Lick 'em tomorrow

A life remembered

In the early days of the internet, which is to say, the late 1990’s, I contacted the owner of a site called InfoMine.com[1] to inquire about starting a second site to be called “Petromine”.  The one was about all things mining and my idea was to build that same model into the petroleum industry.  I naively assumed that a website as large and good as Infomine was a money-maker.  My interlocutor quickly set me straight and said that,

“As soon as I think we have figured out the right approach to making money on the internet, things change and we have to start over.”

No one makes money on the internet was my conclusion and I dropped my idea.

About five years later I was working on a project in Ecuador and met the owner’s representative who was to show me the work site.  He was from Quebec and was one of the most intelligent people I had ever met.  He astounded me by saying that he chose an English-speaking engineering school because he wanted to learn that language.  As an English speaker, I scraped through engineering, and he wanted a bit more challenge.  It was impressive.

At dinner the first night, he told me about his adventures on the internet and I opined that no one makes money on the internet.  He gave me a look that not only said, “You are a naïve fool,” but also defined the depth of my stupidity.  He was a buyer and seller of websites and was making a lot of money on the internet.  One of his sites made him $40,000 per month and I would often ask to see the live Google counter of his earnings because it was like watching the numbers spin on a gas pump.  He encouraged me to invest my time in building my own website to see if I could make some money on the side. 

I had started writing a whimsical manual about how the mining industry works with a view to selling it at investment conferences.  Instead, I finished writing the manual and put it on a website called Miningcompanybuilder.com.  It made zero income, but I thought it was funny and so didn’t regret the investment of time.  Some years later I forgot to pay the subscription fees for my domain name and so lost it and all that it contained.  I was very pleasantly surprised, a few years later, to find that someone had recombined the website into a pdf document and was offering it on their website.  Life is funny.

The one return I received on my website investment came in the form of a telephone call in 2007 from a guy in upper state New York who spoke with a Pakistani accent.

“I have read and enjoyed your website and would like to get your help in developing my mining property in Pakistan.”

I don’t get too many phone calls like that so was intrigued.  And that is how I came to know Sheikh Tanvir, one of the most interesting men I have been privileged to know.  Sheikh passed away a few weeks ago and this is how I remember him.

From an upper middle-class family in Pakistan, Sheikh became involved in the rag trade and eventually found himself in Hong Kong understudying a Jewish businessman for whom he obviously had great affection.  He started an export business in clothing and made a considerable fortune before selling his business and moving to the United States.  Middle aged and bored he began looking for business opportunities and found himself investigating mineral claims in Balochistan, Pakistan.  A very large copper deposit had been discovered and he instinctively knew that any properties around this development would attract interest and perhaps money.  So he picked up mineral leases around the copper deposit and eventually held an enormous land position.  That is when he called me to ask what he should do now.

I agreed to Sheikh’s request for help because I could not believe that someone from the rag trade would have the strong business skills to instinctively know about “close-ology” in the mining industry.  I thought that I could learn from this guy.  And I was right. So began our almost two-decade adventure in mine building in Pakistan.  His adventure returned about as much investment income as my adventure in building internet wealth, but it was at the far side of interesting and yielded a lot of laughs.

When his leases were illegally transferred to another mining company, Sheikh determined to take his complaint to the local supreme court.  My counsel was to talk to the mining company involved and see if some kind of arrangement could be made.  So we found ourselves in downtown Toronto ready to storm the office tower which held the “guilty” party (I never actually saw proof of guilt and only once made the mistake of challenging Sheikh on the point).  As we considered which of a group of buildings contained the offices, Sheikh spied the president of the company walking across the plaza and was off like a shot to confront him on the issues.  I stood back and watched the panoply of expressions that danced across the man’s face as he moved from being perplexed, to understanding the wild man in front of him, to being angry and finally to being conciliatory to get this guy out of his way. 

When I say that another mining company was the “guilty” party, I am referencing one of the biggest mining companies in the world whose president was certainly not used to being accosted on a business plaza in downtown Toronto.  It was a delight to watch as Sheikh, in his heavily accented English, made his point and secured an interview with the president to see if something could be arranged.  Unfortunately for both us and the president, he was let go shortly after this incident so we had to start again but I will always have that memory to chuckle over.

As things turned out, the mining company in question was not given permission to develop the resources that they had discovered and so Sheikh embarked on a ten-year and very quixotic attempt to take over control of the mineral resources.  Chutzpah, thy name is Sheikh.  We came up with some innovative approaches to the Pakistani and Balochi governments. I suppose that if we had a bank account, we might even have made some inroads with those approaches. 

Sometime around 2015, Sheikh announced that he had found an “investor” in Pakistan.  He owned the largest civil construction company in the country and his daughter had just married the grandson of a former Prime Minister.

“But will he demand money under the table?” I inquired.  “I have no interest in being charged and jailed under foreign corrupt trade practices.”

“Completely clean!” I was told. 

The man had a mouth in which butter could never melt. 

Sheikh and I met at a hotel near Kennedy Airport in New York City and flew to Lahore, Pakistan.  Sheikh was beginning to rethink his views about the meltability of the butter, but I had never been to Lahore and thought the adventure might justify the expense.  I was not to be disappointed.  We stayed about five days, I met Sheikh’s in-country team, and we had dinner at the “investor’s” house in one of the largest rooms I have ever been in.  The conversation was carried out in Urdu and Sheikh periodically filled me in on what was being discussed.  It had a lot to do with whether the butter had already melted or not.  It turns out that it had and so we left disappointed.

In the years since, the Canadian mining company regained control of the project and is now building it, so Sheikh’s dream was not fulfilled.  People and organizations in Pakistan that he had trusted turned out not to have warranted that trust.  If one had a right to the bitterness of disappointment, Sheikh was that one.  But I never heard him express disappointment… ever. 

William Tecumseh Sherman, in his memoir, related a Civil War story about the aftermath of the first day of battle at Shiloh in 1862.  It has always reminded me of Sheikh.  After a long and bloody battle, Sherman spotted Ulysses Grant sitting under a peach tree and walked over to speak with him.

“The bodies were so thick that I could have walked to General Grant and never touched the ground.”  

“Bad day,” said Sherman.  “Yes, but we’ll lick ‘em tomorrow,” responded Grant.

That was Sheikh.  We’ll lick ‘em tomorrow.  Never let the circumstances get in the way of the dream.  There are not many people in this world who carry that attitude over time and through all of life’s vicissitudes.  I was fortunate enough to be friends with one of them.  Sheikh will certainly be missed but when I think of him, I will smile and chuckle remembering his laughter in the face of the odds.

To my faithful readers, I have missed a few weeks lately due to pressing concerns (reconstruction of the family cabin and other writing).  One of my current writing projects is a survey history of western civilization from 1450 until the present.  It will be used as a textbook in a high school class that I have been asked to teach next year and I am considering offering a free, weekly Zoom course to others who might be interested.

If this idea has any appeal or you have questions, please let me know in the comments and, with enough interest, I will see if something can be done.

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[1] Infomine went on to greatness and did start to make money.  In 2018 it was sold to a trade magazine, and I suppose the owners did very well financially.  At least I hope so.