A Business that Flies…

I recently made a couple of trips to a place called Sonapur in the outskirts of Guwahati; the town lies on the highway barely 30 kms away. Earlier Sonapur was famous for its scenic beauty, the quaint picnic spots it had to offer and its sweet, juicy oranges. Sonapur is now more known for the multitude of dhabas that have come up along the highway, some of whom have grandly advertised themselves as ‘resorts’. The town itself is bound on one side by the highway, on another side by a tea estate and ringed by agricultural land all around. Besides this, Sonapur is also home to a defence establishment (whether army or air force, I don’t know for certain). Beyond the mushrooming of the said dhabas along the fringes and the recent opening of 2 vehicle showrooms along the highway (a Mahindra one for commercial vehicles and another belonging to Maruti cars), there is little commercial and industrial activity to be seen in the place.

Anyway, when I went into the town I asked an old resident as to the predominant occupations of the local folk. He replied that most people were cultivators, some of them ran myriad trading businesses (grocery, convenience, clothes stores, etc). Besides the regular clientele of defence personnel and their families, there is a fair sprinkling of hill tribal communities who also came down to sell their produce in the town, forming another customer group for the town’s traders. When I further enquired about any other business besides the stores and the ubiquitous dhabas, the geriatric man replied, “Oh yes, a great many do engage in ‘flying business’.” Flying Business?! This was the second time in as many months that I had come across the term. The first was when an old acquaintance had claimed that flying business was in fact, one of his major sources of income. I asked him what he meant and he explained.

To the uninitiated, let me make it clear that the term has nothing to do with propellers, aeronautics, flight ticketing or any other paraphernalia that we normally associate with ‘flying’. It is in fact a business that possesses no concrete definition; it operates mostly on the twin bases of local know-how and sociability. For instance, when one party decides to sell off a plot of land and you get hold of an interested buyer and arrange for the deal to materialise, you charge a certain fee as the facilitator – this is one model of flying business. Oh, flying business has numerous models of operations – again for instance, if you are new to a place and someone comes along who manages the gas connection and the police verification for your new rented home, that becomes yet another illustration of how a flying business may be conducted. Chances are that the same guy will also come forward to get you the registration certificate for your newly-purchased car, finagle a trading licence from the oily local officials, get you a maid or even arrange for the neighbourhood electrician to install the fancy chandelier in your living room. I guess you may call this guy a broker or even a middleman. In its essence, a person who engages in flying business is a sort of all-rounder offering his services; he does ‘this’ and ‘that’ and 'everything else' – his only consideration being the fee. The flying businessman may therefore, be considered a necessary and very useful part of the local community, providing his services through the extensive native network that he has cultivated.

The downside is that flying businessmen are often less than sincere about the services that they supposedly offer. They might charge fees upfront for 'incidental expenses' for things which never materialise; frequently leave you hanging with vague statements of ‘you know how it is, these things take time’ after taking responsibility or even rip you off with legal documents or certificates of decidedly dodgy provenance. There is quite simply no accountability mechanism through which one can ensure that services are rendered on time, as promised and in the correct manner. These are all reasons why the term ‘flying business’ has acquired a certain shady connotation today. Perhaps when you are a flying businessman, it is a constant temptation to just take off…..with your client’s bucks!!