A waste of 3 / 4 hours

One of my friends called me yesterday and said that he wanted to meet me. I was not in much contact with him and since he has called me after long time, I said yes. We met near my company and he asked me to come with him to a place. Neglecting my question, "Where are we going?" he took me to a cafe restaurant in Kothrud where I was supposed to meet his new FRIENDS. These guys ( who work for so called "Indian Software Giant" firms) earn money in their leisure time by working for a company in chain marketing. I was brought there to meet a guy who was very good in marketing that company's product, a gold coin which costs 30,000 rupees. To prove his point, that the coin is not just a 'lump of gold but a rare piece of art' ( fyi, this coin is for numismatist), he started to give me company's overall information.

I was not told that I will be sitting for his presentation when my friend took me to the place. Maybe that's because my friend ( who is a part of the chain) must have thought that after hearing it, I might not come with him. But I wasn't new to the presentation. This company is supposed to work in 100+ domains and have a variety of products, and being a so called smart software professional (who knows nothing but working for 5 days a week and freaking out on weekends, still considered as the brilliant of all white collared corporate people), he invited me to listen to his plan . So, the presentation started off with a question 'Do you want to earn money or not' ? I was kind of surprised, first thing is I just know this person ( the presentation guy) for not more than 5 minutes and he is asking me a question for which everyone will answer 'yes'. I don't want to start the presentation with a shade of quarrel so I answered yes. Then the guy was like unstoppable. He explained me like what is the company, showed me the details (registration no., ISO-9001 certificate, some token of appreciation from some British Institution) for authentication. Then he talked about various products that the company makes and came to the point that I should also invest my money to one of their products , a gold coin.

This was not a normal gold coin, but instead the one on which you get an embossed image of a famous personality. The company get these coins minted from some German minting company and for each image that it emboss, pays royalty to the person who is being embossed. This was about the coin, what I was supposed to do was to pay 30,000 Rs. to a person and get this coin ( which was assumed to be of 99.9999999% purity, 24 carat gold) to join their business. If I want to earn some money, I should refer few of my contacts so that they can buy this coin. If I could refer total 6 people, my account will be credited with 11,500/- check and as the chain grows up, I will be benefited. To explain the business strategy, he talked about the tree structure of the business, the profit that I will be getting after each 2 raised to n people at each level and so on. Moreover, according to him, this was a zero investment business where you can pay 30,000/- by using the credit cards of several banks ( transferring the money from one bank to another ). Then came the most clashing point, he started comparing this business with that of Ambani's, Tata's and all big shot entrepreneurs. I agreed to his point that by traditional means of a job, one can not make a huge money, but strongly disagreed to his analogy that by doing this business I could be rich like Ambani's. Come on. they did not start a crap chain marketing business, all they had was a vision and a strong desire to achieve their aim. I did not see anything of that sort here. Moreover, these people did not have a product as such which has a potential money making future.

So, after wasting my 2-3 hours listening to that guy's management / marketing fundas, I said "Just stop it, I don't want to hear you anymore" and walked away with my friend. It should have been much more better if we could have met for some REAL BUSINESS or for some social cause or just to say hello. Why are we in search of quick money making mantras ?There are so many things which we can do other than chain marketing, real estates, bidding for stocks and can still earn money. I would definitely love to join a thought provoking seminar or a meeting where people come and discuss ways to CREATE / IMPROVE any open source software, put forward a nice idea that could be marketed or maybe start implement yet another killer software application. I would like to join hands and more importantly contribute to ameliorate the current situation of software field or social atmosphere.

This guy and his plan, I think was just a waste of time and nothing else.