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The Everyday Ambergris Conquest

You wake up each morning to a few text messages and a dozen emails, there are people on the other side of the world, going to bed, anticipating you will have addressed their questions when they wake up. There is this absolute, unrelenting responsibility on you because so many businesses depend on your supplies. Your customers don’t care about the ‘Hows’, they care only about the ‘Whens’- there is a timeline for everything. ‘Delivering’ is all that matters, because that is the most important reason they are with you. Still.

It makes you want to recline in your chair, and introspect… how many people out there are driving into stormy seas, high tides and combing the world’s beaches right after a hurricane has passed, walking through the filth, picking and examining a hundred things to find that one needle in the haystack… Grooming and feeding their dogs lovingly over years, training them and making them obey their commands. Painstakingly removing the rust from the under bellies of their 4×4 jeeps more often than anyone else does in the world and changing tyres all so frequently.

Ambergris is not ‘floating gold’. You are least likely to find it when it’s floating. It is not a treasure hunt either.

Finding Ambergris is a diligent, full time occupation. It is sheer hard work and pain, borne both, by the collectors and the ones who invest in it and sell it further, subsequently enriching the production value and capability of a top end perfume house and bringing to the fore an end product that is unmatched in value and craftsmanship, way ahead of its lousy competition.

There is precision involved at every stage. Right from the Sperm Whale who produces it, to the ocean who marinates by keeping it deep within its chest for years sometimes, to the currents that carry it ashore, to the collectors who find it, to the traders who takes financial risks, to the perfumer who needs to get it right on all accounts. The cost of effort is extraordinary.

But then there is joy, because in the end, this product with its miraculous properties would have bettered so many lives. Often, including that of the very Whale that produced it.