The Asian Wall Street Journal
English
(c) 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. To see the edition in which this article
appeared, click here http://awsj.com.hk/factiva-ns
WHEN MOHAMMED Akil Syed left Uttar Pradesh over 60 years ago to
make a living down South, he hardly imagined that his children would eventually
make his bakery a household name in prosperous South Bombay with
movie stars, politicians and wealthy businessmen as clients. Now, the annual
turnover from the Syed family bakery in Bombay's Kemp's Corner is around
$400,000.
The transformation of a dusty, small shop that sold soft bread,
butter, and eggs into a popular minimart now called Bake House that
supplies snacks of all kinds underlines the progress that
self-driven entrepreneurs have made in India. But this story has one surprising
twist: the Syeds are Muslim.
Much of the literature about Muslim families in India paints a
picture of discrimination, segregation and economic disadvantage. Sadly, some
statistics show the truth in these generalizations. While Muslims form nearly
12% of India's 1.02 billion people, their share in elite cadres of the
bureaucracy the Indian Administrative, Foreign, or Police Services
is less than half of that. The story is similar in both the judiciary and the
private sector. True, the heads of two leading companies in the growing sectors
of the Indian economy pharmaceuticals and infotech are
Muslim. But overall, the community is underrepresented in the corporate sector
as well.
It would seem that the only areas of public life in which Indian
Muslims excel are sport and entertainment; two areas where talent is harder to
suppress. Three of the eleven players in the Indian cricket team that vanquished
Pakistan in the Samsung Cup of one-day internationals that ended last month in
Lahore Mohammed Kaif, Zaheer Khan, and Irfan Pathan were
Muslim. Likewise, three of Bollywood's biggest male stars today
Aamir Khan, Salman Khan, and Shahrukh Khan are Muslim. But critics
argue that they are exceptions to the rule that Muslims are rarely incorporated
into mainstream Indian life.
Many in India would argue that those Muslims who overcome do so because they are
exceptionally brilliant (like the missile scientist Abdul Kalam, now India's
president), or due to some form of affirmative action.
This is why the Syed family story stands out. Not only have the Syeds succeeded
on their own terms, they have done so in a predominantly Gujarati-speaking
middle-class, conservative area. It was in Gujarat, in 2002, that hundreds of
Muslims died in the violent retaliation after a Muslim mob set a train
compartment afire, killing over 50 Hindu nationalist activists. This month, the
Indian Supreme Court reopened the Best Bakery case, in which a Hindu mob
allegedly burnt a Muslim-owned bakery (which killed 14 people) in Baroda, a city
in Gujarat, during the riots that followed the burning of the train.
But Bombay is a very different city. The fact that the Syeds operate peacefully
and have prospered here says as much about the inclusive ethos of Bombay, as
about their own spunk. Zahid Syed, Akil's son, has never felt threatened in this
part of Bombay. Of course, during periods of communal unrest he takes care to
shut his shop, but his premises have never been damaged. "People know us,
we have never felt unsafe," he says.
The Syeds clearly don't think of themselves as making any broad political point.
But their actions underscore their deep belief in India. In pre-Partition India,
the family's patriarch moved from Azamgarh to Bombay, not to Pakistan, whose
raison d'etre was to be the home of the sub-continent's Muslims, and where many
Muslims were migrating. Then, he made his home in this cosmopolitan city. His
children invested in the business, built a clientele and developed a chain of
suppliers.
In the early years after Indian independence in 1947, food was in
short supply, and government-owned ration shops provided often sub-standard
grain at subsidized prices. A state-run bakery made one-taste-suits-all white
bread. At such a time, the Syeds offered a mouthwatering alternative, soft fresh
bread at inexpensive prices. The Syed children, back from school, would slice
the fresh bread with their long, sharp knives, then wrap the bread in old
newspapers and present it to their customers who would rush home to
share the treat with their families. "Our success was entirely due to word
of mouth," says Zahid Syed, Akil's son.
But success was not instant. For many years, Akil Syed's shop
remained a pau (bread) shop, offering little else. But when his health
deteriorated in the late 1980s (he died in 1991) the older sons took charge.
They had little choice but to drop studies and take over the business. They
named their shop Bread Station. They began importing foreign-made cheeses and
jams at a time when India discouraged large-scale imports of consumer products.
Most shops sold Indian-made Polson butter and Verka cheese, but at Bread Station
you could get Kraft cheese and Suchard's hot chocolate, although at a premium,
marked-up price. Some of these initiatives were necessary. The Syeds had
competition around the corner a large bakery called American
Express, which smelled of cakes and two varieties of bread: brown and white.
In 1991, something else happened: India jettisoned the socialist model of
self-denial, and the Syeds' business took off. "In our father's time I
remember people haggled over prices because nobody had a lot of money, and there
was a lot of hardship. Now, many people come and some of them spend hundreds of
rupees at a time. Everybody is doing well," he says. By 1995 their business
had grown enough to hire staff.
Today, the two bakeries employ nearly 40 people. Zahid Syed
estimates that he gets almost 1,000 customers daily. His bakery operates from 5
am to midnight, converting three bags of 90 kg of flour each into all kinds of
bread products daily. "We are successful because our clients like us
otherwise we would not survive. We have trusted, old clients who come to us year
after year," Mr. Syed says. They also provide home delivery, with a staff
of four fielding calls and rushing to customers on motor scooters to anywhere in
South Bombay. The next plan is a website. Yet despite their success, Mr. Syed
does not want his children to follow the same path. "They should become
professionals, lawyers, doctors, something like that." As for
his own plans, he thinks setting up a supermarket would be a good idea.
Mr. Syed's father died before seeing the far-reaching benefits of India's
economic liberalization, which created opportunities that extend to those who
had been long perceived as victims of discrimination. His business-savvy sons
anticipated these opportunities, grasped them, and carved out success.
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Mr. Tripathi, a London-based writer, grew up in Bombay on the Syeds' bread.