It was close to 10 AM on Sunday when I received a call from veteran Perumal Kovil Beggar, “white rice” Ramasamy. I was surprised, to say the least. I wasn’t sure if he was responding to my earlier voice mails on his opinion or something different. Here is an excerpt of my conversation with Ramasamy (translated to English).
Me: So, can I know the purpose of this call?
Ramasamy: (in a relaxed tone) I heard through one of my associates that you do web consulting.
Me: Yes. How can I help you?
Ramasamy: (in socialistic sense) I have always felt the need to unite Beggars across India, as a matter of fact, across the World, and bring them under one portal.
Me: (taken a back) Sure. What is your intention?
Ramasamy: I have tried some social networking sites and my kids at home use Orkut a lot. I need something like a social networking site dedicated to Beggars.
Me: if you can excuse me…then better start a social group for “Perumal Kovil Beggars” at Orkut. Orkut is pretty democratic and they do not discriminate based on Class or Professional lines, and more importantly has a wider reach among certain geographies.
Ramasamy: Listen. You don’t understand my point.
Me: May be I am not getting the gist of your intention.
Ramasamy: OK. I don’t need another social networking site. It won’t sell. I need to have a site that benefits members as well. I need a way to search for the neighbourhood beggar, may payments, enter events in neighbourhood that talk about free food program etc.
Me: Nice!
Ramasamy: You see what I’m saying?
Me: Hell ya! I get what you are saying. So, you want me to build a social networking site for Beggars with a payment gateway and then modules such as event notification according to their zipcode or location.
Ramasamy: Can you think about bells and whistles to this concept?
Me: Not much. All I can do is, if your brethren have tracking devices such as a GPS coordinate transmitter, we can have some sort of Google Maps overlay and track in real time the density of Beggars in a chosen neighbourhood and alert them through SMS about nearest free food events.
Ramasamy: Let us keep it for the second cut. On the first cut, I would like a functional site that lets beggars across India to register and enter their e-banking details - to help donors wire some amount.
Me: (Thinking: Shit yes) This is interesting. How do you think you will be able to sustain the site? I mean, how would you find people to sign up?
Ramasamy: Oh, that is not a problem. I am not looking for an immediate surge in traffic. I would like to spread by word of mouth. We have organizations and we can share some flier. Most of us have accounts that are net-banking enabled and a sizable number of us are graduates of some form. So, it is not a matter of readability. For the rest, we will constitute some field visit data collection and increase the member base.
Me: Makes my job look simple.
Ramasamy: That’s not it. We need to have a referral program. I mean, the beggar that I introduced, introduces another begger then a negligible percentage of donation received by that begger will trickle down to his immediate referrer and to that of Parent referrer. It is a chain and everybody that is related gets benefited.
Me: I get you. If am right, you need the referrers to be benefited as well. Goodness, the grand daddy of all beggars is going to make a shit load of money - if this concept works out!
Ramasamy: Yes. We are very much socialistic except that we don’t say it explicitly. This is going to be one among my other Capitalistic venture.
Me: How long do you see a business viability?
Ramasamy: I don’t know. I am hoping to have one up and running in the next six months unless otherwise you have a different answer.
Me: I will have to get back to you later on that.
Ramasamy: Sounds good to me. I hope to hear from you soon then.
[Phone hangs up...]
NOTE: Yes, this is my profession. In a democratic sense, I cannot discriminate against a person’s profession, be it a regular 9-to-5 Company or an Escort Service or a Mendicant. As long as there is a viable business plan and payments are guaranteed and flow on-time, I am answerable and have to keep up my commitment in helping businesses in their operation.
On a different side note: At times of great depression, Governments created opportunities through public works project. This enabled sustainability in running families and keeping the unemployed employed. So, it doesn’t really mattered from where the money came from as long as it continued to come.