I’m just trying to put food on the table: Industrialist The Wood Ibrahim
When I was young, my mother gave me two pieces of advice for life: 1) always focus on putting food on the table, 2) make sure to buy a hugeass table. From that point on, my life has been founded on these two maxims. It has made me into the billionaire I am today.
To this day, when people ask me why I do all that I do, I tell them I'm just putting food on the table. The other day some birds from National Birds against Revenue (NBR) came and audited me. You know how they are, always so underhanded, always trying to pin things on us that have nothing to do with us. I have more than 500 million bucks that are accounted for, but do they care about that? No. They kept hounding me for the other 500m that's unaccounted for. It's really just a glass half-empty, half-full kinda thing.
On top of the pessimism, they don't really seem to understand the point of entrepreneurship at all, the foundation on which this proud country stands. Rather than focusing on all the good stuff that I do, did, will do, whoop de doo, they asked me about unpaid wages of my staff. You know why that's annoying as hell? Because it's just one month of unpaid wage. You know how many people I owe and am owed from, how much and for how long? Sheesh, imagine going berserk over paltry 6,330 taka for around a thousand people. I mean yeah, together it's a small-mid sum, but individually it's just 6000 bucks.
Which is like way less than a single meal at our place. You see, I've always been a mama's boy, I followed everything she said to a t, which is why I started running a t-shirt business in the first place.
By her word, I bought a huge table made out of mahogany straight from the Amazons. If you see it, you instantly recognise the royalty. And such a grand table requires great meals, no?
There's a house rule that during a meal, no more than four inches of the table can be left between two dishes, which means you'd have to feel it up with around 20-25 items at least. It's such a sight, it's what keeps me going. When the birds from NBR told me it doesn't take much to put food on the table and asked me to pay the wages, I was like bro, what I mean by food is a buffet for each meal and what I mean by a table is basically a stage for an underground metal show.
And then it took another while to make them understand why I need to get some of my money offshore. Well, a man can own multiple tables, can't he? I own property across at least 15 countries, and all of them come with tables. I mean what's any house without one, amirite?
Then there's all the property I own locally, the tables at my office, at my kids' private schools, it all adds up. I showed all the documents, receipts of all the tables I own and asked them, "Is this accounting enough for you?", referring to the "unaccounted" for wealth they just couldn't let go of. They just kept talking about it over and over. It was getting on my nerves.
So I killed each pair of birds down with one stone.
Comments