Rubber Bands to Copper Cables

By Gunasegaran Reddy

A journey of a simple village boy who worked through his primary and secondary education and chanced into completing his university education with sheer grid, perseverance and fortitude. This book is about working up through innumerable life challenges where every incident, challenge and adversity has a lesson to be grasped. And this gradual sculpting makes us what we are today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gunasegaran Reddy
• Release date: Mar 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9786299793601

Book preview

Chapter 1: Rubber bands to cash

School is where we learn about how to get ahead in life. For me, this meant finding opportunities and I’ll share next how my school days opened up so many doors that I never thought would be possible for someone like me.

First some background. I grew up in Malacca at a place called Kampung Limbongan which is about 150km from Kuala Lumpur the capital city of Malaysia. I am the third child and have 2 elder sisters, a younger sister and a brother. We were not rich, but we got by with food always served up at main meals. My four siblings and I each received 10 sen (Malaysian cents) each per every school day to spend in the canteen at recess.

So while there was no real pressure on me to look for more, I was always raring to see what my limits were. At times, I’d go too far - but we’ll get to that. Let me share how rubber bands helped me generate some extra cash.

Back in the early 1960s, when there was no Internet or gadgets and we kids entertained ourselves playing simple games that we came up with on our own, I happened to be very good at a rubber band game. While we kids at the village that we lived in together played this every day for fun, I soon stumbled upon an amazing opportunity in 1962 while I was just 10 years old.

This game was simple - a thick rubber band was stretched between two rods stuck in the ground. Each participant would place 20 rubber bands onto this stretched cord until a heaping pile is formed and just held off the ground. A line is then drawn in the dirt, about fifteen (15) feet away from the rods. The participants were school and village friends of all races and generally about the same age group. We would look forward to getting together for all sorts of adventures and this game was one of our favourites. It was fun with a lot of laughter despite the heat.

To play, we would stand behind the line and take turns shooting down the rubber bands from this pile. Whatever rubber bands got shot off and fell on the ground became a bounty for the shooter. Since I was good at this game, I’d usually get the lion’s share of rubber bands.

But we had a lot of time on our hands then, and all of us wanted to play some more. The other kids asked me to lend them some rubber bands and it was at this juncture that a light bulb must have lit up inside my young mind. I agreed to SELL them the rubber bands and they agreed!

So you can imagine the hustle I was soon running with rubber bands. I’d win the game, then sell the rubber bands back to the other village kids. With this cycle of winnings and selling back the rubber bands, I realised that there could be a way to make even more money - especially if those kids bought ALL their rubber bands from me!

To give you a better perspective of this money-making plan I had hatched, it wasn’t easy to get rubber bands in the village we all lived in. We would go hunting because rubber bands were not given out free like today by shop owners or food vendors as part of cooked food packaging - commonly thosai, roti canai, curries, kueh (local deserts) or such - and with bags of loose groceries like lentils, potatoes, tomatoes and more.

So, demand for rubber bands was high among us kids. Some stores at the far ends of the village sold rubber bands, but we found those prices to be expensive. Which meant the only way to get rubber bands affordably in quantity was from OUTSIDE the village and that involved cycling to Malacca town some two miles away.

This insight led me to cycle into town to look for more rubber bands. (At that young age, I was already cycling regularly with my dad into town every Saturday, following him to where he worked at a church). I checked out some shops and found that I could BUY rubber bands in bulk!

With some money saved up from my game winnings (plus not spending all the precious 10 sen at recess daily), I bought a whole bunch of rubber bands that next weekend. When I got home, I tied those new rubber bands in packs of 30 pieces to be sold at 5 sen per pack - cheaper than the price set at the village stores.

I can’t remember how much I invested in buying those rubber bands in bulk for the first time from the town shop nor how much I made selling these to the other village children. But I remember feeling very satisfied that my investment had paid off well, with over 100% raw profit, because my cost buying from the town shop was about 2 sen for 30 rubber bands.

This scheme turned out to be a recurring source of side income. Rubber bands break when you overstretch to shoot them, they also crumbled due to too much sun exposure and from various other causes. Further, I could sell back rubber bands that I had won in the games!

This side income was useful in the sense that I did not have to burden my parents for money to support my hobbies like making kites, additional colour pencils, adventure trips etc. This habit stayed on as we grew up, and my siblings and I would also contribute to household purchases when we grew older.

Since I was already cycling every weekend into town and having obtained some extra cash from rubber band sales, I expanded my sales scheme to sweets that I could buy in bulk from the town shops.

Again, I need to provide some perspective on why this was an opportunity that I could exploit - especially in school, where these treats were sold only in the tuckshop or by bicycle peddlers who would wait just outside the school fencing. In those days, you could get only a limited variety of sweets from these sources.

