“Speed is money - A common business school aphorism”.
I lay aside the Corporate Strategy book that I was reading. It was a hot and sultry July afternoon. And I had been waiting for a master weaver with whom we regularly worked. Let’s call him Master Shifu for I can think of no other human bearing closer resemblance to Shifu than him.
In the end, Shifu turned up. With a scarf in his hand. He asked me to try it on. I reluctantly did knowing that I was drenched in sweat.
But good heavens! What was that? Smooth, silky and almost weightless.
Shifu smirked. Now he handed me another scarf that was stiff like a cracker. Same material. Nuni Silk. I was deeply intrigued.
Shifu went on to describe with great pride how he had managed to preserve generational secrets of bio-softening silks using “fruits that taste sweet, leaves than smell fresh, water that has slight ph.”
Quite frankly, I was thinking he was describing the recipe of a tropical cocktail. Nevertheless.
With my highly entrepreneurial and fresh-out-of-America spirit, I asked “So where can I get this material?”
Shifu went on with his Byzantine story of how that silk is super rare. And he has asked women in a far off village to rear silk worms for him, and the rain did not come, and all the cocoons….
“Wait!” I interrupted. “You can give all the damaged stuff to me, I will try making something.”
But Shifu went on with the somber story, “Unfortunately the villagers burned them.”
“You mean like medieval peasants, they burned them all?”
“Yes.”
I had no words to say. Years went by. One day, a farmer came from the neighboring hill state, on a scraggly scooter. Behind him was a large misshapen sack. Inside it were silvery white cocoons and a message that the hill state nearby had started rearing them. Shifu looked at me and I looked at Shifu.
We gave the man drinks and showered him with applause for being a “true farmer.” He smiled shyly.
I knew what I wanted to name this product. After searching in many languages, I found the exact word, “Niseko” meaning “a river that runs to a cliff” in Anui (Japan). For this product came “flowing” to us, despite climate change, despite deforestation, despite people moving away from this craft. And all we did was wait patiently like a cliff.
I do not believe speed is money outside the formal economy. The world is designed to facilitate the formal economy. But in the informal economy, it is usually patience, grit, and street smartness that fends the way through the structured, consumeristic, modern world. If only, the world was less obsessed with speed, and had time to see that real life has beautiful stories.
