rules. It assumed that tickets could be bought ninety days in advance. People buying earlier got them cheaper. The 180 seats on the plane were divided into buckets. Each bucket provided a certain number of fares that were much lower than the others. Bucket one would have, for example, two tickets at one rupee each if bought on ninety days prior to departure. If they were bought on that day, the fare scan moved to the next bucket where tickets were priced slightly higher, and so on. The fare structure was time-sensitive and automatically moved on to the higher bucket even if the tickets were not bought on the previous day. The number of lower fare tickets got smaller as the days passed until the day of travel. Even on the day of travel, the price of the ticket, while being much higher than that which was offered on the opening day, would still be significantly lower than that offered on legacy airlines justifying the overall philosophy of the LCC.

• Airlines are prisoners of three entities: travel agents, proprietary reservation systems (like Saber, Galileo, and Amadeus), and network service providers.

• There is a ticket consolidator who is a travel agent registered with International Air Transport Association (IATA). The travel agent is the only person with access to the airline inventory. Even the airline cannot sell a ticket at less than the travel agent’s rate.

• There are two kinds of travel agents. IATA travel agents are distinct from non-IATA agents.

• The airlines receive the passenger manifest at the last minute. They therefore resort to overbooking which leads to chaos if all the multiple cross-booked passengers for the same flight turn up.

• The system of travel agents is not a cartel but creates inefficiencies, wastages, and cost overheads.

• Other costs borne by airlines included bad debt insurance costs, working capital costs, costs on interest, costs incurred on clearing-house charges, and miscellaneous other costs.

• Deccan however pioneered the creation of interfaces between customers and the payment gateway and brought in several other innovations in the concept of point of sale, cyber cafes and post-offices included, and broke the monopoly of the system of IATA travel agents.

• I had made it amply clear to team members that they must bear two things in mind: they must create the lowest-cost airline and must create a supporting IT system that was robust, scalable, and easy for the passenger. A passenger should be able to buy a ticket as easily as he bought a bottle of shampoo across the counter! They were free to explore ways and innovate but these two deliverables were paramount.

• The problem with Indians, I have been told by foreigners, is that they don’t know how to say ‘No’.

• Qualified pilots certified to fly one type of aircraft, say a Boeing, cannot readily fly another aircraft such as ATR or Airbus because of the differences in instrumentation, process control, and performance, among others.

• Our entire effort was aimed at making the airline inclusive. The phrase ‘inclusive business model’ has become a cliché and people do not tire of talking about inclusive growth.

• An entrepreneur must not only create a new product but fundamentally alter the very behaviour of consumers; create societal change.

• Ryan Air garnered an array of uncharitable remarks. Some called it cattle class.

• When people say it cannot be done, don’t accept it easily but get into the habit of checking the rule book yourself.

• I told passengers we were committed to four principles of LCC: fly safe, be on time, deliver bags safely and quickly, and offer lowest fares. All these promises were measurable.

• It seems intuitive to think that monopoly protects a business from competition, but my experience is that it is competition that enlarges a consumer base and protects the business and not the other way around.

• I went to a pharmacy close to the district headquarters. There were a dozen pharmacies in the neighbourhood. I once asked this chemist, ‘Your shop is located in a place where there are twenty other pharmacies. Doesn’t that affect your business?’ What I heard from him is an unforgettable lesson in customer psychology. He said, ‘Sir, an isolated chemist’s shop in a residential area is far less frequented than twenty shops in the bazaar area.

• Competition can only kill business when the business is inefficient. Competition helps to improve quality and brings down prices and is therefore good for the consumer. Monopoly, on the other hand, invariably stifles business. It is good neither for the consumer nor the business nor the industry.

• If a man does not know to which port he is steering no wind is favourable to him. —Seneca

• Laxman defined him through the logic of absences: he is not plebian, not philistine, not the element in the rabble, not a member of the Spanish philosopher Ortega Gasset’s ‘mass’, and not ‘working class’ as Lenin would have seen him. He is aware, alert, perspicacious, sensitive, able to discern hidden personal agendas in political rhetoric, possesses opinions of his own and is able to reason ‘why’, ‘what’, or ‘how’, and has an immense store of empathy for others of his kind.

• Acquiring new aircraft meant cash-flow problems. Not acquiring aircraft, and thereby not expanding, meant we would not be top of the line and competition would erode our flanks

• The airlines were deliberately offering lower fares to undercut us, known as predatory pricing; it is a practice that well-entrenched airlines utilize to kill competition and is unlawful in the US.

• I urged Airbus and Kiran Rao to incorporate a six-month gap between deliveries to us and to Kingfisher. Kiran would not listen, and with the unimpeachable logic of the salesman said if they didn’t sell to Mallya, Boeing surely would. I had warned aircraft-makers that it would be counter productive for them to sell to everyone before the market matured, arguing that it would only trigger a new aviation shake-out and no-one would survive except the monopolies. I sensed a hint of prophecy about my own words.

• I recalled my mandate: that the challenge of creating something is worth striving for, living for, and dying for.

• Why hadn’t Indian IT companies like Wipro and Infosys joined the race? Azim Premji said, ‘Captain, mission-critical IT requires huge investments. You have to build and test the system. No airline uses a new IT vendor to provide critical services to the company because of the danger of glitches. If you want to avoid glitches you need to invest huge amounts of money, time, and resources. That is because you have to run your IT software on a platform where it works. IT people who have worked with airlines for fifteen to twenty years have a great advantage. They have developed and tested the system on a live platform; are familiar with it. Yours has been an enormous platform for IGT. You have provided them the opportunity to build and test their system live on your platform.’

• He was not in the least pompous but exuded a quiet acknowledgement of his own sense of power. There is a magnetic field to power of all kinds. Sitting before him, I felt the aura of the power of colossal wealth and far-reaching influence.

• There are some people with an intuitive understanding of business; have a nose for money. I don’t think any MBA programme can teach this.

• The deal was done. I don’t know whether what I did was right or wrong: the jury is still out on that. Many were of the opinion that I should have joined hands with Reliance, but the deal with Mallya seemed the best course at the time.

• Mallya combined brand power with value and priced his product on the basis of both. He said, ‘I can spend Rs 500 and make it look like Rs 5000, so I can charge more.

• Kishore runs the Big Bazaar retail chain that has a nationwide presence. He did not endorse the positioning of Deccan, saying, ‘Keep the two as distinct as possible. Deccan is a great brand. Kingfisher is a great brand. By repositioning you will be blurring distinctions and diluting the brand value of both. You should be deriving all the synergies only in the back-end.’

• Now all the airlines had got together and fixed a minimum entry level fare and called it fuel surcharge to avoid being accused of price-fixing, which was what it was.

• when you increase costs and fares while promoting a low-cost model, losses increase due to falling occupancy.

• Mallya was creating trouble for himself. I told him that this was exactly what happened when British Airways set up Go and KLM set up Buzz. Both airlines eventually killed their low-cost subsidiaries.

• Equity can also be an obsession and can shackle the entrepreneur. It is better to have a small stake in a multi-billion-dollar company than have big stake in a small company.

• ‘Yes, I will sign a no-competition agreement undertaking not to set up an airline, but as I said I’m an entrepreneur and will do that which gives me the adrenalin rush; what gives meaning to life. I will build and create; I will start all over again.’

• ‘Wealth in India gets created at the top. But the top of the pyramid cannot survive unless the middle and the bottom of the pyramid are thriving.’