I first saw this quote on the Calcutta Metro Rail Station in 2001, during those twenty-minute underground rides from Rabindra Sarovar to Park Street. Those journeys cost me INR 7 per day; the monthly pass was a lifesaver on my meagre five-figure post-MBA salary.
I was a Management Trainee at RPG Retail then, fresh off campus recruitment. I was responsible for the Operations of Asia’s largest music retail store in the day - all of 7,000 sq ft, designed by Fitch PLC and a monthly turnover of INR 60 lakhs. That’s INR 2 lakhs a day, selling cassettes worth INR 28 for Bengali music and INR 33 for Hindi.
CDs and DVDs were just hitting the market and were priced at INR 299, restricting them for just a few hundred in the city and a few thousands in the country, perhaps.
Retail wasn't entirely new to me — I'd worked part-time as a waiter at Baskin Robbins Ice Cream parlour in Chennai, the second outlet in India and the first in the city.
I already understood, however faintly, the mechanics of managing customers.
Reading Gandhi's words daily only deepened what I was beginning to learn: that customers were everything.
Back then, many shopkeepers still believed they were doing the community a service — stocking shelves at competitive prices with wafer-thin margins, almost grudgingly. The servitude was absent.
Curiously, little has changed in twenty-five years.
I'm uncertain if Gandhi's quote still adorns that metro corridor, but I notice something troubling: despite all the talk about customer experience and digital transformation, servitude has largely disappeared.
From luxury brands to neighbourhood shops, there's an undercurrent of indifference masquerading as efficiency.
I've run retail businesses and launched startups.
I've always tried to live this principle visibly — showing my teams that the rice and milk we buy at home exists because customers chose to give us their business yesterday.
Without them, regardless of title or designation, there's no revenue to manage, no salary to draw.
We've certainly shifted customer focus dramatically. Technology has changed the experience. Yet we have miles to go in creating exemplary customer moments.
The irony isn't lost on me: we've mastered the transaction but forgotten the transaction's foundation — genuine respect for the person across the counter.
Today, on Gandhi Jayanti, his words resonate as loudly as they did in 2001. Perhaps more so. Happy Birthday, Late Shri, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ji.
Hey! Ram.
