Fly on Corporate Wall

Hard times seem to spur artists’ creativity. Consider Rat Osathanugrah, who was involved in art before joining the family firm, Osotspa, where he’s now executive chairman.
It was Rat who – under the pen name Mr Shark – composed the song “Su Tor Pai” (“Fight On”) a decade ago. The tune remains an inspiration for a great many people, some of whom are constantly leaving grateful comments on YouTube where it’s posted.
Rat tells A Day Bulletin that he wrote it after reading about all the suffering in the news – this was during the Asian financial crisis, remember. “There was a lot of negative news at the time, like people committing suicide.”
Meanwhile his company, where he’d then been working for five years, saw the cost of its overseas loan debt more than double, from Bt2 billion to Bt5 billion, thanks to the baht’s devaluation. “So the song just came naturally to mind,” Rat says.
Did he write it for himself, then? “Probably,” he says, even if he wasn’t aware of it at the time. “It might have come from the pressure inside me.”
Rat is the third generation of the family that’s run the conglomerate for 120 years, and says it’s always survived hard times by using common sense. “People call it ‘common’ sense, but in fact it’s ‘rare’ sense, because it’s not that easy.” When the crisis bit hard, Rat had to cut losses. Anything that wasn’t turning a profit was jettisoned. It was an era of “maintaining”. “My grandfather’s era was about pioneering and my father’s was about experimenting, and I tried to make the best of what we had left.”
Rat is pleased with his performance so far, having boosted sales of the M-150 energy drinks his father launched threefold in 10 years. It was Rat’s smart idea to flog the drinks at sport and music events. And wasn’t it Sek Loso who first got most of us interested in M-150 with that song about living life to the fullest?
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