Finding my Drum

One of my grandmother’s iconic stories was about a naughty little monkey. The monkey was playing around one day and happened to stop at a place where a carpenter was working. Ever curious, he peeped down through the leaves of the tree to watch the carpenter. When the carpenter took a break for lunch, the monkey naturally tried to imitate what he had been doing. In doing so, he did not pay attention to his long tail that got caught in a plank of wood. Helpless with pain, the monkey was forced to cut off his own tail with a knife lying nearby. He grabbed the knife and left through the forest holding the knife in his hand, wincing with pain.

Finally, he came to rest on a mango tree. There he saw fresh juicy mangoes hanging from a branch. They took his mind off the pain, and he really wanted to eat those mangoes. The mangoes were out on the limb of a very thin branch, which he was sure wouldn’t hold his weight. So, the monkey tried to saw down the branch tree with the knife in his hand. The branch fell to the ground, but the knife got stuck in the tree. The monkey scrambled down, picked up a few succulent mangoes and gnawing on one went on his way.

A little further on, he saw a peasant who was playing a folk drum and singing as he walked along. The monkey was fascinated by the sound of the drum and kept following the peasant along the tree line. At some point he stopped paying attention and the mangoes he held fell to the ground. The salesman was excited to see such succulent mangoes and dropping his drum ran to them.

The monkey scrambled down the tree and picked up the drum and went home singing all the way and playing on his drum:

I lost my tail, I got a drum,
Dum dum dum.
I lost my tail, I got a knife,
Dum, dum, dum.
I lost my knife, I got a fruit,
Dum, dum, dum.
I lost my fruit. I got a drum,
Dum dum, dum, dum, dum, dum dum dum……and he ran all the way home.

My granny was excellent at singing along like a happy monkey. I loved this story, but it took me years to understand the point of it.
***
Exciting things started happening at work. Although I found the shift to the office hard, it relieved me of a lot of the day-to-day nitty-gritty. I had learned my lesson though, and kept close watch on things, but I was not alone anymore. I had help, I had people.
It was about this time that social media started becoming a thing. Marketing, which had long been the most difficult challenge, seemed to be a little bit easier. Imagine you’re walking to a store, and you want to pick up the game of Monopoly. You don’t see it, but you know the store has it because it has board games. So, you would ask for it. However, if you wanted to pick up a game of Pallanguzhi or Aadu Puli Aatam, and you did not see it, you wouldn’t even know it was there.

Sadly, our games needed a lot of marketing, a lot of awareness and until they brought in a lot of sales, many stores did not display them prominently. We didn’t have the advertising budget. We also had numerous other challenges. Being a small company and working with small artisans meant that in many cases we advanced money to get our products made. Long payment cycles did not work for us, especially as margins were so thin. Many stores did not want to stock us or took forever to pay us. This combination of aspects made it harder for people to know where the games could be found.

Social media changed all that. Suddenly we could reach out to people across the country and tell them where they could buy our games. We could very soon have our own portal so people could come directly to us to buy our games. We could tell them about our games, the fascinating tidbits about their history and origins. It was an exciting time. It was a time when we could literally trumpet what we were doing to the far corners of the world. And with a little more time on my hands since moving to the office, I started to do just that.

Much like the monkey, I might have lost the fun of working from home, but I had found my drum! And now I saw the point of my granny’s story!

Dum dum, dum, dum, dum, dum dum dum……