Stairway To Success December 30, 2005

"Sir, when we had to leave Doddaballapur to come to Bangalore, I could not speak English and had no idea what a sandwich was", said 21-year-old Vinay. He was narrating his journey from being a small village boy to his position as a manager of a Cafe Coffee Day outlet. Vinay’s father used to work for a cooperative bank. One day, all of a sudden, he died, leaving behind two young children and his wife, a home maker with no idea about the big, wide world out there. The family had no income other than what he used to bring home. The bank was kind enough to come to their rescue; they told her that she could join the bank. However, there was a condition. She had to move to Bangalore because the branch in Doddaballapur could not accommodate a female employee. The family had no alternatives. Though her new job promised to give her a take-home salary of Rs 4,000, in a city like Bangalore, it wasn’t enough. Worse, she had to wait for six months before the first salary was credited to her account due to procedural reasons. At that time, Vinay was just about 15. For him, his mother and his little sister, it was as if they had fallen out of the frying pan into the fire. Vinay decided to look around for a job while he enrolled in an evening college. After a short stint with a grocery chain where he used to pack bags, Vinay came to Cafe Coffee Day. There he waited on customers, cleaned tables, and served coffee and sandwiches, and began to learn how to deal with customers of all kinds. That was a good five years ago. Today, Vinay speaks fluent English, oversees the work of a dozen people, runs the cafe as a profit-and-loss centre and is due to go to Vienna, where Cafe Coffee Day is opening its next outlet.Sarika Gandotra lost her mother in an accident when she was a six-monthold baby. She was raised by relatives who resented the burden and coaxed her father to marry again when she was five. The marriage led the family into a downward spiral. The stepmother decided to dislike her. The more she did that, the more protective her father became. One day, he walked out of the house with Sarika in tow. They moved from Jammu to Delhi to Mumbai and finally to Bangalore. Fate was not kind to the two. A time came when Sarika's father started giving up and asked her to get married so that she could probably have a better life. Sarika refused. She told her father that rather than get married at such an young age and move into yet another phase of uncertainty, she would look for a job that would let her continue with her studies and, at the same time, look after him. She joined Cafe Coffee Day. Last year, in yet another cruel blow of fate, her father died. But Sarika, a child of displacement, is in no state of despair.As the DJs of MTV entertain from the overhead televisions and animated young people take in the aroma of a cafe latte and enjoy the freedom of youth, she runs between the espresso machine and the next customer waiting to be served until the clock tells her that it is time to rush to her final year BCom class at the Sheshadripuram College.Behind the business built on the lifestyle, glitz and exuberance of Cafe Coffee Day’s mostly youthful customers, is a story of the grit and determination of young men and women who are rebuilding their lives.Looking into her youthful eyes that alternate between her past and her future, I ask Sarika, doesn’t she feel embarrassed serving the young men and women who probably go to the same college as she does? Does it not feel below her dignity to clean up their tables after they are gone? Sarika replies that she is proud to earn her livelihood the hard way; she tells me that she would not have it any other way and declares that the occasional tag of “waitress’’ does not bother her as she waits at the table of her own destiny.Of the 2000 young men and women who serve you the brew every day at Cafe Coffee Day, 15% are people who go to college at night, working part-time at 36 hours a week, that leaves them with an estimated take home pay of Rs 2,500 a month, contributory provident fund and insurance thrown in as extra. So, the next time you stop by for a cup of coffee, take a deep breath. A lot is happening over coffee. Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html