No Laughing Matter

Tricks of Business-politics

By Madan Lamsal

Do you want to be recognized and well known in the society? Then register few companies with the company registrar’s office. Though your companies will exist only in the letterheads, you can print all those company names in your visiting cards. If you can make it a folding one, printed with golden colour, that will be just superb. It gives you a better image. In olden days, if you put many pens in your coat you would be regarded as a man of letters. The same holds true today in a slightly different way.

Then join a local club where you can practice the techniques of public speaking. In the next phase become a member of a district chamber. There too, you must never miss a chance to speak at various gatherings they hold from time to time, though you may not know the subject you are speaking about.

The less you involve in your business (if you have any) the better. Because, becoming member in different organizations is also a business. If you have brothers to look after the businesses, that means you are always one step ahead of your competitors. Because you don’t need to worry about the profit-loss game yourself.

It is a very long journey to business success if you go to party politics directly, though politics is a true business today. To make the route short, you should catch the business-politics. As there is a saying, "winners don’t do different things, they do things differently", you will be doing business, in the politician’s way. At the same time, you will be doing politics in a businessman’s way. This is a far better way of doing politics than being directly in politics.

Therefore, join an organization as a member and hold it very strongly. Always think that if your interest is not served from the existing organization, you can threaten your colleagues that you are going to open a new organization of similar type, like congressmen and the main opposition party members threaten to do with their party leaders.

But if your interest is served from the existing set up, you don’t have to worry. Now, just think about how to play with the words. Most of the time you will be invited in the seminars and to cocktails and dinners. Visiting the foreign countries is like going from one village to the other. Today you are in China, tomorrow in France and day after tomorrow in ...you really don’t know where. But one thing you must not forget to do is whenever you get a mike in front you, utter words like ‘quality’, ‘growth’, ‘unity’, ‘productivity’ and the like as many times as you can. These are the magic words to attract the people. Don’t worry what you really do in real life.

Whatever you do, you must have one thing in the hard disk of your mind - to get into the upper or lower house of the parliament, either by way of nomination or through election on a party ticket. Or at least stand for the election. Never worry how many votes you get. People don’t count the votes. What they count is how many times you were in the list of candidates. This way you will be in the highest layers of political circle and you will always have chance to mingle with the senior members of the different parties. Whenever you need, you can influence them to win their favours for your business. Who knows when you need them to approve your or your friends’ projects! Or you may even get chances to broker the sale of the MP’s Pajeros. So why not start right now?

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