THE STORY OF how two representatives of the British American Tobacco (BAT) company—Jellicoe and Page—came from London to Calcutta in 1906 to find a distributor for their cigarettes in India is now part of corporate lore. Finding a suitable wholesaler proved to be no easy task. Finally, they zeroed in on the only person willing to take a bet on a business others felt was sure to be unprofitable—a minor agent named Buksh Ellahie. Rumour goes that having no money of his own, he borrowed it from a courtesan he was interested in. The bet paid off, and both his business and love life flourished, with the courtesan soon becoming his wife.
Less known is how the Imperial Tobacco Company of India Limited (which would later become the present-day ITC)—formed on August 24, 1910, to develop BAT’s overseas operations—educated Indians on the pleasures of smoking cigarettes. Imperial Tobacco’s salesmen started off by giving away samples by the millions. “A district salesman was not considered worth his salt unless he gave away free samples of between 50- to 100 thousand cigarettes each month, a huge sum by any reckoning, and how he did it was his problem,” writes Champaka Basu in her book, Challenge and Change: The ITC Story—1910 to 1985.
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