i think we as a community, have come a long way in the last 100 years. If you go to any of the small villages and towns of southern Andhra (erstwhile madras state) you will find pattars owning hotels. Most of them came to these places in the 40s and 50s, with hardly any cash, opened small tea shops and have prospered.
the big companies, like TVS or Amalgamations, though nominally brahmin, by their very nature of public limited companies, opened up their management cadres to the professional managers.
good entrepreneurship, i think, is best evidenced, by the small individual initiator. we had lawyers of yore, who were essentially, a single point of business. today maybe we have chartered accountants, each with their own office, a few clerks and a handful of clients.
the same thing goes in IT where folks with special skillsets set themselves up as consultants. There is big money in being an SAP consultant for example – S250 an hour, and I have a few friends who earn that type of money. Which works out (at 40 hours per week for 50 weeks a year) to 500,000 dolla a year. The only snag, is the person has to travel where the job is – across states or even continents (a friend of mine from USA took up a 3 year assignment in Singapore and in the process saved enough to celebrate two grand weddings of his daughters back to back within a month).
There is a whole slew of tambrams who are into the wedding planning business in chennai. Making tons of money from the look of it. All of them started off with honesty and good products, but what I hear, is that with success, comes corruption, arrogance and above all poor delivery. I don’t know why that should happen. Consistency of quality, I think, is the key to long term success, and personal satisfaction.
When I was young, a friend of my dad’s started a small appalam store – basically selling applams, murkukkus and such stuff, that his wife made. As one know, the key to success is freshness. The guy’s product was not good, and most often stale. Out of a sense of loyalty my dad used to purchase stuff, but he had not many customers, and soon went out of business.
Nowadays, there are plenty of tambrams who are into the catering business. Ie delivery of meals 3 times a day to retirees or for functions. This is a handsomely rewarding enterprise, with very low cost structure. I know a mama/mami in abhiramapuram, who are doing this for the past 10 years since the mama took a voluntary retirement. With the money earned, 2 daughters have been married off, and a son sent to USA for higher studies. Their quality is good, but they are honest enough to know their limits. They have no hesitation in refusing orders, beyond their limit to supply, with quality and freshness.
I don’t know about tambrams beating chettiars re business. There is no special reason to compare ourselves with other communities. If that be so, I think nadars and muslims are way ahead of other groups in tamil nadu, as is evidenced by these using their money, i think, also to buy political influence.
money can influence power, as is evidenced by the jews in the usa. we tambrams, through our business, have just managed to escape poverty, and slip into middle class. i think.
