Five Lives

In this assignment we were again working as a group. There were four of us: Nikhil, Krupakar, Arav and me. We went around yelahanka to find businesses. We went to a cobbler, tender coconut vendor, a rolls place, a flower vendor and a mattress place.

Flower Vender:

We met him as we were walking towards the mattress shop. All he had was a cart with potted plants. He comes from a village which is far away he did not say where. He has a brother back in the village who takes care of the nursery, where they grow the plants. They take turns to try and sell the plants.

He did not have a set area or location to which he goes to everyday. He said that he goes to random places to sell the plants. The prices of the plants vary according to what flower they hold. It starts at 30rs for an unpotted plant. And for 60rs you get a potted plant. He also said that he has his good days and bad ones.

Tender coconut vendor:

We went up to the coconut vendor and ordered one for each of us. By the time he finished the third coconut, we smiled and started sweet talking him telling him how swift he is at chopping the coconut. He smiles and said that it al came with practice.

Since our strategy of starting to ask questions was successful, slowly we started asking questions about his strategy to run his business. His name was Mahesh. Every day he got his coconuts on the way to the airport. he had two ‘thelas’, one where he kept the uneaten coconuts and the other where he kept the broken and eaten coconuts. most of the day he stayed in the same spot even though he had wheels. This was because he got a lot of orders from the families living in SFS. Sometimes, he said, he even went to other places in the evening to catch the tired workers who were heading back home.

Cobbler:

Our approach to gaining information about this example was to sit a little distance from her and observe the happenings and figure out her strategies without even talking to her.

The cobbler sits at a junction near a bus stop on a busy main road. She works quickly and can fix your shoe problems on the spot. Though it isn’t too apparent, cobblers are territorial. They cover an area among a bunch of them and cannot go to another place where another cobbler already has a stall. Some will collaborate and if one of them gets more work, they pass it to another in their group. Often these groups are family.

But for sitting in the hot sun for so many hours, the meager income of 200-300 a day doesn’t seem worth it.

Mattresses:

The mattress shop is already established. They have a small shop next to a drugstore in a market with a sewing machine and cotton separating machine.

They buy their cotton from Kamakshi Playa and Vijay Playa where they get wholesale cotton. These places get the cotton from Tamilnadu. They clean and separate the cotton in a machine and start stuffing it in the thick covering materials. After sewing it, the mattress is dusted by hitting it with a stick.

They get orders and they make mattresses and pillows. The customer has to come back and pick up the order so they don’t have to worry about transporting the mattresses. They started off by taking a loan to buy the machines. Now they are working at a profit of Rs.10,000 a month and the loan has been taken care of.

Rolls Corner:

Gajodhar has been there for about 2 years. Before that he lived in Bhopal and had to move to Bangalore because of some personal reasons. His family is in Bhopal. He keeps sending them money. The shop is in a residential area with a row of shops. There is one guy who makes the dough, the other guy makes the roti’s and there are 2 guys who roll them and also take orders from the customers.

Their skill is to break the eggs in one hand and make the rolls fast enough so that the customers don’t have to wait for a long time. Their strategy is to half cook the roti’s in their free time since there are many customers in the evening.