By Promit Pramanik _11952 Comments READ LATER Extract published from The Tanishq story: Inside India’s no.1 Jewellery Brand by CK Venkataraman, Managing Director of Titan Co. Ltd.
This extract is from the chapter titled Partnership. It was in the early days of my move into Tanishq. I was in Kolkata, sometime in late 2005 or early 2006.
So far, my impression of Tanishq had been one of elegance (the jewellery), grandeur (the stores), innovation (the plant), camaraderie (the office) and professionalism (meetings with vendor partners in our own offices). I didn’t realize that I was about to get jolted out of my life in the next ten minutes. We were in Sinthi More, one of the biggest jewellery-making hubs of Kolkata.
LRN, some other colleagues and myself had gone to visit the workshops where our vendors made our gold jewellery. It was summer and the temperature was in the high forties. It was quite a crowded place with narrow streets and narrower alleys, looking like a scene from the early twentieth century.
Perhaps very little has changed since then. We entered a multistorey building. We were told that some of the rooms in this building were rented out to our head karigars , rooms in which the bench karigars (those who make the jewellery) worked.
Our vendors acted as the aggregators of such head karigars and were the bridge between the company and the centres of production, being responsible for product quality, delivery and gold safety. We climbed to the second floor. The st.