Best friends for never and the guide book that never was!

“I wonder how many times you have to be hit on the head before you find out who’s hitting you?”

This Harry Truman quote has great significance…now I know it well! It was just after I completed a project that I held very close to my heart – bringing out a city guide book. After successfully commissioning the guide’s content, I consulted several friends, mostly marketing professionals, on how the guide would fare in the market. Please let me confess here that I’m very bad in marketing…I can’t…I don’t have the gift of gab.

I can remain invisible for 365 days and get things done as instructed to me. But to sell something…I dread at the thought of meeting people, introducing myself and selling a product. With very minuscule budget, my marketing friends were the best bet to help me out in bringing in sponsors and advertisers. I was pinning my hopes on them. I have heard them talking big – rubbing shoulders with bigwigs in the industry…getting sponsors for my guide would be easy – I thought!

With whatever resources available with me, I placed everything on the table. I printed a couple of dummy copies for my marketing friends to show their clients.

The first look evoked an invariable ‘wow!’ So it would be an early evening meeting with them to discuss the prospects of the guide. Rounds of beer followed and excel sheets shown, estimates made and profits shared. Colors of the sedan I would have to gift my friend for bringing in sponsorship for me were also discussed and as the night grew old and with every burp all were forgotten.

By next afternoon another proposal, another profitable idea from my dear friends lit my hope’s lamp and by evening I had already raked in more imaginary money than I thought my guide book could make, followed by a morning when everything was forgotten – time to move on!

I never lost hope or probably my faith on my friends was even more for my brain to comprehend that I was being taken for a ride. Months of persuasion and desperation led to calls being not answered or ‘will call you later’, mobile phones being lost ‘so I lost your number’ and friends remaining on official tours to almost all cities of the countries thus ‘I will come to Delhi and speak to you.’

Gradually and sadly enough I came to know who was hitting on my head – repeatedly and more fiercely. Knowing well of my limitations, I started giving the slip to these friends and decided to scrap the entire project. Today the left over copies on my desk tell me everyday that not all good things have a happy ending.

Now my fundas of life is:

• If you play dead, you will be skinned.
• If you are footing the bill in the bar for a friend you are stupid and if you believe what he tells you now you are actually allowing him to treat you like a stupid again.
• Never believe a friend after he had two beers