Since I had other places outside the village to go buy sweets every weekend, I could become an alternate source to supply these treats to pupils both in my class and elsewhere in the school. And that’s what I did. I bought those sweets in bulk, divided them into packets of two each and sold them from my school bag.

This sweets scheme was such a huge hit because my classmates no longer needed to wait for recess or be excused to leave the classroom to get sweets. As children, we were always hungry - what more if it was for sugary treats! Pupils from other classes would also pop in to buy from me during period changes.

By offering a ready supply of favourite sweet varieties, while also having flavours they couldn’t get from these two regular sources, this made me popular with other children in the village too. I eventually made a lot more from selling sweets than my rubber bands scheme. The profit was decent as I purchased 3 sweets for 5 sen and sold two for the same price.

The earnings were attractive enough that when the scout troop I was part of in school needed to raise funds for activities, I suggested to the scoutmaster to do something similar. While he admired the business entrepreneurship outlook that I had, he didn’t want the troop members to be doing sales in school and beyond.

Being bitten by the entrepreneurship bug at such a tender age, I went looking for more opportunities.

The sweets and rubber band sales scheme had run their course by the time I was in form two (mid 1962) and my older sister Saraswathy, too was looking for opportunities to make some extra money. She suggested that we do something similar together during the weekends

What we came up with was preparing vadai (a savoury Indian dhall cake, made either from lentils or crushed rice), the plan was for Saras to do the cooking while I would go sell these freshly fried delicacies for teatime.

To avoid using items at home, I bought all the necessary ingredients - including the oil to fry the vade in. After the vade was fried and packed neatly in a container that I fastened to the bicycle’s back seat, I would walk around the village and whoever was around used to stop me to buy - because the fresh smell was so tempting.

Selling these vadai at five (5) sen apiece, I easily doubled my investment from sales and made my sister happy to get the extra income. But this vadai venture didn’t last long because my sister left school and was employed as a salesperson at a sari shop in Malacca town.

Without someone helping me with the vadai preparation and cooking, it was too much work for me to handle on my own. So reluctantly, I had to accept the reality of the situation. It was my first major setback and proved to be a very useful life lesson. It is only possible to rise so far on your own for we need others working together with us to climb higher.

Chapter 2: Polishing boots… to working with slaves

In those days, going out to work part-time, or even full-time, as early as the age of 13 was not unusual. This was due to the education system whereby students who failed their standard six examinations at the age of 12 are not able to proceed to secondary school and would end up in the job market. Most of the villagers were poor, living from hand to mouth. Hence to assist make ends meet, many young boys would take up activities to earn extra pocket money. My friend, Ah Tu, took to cutting and drying banana tree trunk fibre and selling them to hawkers at 20 sen a bundle. The dried fibre was used as string to tie food packages.

Luckily for me, the standard six examination was abolished the year I reached standard 6, and I was the first batch that benefitted from being saved from sitting for this dreaded examination. Failing this exam would have meant that I would have had to leave school at the tender age of twelve. I remember vividly the frequent scolding from our class teacher Mr Chin Peng Lim who would say that if not for the abolishing of the standard six examination I would be one of those who would have had to leave school.

Secondary school was tough with a variety of subjects. My secondary school was called Gajah Berang Secondary English School which was about 45 minutes’ walk from home. With the worst of academic pressure off and also because I was already an enterprising child, I went to look at alternate sources of income after quitting the part time construction job. Then, one of my friends told me of an attractive job opportunity and I jumped at the chance.

Even though Malaya had gained its independence from the British colonisers in 1957 and became Malaysia in 1963 with the addition of Sabah, Sarawak and Singapore, there were still many British and Australian army troops living here to help fight off the Communist threat. This threat lasted well into the 1970s, long after the nation’s independence, even though the Communist fight was supposedly aimed at helping locals shrug off the colonialism yoke.

We didn’t see much evidence of Communist activity in Melaka, but there was a huge camp (Terendak) in the state for the British and Australian soldiers. The higher-ranking officers and their families lived outside the camp, in an area roughly about a mile from my home, in a housing estate designated for their use. The new job opportunity was to polish these officers’ boots to military perfection, and given the number of footwear to be handled, this was a job with recurring long-term potential. But there was one major hurdle - there were already others taking full advantage of this income opportunity.

There was a sort of unwritten allocation of houses on a first-come, first-served basis for the local boys who did this boot-polishing service for the officers. Fortunately I knew a bread vendor for that housing estate and he introduced me to the local boys’ community, so that I would be deemed acceptable to work in that area. After joining the local boys for several days and learning the trade from them an officer randomly asked me to polish his boots.

In such an instance, the standard protocol is to check if this officer’s home had already been allocated to another boy.