Tuesday, June 14, 2011

Anjali - The First Business Deal

Anjali got a couple of small pots to paint yesterday. I had no clue what it was all about until I saw what she had done to them after she returned from school today (with some help from her mother of course). She had painted one blue and another black and she painted some kind of a design on it. She was pretty engrossed in her painting while I was chatting with Srinivas Babu my old friend my college in my study this afternoon.

She ran into the study and showed me two pots, looking pretty nice indeed. Babu teased her and said he would like one and could he keep it. She said no and started crying and throwing a tantrum. So Babu tried another tactic and said he would buy one. Would she like to sell it?
My pot, with the reluctant creator-seller in the background

Anjali liked the idea of playacting like a seller of pots and she said she would set up her shop properly in the other room and act like she was selling pots. And so she did. By the time we had gone there she was there, her two pots in front of her. I asked her the price and she said that one was ten and another twenty - whatever that meant (funnily she did not say one and two). I gave her a ten rupee note and bought one. Babu then asked her the price of the other one and she stuck to her original price of twenty. So Babu took it, painted with her name on it, for twenty bucks. Thirty bucks!

'I got two monies,' she screamed and ran around holding her thirty rupees. 'I got two rupees.' I wondered how she got ten and twenty as the saleprice in her head when she had no clue what it means. Anyway, that is the difference between making three rupees and thirty I guess.

And so she concluded her first deal, by adding value to two small pots, putting it up in a place where there was a market, timing her entire production well, running in and advertising the work with enthusiasm, creating the proper atmosphere around the sale, giving it her signature and then selling it off for a neat profit. You don't need an MBA for that do you?

Of course one thing led to another, but it was nice to see her trying to give us back the money after the excitement of the sale died down a bit. The entire business transaction was fun wasn't it? Of course no one took the money back. Being part of this experience  was worth a bit more than that so perhaps we profited as well.
A win-win situation if you ask me.

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