Hi all You faithful followers of my blog and readers of my posts. I just came back to live again after last nights wonderful party with our neighbors. For sure we stayed in the open garden area of their wonderful house and kept enough distance to each other, so that no risk for virus propagation existed. But despite these limitations the party was great.
Actually there were two reasons for me to be happy last night. First of all my team at our factory in Itatiba, Sao Paulo – most of the involved colleagues working at their home offices since 4 months – closed the month and we all were very proud and satisfied about the once again very good result. Both in terms of order intake and net sales the month July 2020 was above our original expectations.
Thanks to all our wonderful customers, who continue to trust us and our capability, to deliver premium quality products to them exactly within the contractually agreed upon delivery times. The fact, that our business grows even during such complicated times like now shows clearly, that we have gained a recognized high attractivity and competitivity for our customers in Brazil, Latin America and on all other continents, where our Vulkan Group colleagues commercialise our products successfully.
The second reason for our party last night was the “live” online show of my favorite samba music band Raça Negra. This band started playing cover songs of other Brazilian musicians in Sao Caetano, Sao Paulo, from 1983 on and became quite famous in this region there during these early years. In 1991 their first album with own compositions was launched publicly – including the initial charts hit “Caroline” – and from this moment on Raça Negra became quite quickly very popular all over Brazil.
In the following years they published 11 further albums until 2000 and created the very successful romantic samba “pagode” music style. The song “É tarde demais” made it into the Guiness Book of Records as the song which was most played in the radio stations during one day. Actually this song was played 600 times on brazilian radio stations during July 20, 1995. In the second half of the 90s Raça Negra had its greatest success and attracted 1.5 million fans during a show in Sao Paulo and 700 thousand fans during a show in the US.
The band changed its composition several times during the last 3 decades and the only original band member which continues until today is its leader Luis Carlos. During the last years he appears in live shows together with other famous brazilian samba musicians and Raça Negra still has a very large fan base which very often includes familly members of the different generations. I doubt that You could find a single Brazilian who does not know Raça Negra and who can`t sing at least a few lines of one of their very popular songs like “Cheia de Manias”, “Quando te encontrei”, “É tarde demais”, “Caroline”, “Estou mal”, and many others.
For me personally, the music of Raça Negra – the same as my beloved carioca soccer club Flamengo – makes deeply part of my experiences, emotional feelings and development in this wonderful country since I came here for the first time in June 1996. Ten years after the desastrous military dictatorship period, which mislead Brazil between 1964 and 1985, the country had successfully restored democracy, just overcome the terrible hyper inflation and everybody in Brazil and in the outside world had the strong impression, that now Brazil – after “lost” decades – had found the right track for growth and prosperity. And everybody was convinced, that Brazil with its huge size of land and population and its immense richness of all kinds of valuable resources and opportunities would soon become one of the globally leading economies and countries.
Within all this development and situations Henkel, the company for which I had been working at that time, decided to extend its business and market participation in Brazil and to launch a massive capital investment for the extension of its chemical plant (later-on this became part of Cognis and today it belongs to BASF) in Jacarei, Sao Paulo. That`s the background for my engagement in Brazil and moval to this wonderfully crazy country. I will give You more insights in how I got started on this in one of my future posts in this blog.
Now, for sure You can question, what makes the sence in this strong admiration of such a popular “kitschy” (?) samba music group over decades. But that`s definitely not the way we here in this country are programmed and how we live our lives. Emotions make an important and constant part of our live here. This – definitely diffent than in Europe, the USA and in great parts of Asia – is the same for people of all ages, ancestries and sociological and economical classes. I doubt that You could for long withstand all kinds of challenges which we here in this (wonderful) part of the world face every bloody day of our life and need to overcome. Only with our cold brain`s work this would not function for long.
As my great friend Hanno Erwes, Managing Director of the German-Brazilian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (AHK) in Rio de Janeiro (https://brasilien.rio.ahk.de/pt/), to which Vulkan do Brasil is associated and where I have been actively participating in many events and projects since about 10 years – right now as Vice President, told me once: “Every morning when I wake up, I come to 10 strong reasons, why I should make my suitcase and leave quickly this country, but after breakfast I always find at least 10 good reasons, why I should not make my suitcase but continue to stay here.” I can only fully agree with Hanno. This reflects very nicely our joint situation, even more nowadays for wellknown health, economical and political reasons. But no doubt – I will, together with my lovely familly and our fantastic company Vulkan do Brasil (https://www.vulkan.com/en-us/holding/vulkan-companies/brazil) stay and continue my life and job here.
Before I finish my today`s post, I definitely need to give You three (!) important recommendations:
Here is one of my (many) favorite Raça Negra songs: the quality of the video is not very good, but this is a cut from one of the Raça Negra shows at the end of the 90s in Sao Paulo:
And here is a quite recent one with one of Raça Negra`s undoubtedly greates hits “Cheia de mania”:
And – if this also interests You – here the recommendation of a meanwhile very famous and often cited book from the wellknown German Austrian novelist, playwright, journalist and biographer Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942) who emigrated from Hitlerian Germany during 1940 and ended up in Petropolis, Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil: “Brazil, Land of the Future” (Original title> “Brasilien. Ein Land der Zukunft. Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1941).
Now lunch time has come for me and this is the right moment for wishing You a nice weekend , wherever You live and are, and to hopefully meet again with You here in my blog tomorrow.
