Why I Sell Paper

People ask me all the time. The question arrives at dinners, at networking events, on flights, in the middle of conversations that are going perfectly well until it does not. What do you do?

I sell paper.

The reaction is always the same. A pause. A slight tilt of the head. Sometimes they ask again, as if they misheard. When I was in school, people assumed we sold newspapers. Some thought I was being vague on purpose. Neither. My family has been in the paper trade for 65 years. I am the fourth generation. And somewhere along the way, we became among the first to sell tissue paper in India.

But before I get to tissue, let me tell you how I fell in love with paper itself.

My father was not in paper the way most people are in a business. He was in it the way some people are in music or painting. He would tear sheets apart with his hands to understand how they were constructed. He would lick paper, chew it, hold it up to light at different angles. It sounds strange until you understand what he was doing, which was reading it. Every fibre, every surface, every gram told him something. His passion had no obvious ceiling.

He travelled constantly, visiting printers and paper mills, and he rarely minded me coming along. I walked into my first printing press at age seven. My first paper mill at eight. Chlorine bleaching was still common then, and those fumes hit me the moment I stepped inside, heavy and sharp and slightly nauseating. But the machines. The machines got into me and never quite left. I went home and dreamed about building a mill someday. That dream is still alive. It is one of the few things I have carried completely intact from childhood into adulthood.

As I grew older and the time came to choose an engineering discipline, the answer was straightforward. Paper and cellulosic fibres. When my father passed, his legacy did not leave with him. It had already taken root somewhere deeper than memory. You tend to find your way toward the things you love without fully understanding why, and I have always believed that the passion itself is a kind of compass.

I started working in December 2012, fresh out of college, though I had taken an extra semester which is a story I will save for another time. My family put me on coated paper, and I spent my early months sitting with printers and traders, asking questions, learning which grades were used where and more importantly why. The why has always been the part that interests me. Anything explained without logic never sat well with me, even as a child.

Then an opportunity came to set up an export business alongside my uncle. I packed a bag with samples of everything we had. Tissue, uncoated, packaging grades, the full range. I had never sold tissue before. My knowledge of it was entirely theoretical, the kind that lives in textbooks and does not survive first contact with a real customer. What I had instead were two people who changed the course of things entirely. I will call them Deepak and Vasim.

Deepak was a Delhi boy through and through, mid-life, full of energy, always looking at the next angle, happily unstoppable. He had a warmth that made rooms easier to be in and a directness that I found quietly liberating. He taught me something simple and important: there is no harm in saying hello, and there is no shame in asking someone to buy. He drove me across Dubai for hours, fed me at roadside restaurants, filled in the loneliness of being young and new in a foreign market. He was mentor, companion, and business partner, sometimes all three in the same afternoon.

Vasim was different. He projected sternness and carried himself like someone who did not suffer fools. For the first several months I took him entirely at face value. He was the younger brother and co-owner of one of the most respected tissue companies in Dubai. We arrived for a meeting at lunch. Deepak swept in ahead of us and made himself comfortable before we had properly sat down. Vasim’s elder brother, a man I had not yet met, invited us to eat without hesitation. By the end of that day, Vasim had placed a trial order for a couple of containers.

24th August 2014. A Sunday. I remember it exactly.

Over time, Vasim became something I had not expected. He shared his thoughts on life freely, forgave the mistakes we made as beginners without making us feel small, and let me sit in his office for hours when I had nowhere else to be. He opened his factory floor to me so I could watch the converting machines and understand how they worked. He brought me into his plans and his anxieties about the future as though my perspective mattered. When suppliers visited him, he would pass along my contact without being asked. That generosity, quiet and consistent, is not something I have forgotten.

And that is how I came to sell tissue.

From 11.5 to 45 GSM, tissue is one of the most interesting products I have ever handled. To put that in perspective, a single square metre of the lightest tissue weighs just 11.5 grams. You begin with something that is 99.9% water and a fraction of fibre, and you end with something that is 95% fibre with barely any moisture left. You produce it on machines running at over 2000 metres per minute. Most paper grades do not begin until 30 GSM and above. Tissue sits 61% below that floor. The engineering required to produce it commercially, consistently, at speed, is genuinely impressive. Converting it into the finished products people use every day is its own art form.

A decade on, tissue is my passion in the way paper was my father’s. Because it is so light, transport becomes a puzzle. Because it trades across currencies and geographies, every deal carries its own complexity. I have made blunders, absorbed the lessons, made new mistakes, and tried not to repeat the old ones. That cycle is what keeps the work alive.

The industry has its limitations. Innovation does not move fast here. But the possibilities feel endless to me, in the way that any field feels endless once you go deep enough into it. Tissue lives and dies by how well you understand the person on the other side of the transaction, their pressures, their margins, their ambitions. That human dimension is what ties everything together and, I think, what keeps me genuinely engaged rather than just professionally competent.

By God’s grace we trade across many paper grades. But nothing gives me the same charge as tissue. Walking into a new converter’s facility. Watching the machine run. That feeling takes me straight back to being eight years old in a paper mill, eyes wide, lungs full of bleach fumes, completely certain I was exactly where I was supposed to be.

That has not changed. I hope it never does.