During my conversation with Narayan Rao, the founder of Bengaluru’s popular icecream brand Corner House, I tell him, rather unwittingly, “Corner House is a legacy brand–”
It is, however, not preposterous to assume that Corner House is, indeed, a legacy brand in Bengaluru. It has, after all, 19 parlours across the city and two more in Mysuru. It has been around for 40 years, withstanding competition from other international icecream brands. It sells, on average, 1.5 lakh litres of ice cream every month.
The first was on a hot June afternoon in Delhi in 1980. Rao had just returned from Canada after studying hotel management. He was waiting outside the office of the general manager of a five-star hotel for his interview when he met his schoolmate, who was the personal secretary to the manager. She had a hunch that he would not like working there. “She said, ‘If you ask me, you should just turn around and walk out of here.’ I did just that. .” If he had not bumped into her, he might not have come to Bengaluru and started Corner House. “Forty years later, I called and thanked her.”
The second moment of serendipity came a few years after he started Corner House, which was then a fast-food joint. Business was stuttering. He ran out of the money he borrowed from his father. Banks, then, were not liberal with loans as they are now. He had no collateral, either. He was at a restaurant, contemplating the future of his fledgling food business over a coffee, when a fellow diner joined him. They exchanged pleasantries. It turned out that the guy sitting across the table was a bank manager whose brother was Rao’s classmate. Seven days later, Rao got the money he needed to keep his business afloat.
“Bangalore has always been good to me,” he says. It is where he met the love of his life, whom he is married to for 41 years. It is where he established his livelihood. For someone born and brought up in Delhi, it is now his home.
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