Birth of a SalesMan

We have all had a brush with salesmen. You find them selling lottery tickets, mobile phone subscriptions, credit cards, bank loans, even safety pins and rubber bands; they promise you everything under the sun.
While travelling by the evening train to my hometown on Saturdays,I happened to come across a very astute salesman selling CDs which he claimed contained every single legal form you would ever need in your life - right from passport application forms to legal documents for your dying will. Presumably he had downloaded the online forms from government sites and burnt them onto CDs and then packaged them neatly in sealed covers with his photograph on it and a blurb saying that he held the patent for the contents within.
He started his promotional address with a challenging question - how many on the train had travelled to the state capital just to get hands on a legal form they needed for some urgent procedure or an application form for a government job?
With his CD, he claimed all that would stop. Every single form under the sun was now available on his CD- his patented product, he repeated. If the customer did not have a personal computer they could visit the nearest DTP center (found at every nook and corner of my home state mostly in the business of printing wedding cards and promotional brochures) where they could get a printed hard copy of the soft version.
Clever move I would say. Lots of people do a lot of unnecessary travel in their lifetime just to procure a necessary legal form - since the government is not yet so tech savvy and printed forms are the norm. If forms are available online, you wouldn't know the site to download it from and even then they were subject to frequent change and get outdated at a whim.
I saw things in a different light.
Procuring the government forms are only 10% of the pain. Forms are subject to frequent changes, almost once every year, as I mentioned earlier.
But the main headache is filling up these forms. The entries on goverment forms have very ambiguous and dubious titles which only the scribes sitting outside the goverment forms can discern and fill. If you attempted filling government forms by yourself, you would have to fill a couple of them until you came up with one which you presumed had all the correct entries. Even then, there was always the risk, that when you got back to the office to submit the form, the clerk in charge would dismiss your application with a shake of his head pointing to some entry which was wrongly filled in your carefully filled up application, and ask you to re-enter the details on a fresh form making you lose your time, money on a new form and more importantly losng your position on the never-ending que where you were. Filling up income tax return forms, filing for a fresh passport or a PAN card are big headaches that most would gladly pay an agent to fill up, paying a king's ransom in the process.
The salesman was playing up on those fears and he did get quite a lot of customers- many of them quite well educated, mostly middle aged gentlemen and old couples. when the salesman added that some young budding entrepreneur could also set up a small business just printing those forms from the CD and selling them to needy people who would otherwise would have to travel to the concerned government office to procure it. Some country bumpkins thought this was a good idea to make a quick buck(you see employment is still a big problem in my native state), and a few more CDs were sold.
I saw this partiucular enterprising salesman every single Saturday evening when I travelled home, for a couple of months, until one fine day, he simply vanished - perhaps sensing his game was up, afraid to face the ire of the more frequent travellers on the train who might have seen through his scheme guaranteed not to fail! These entrepreneurial salesmen!

All that glitters...

This incident took place in the early eighties when I was still in my upper primary class.
We had a lot of stuff to read in our house. My father subscribed to The Blitz, The Times Of India and the now defunct Illustrated Weekly of India (then edited by the most venerable Khushwant Singh). So we were never really short of reading material.
The Illustrated Weekly reserved its last page for classifieds and one advertisement insert that appeared week after week caught my fancy. It was an advert for a mini printing press. It promised to print wedding cards, visiting cards and anything that came to your imagination.
I was intrigued by this product and I mentioned this to my father one day. He brushed it off as a child's immature fancy. But week after week I saw the ad and got more and more excited about it.
Finally my father told me he would order the product. It cost 30 rupees which was quite a sum in those days. The order was supposed to be placed by VPP(Value Post Payable) which meant that we would have to pay the postman the amount before we could open the package.
I waited anxiously for the mini printing press and started dreaming of all kinds of thing I would be able to do with it.
It was a long wait but one day finally the printing press arrived. The postman handed over the package, my father paid the money and I tore open the bundle as soon as I could.
To my dismay what was supposed to be a "printing press" was just a collection of rubber blocks with inverted letters embossed on it. There was a small holder for the these blocks and an ink stamp pad came with it. It was just a crude rubber stamp.
I tried arranging the letters on the holder to spell out my name. I pressed it against the pad and tried to make an impression on paper. But it was a clumsy process. The letters fell out and if they didn't, the impression was imperfect with some letters not producing any imprint, being misaligned.
I was dismayed.
My father laughed. He said,"Let this be your first lesson in life about buying. You always have to be careful of being cheated".
I wondered whether my father indeed had an idea of what the so called printing press would be, when he placed the order.
I never bugged my father for anything after that, until I reached the 10th grade when I asked for, and got a typewriter which proved out to be a real utility and on which I drafted my first story which appeared in a local english magazine in serialized form.
I had learnt an important lesson in life - things are not always what they seem.
Later in life I saw some weird products some of my friend bought on the internet. A mosquito killer arrived in the form of a hammer and a plate. There were spurious products which promised to produce rays which would repell anything from flies to rodents.
I smile now, when I think about that mini printing press and what it turned out to be and what it taught me.