Remembering Mike: Dr Michael Halse (1929–2003)

Robert Halse, Mike’s nephew, spoke with me and Dr R.P. Aneja, and Carly, Robert’s niece, earlier spoke with Dr Aneja, me, Behla, Nagar and Tom. This piece brings together points from those conversations, including Mike’s last days. Robert, Carly and others may add more later, and where something is not yet certain, I say so. It also draws on writings already on Vrikshamandir by R.K. Nagar and Dr R.P. Aneja, not only on my own memory. Older pieces on this site remain as they were: Mike the mentor, R.K. Nagar’s Michael Halse: My Guru, and the 1967 meeting.

Dr Michael Halse was a member of the founding board of the National Dairy Development Board, then FAO adviser to NDDB from 1968 to 1983, and from 1970 the team leader of the FAO experts assigned there. Before Anand he spent about five years at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, from 1963 to 1968.

Mike before India

Michael Charles Halse was born in 1929. His father was R.W. Halse, who ran the family butcher’s business, R.W. Halse Ltd, and the family lived at 52a Greenfield Gardens in north-west London. He was at Highgate Junior School from January 1940 to July 1942, and at the Senior School from September 1942 to July 1948. He was a boarder, first in School House and then in Grindal, where he was Head of House in his last two years.

At Highgate everyone thought he would become an artist. His teacher and friend was the English master, John Stevenson, whom the boys called “Stevo”. Mike won prizes for essays and for reading in chapel, and he played the lead in Shaw’s Saint Joan in a school play people long remembered.

He then won a scholarship to Bowdoin College in Maine, USA, to study English, and after that went to Oxford. At Oxford he became interested in business and in the hunger of millions of people, and he left without finishing his degree. He worked for a short time in advertising in London and ran his own drama group, where he encouraged young people. In the early 1950s he got into Harvard Business School, which was not easy then, and took his Master’s degree. After Harvard, the Ford Foundation sent him to Rangoon University in Burma, where he helped reorganise its accounting system.

At IIM Ahmedabad, 1963 to 1968

Mike came to the newly started IIM Ahmedabad in January 1963. Dr Vikram Sarabhai had asked Professor Henry Arthur of Harvard Business School, an expert on agribusiness, to help IIMA start teaching agricultural management, and Mike came as Professor Arthur’s doctoral student, with the Ford Foundation behind it. He helped set up the Agriculture and Cooperatives group, known as the AgCo Group, and from April 1964 he led its project for the Ministry of Agriculture on community development blocks. He worked closely with the Director, Ravi Mathai, with Kamla Chowdhry, another Harvard alumna, and with Prakash Tandon and others.

Mike wrote case studies on dairying based on how Amul worked, and that is how he came to know Dr Kurien. He used these cases in the Multi Level Dairy Management Programmes he organised at IIMA. The third and highest level dealt with strategy, and Dr Kurien and Mr Dalaya took part in it. Dr Aneja, then working at Aarey Dairy Science College, attended the programme, and later was a facilitator for the international programme.

How I came to work for Mike

In 1967 Mike was leading a group of IIMA professors on a consulting project on protein deficiency. One of them was Prof V.K. Gupta, a friend and former colleague of my father, which is how he knew me. Prof Gupta gave me my first job, a door-to-door survey in a middle-class colony in Delhi. That is when I met Mike, at the Ford Foundation guest house in Delhi, as I have written in my earlier blog on him.

Mike then gave me a project analysing National Sample Survey data on who eats how much. This work led to a major conference in Mumbai, attended by top business people, managers and thinkers, and in 1968 the Protein Foods Association of India was formed. In 1973 it was renamed the Protein Foods and Nutrition Development Association of India (PFNDAI), and it still works from Mumbai today.

He gave me one more project, which became his paper on Anand and the Bombay Milk Scheme. Dr Kurien presented it at the University of Reading in 1968, and it is the second speech in Dr Kurien’s book of speeches, published by Tata McGraw-Hill. These three assignments led to my job at NDDB.

In 1967 and early 1968 Mike was still in Ahmedabad. He did not live on the IIMA campus but in a rented bungalow in Navrangpura. His driver was Hamza, and I travelled many times in that large car of his. In early 1968 I was staying with Prof Gupta at his home, and I would go to Mike’s place by auto rickshaw. Mike’s furniture and belongings moved from Ahmedabad to Anand at the end of April 1968, and he himself moved to Anand in July 1968. So his NDDB and FAO years ran from 1968 to 1983. (An IIMA Archives article on how agriculture came into IIMA’s work tells much of the same story, though it dates his move to NDDB to early 1967.)

Founding NDDB, and the FAO years

Before NDDB was formed in 1965, the Government of India set up a committee headed by Dr Kurien to look into the affairs of the Delhi Milk Scheme and recommend steps to improve it. Mike was a member of that committee, along with Mr Dalaya and Mr V.H. Shah. All three became members of the first board of NDDB when it was formed.

When NDDB was formed, Dr Kurien recommended Mike, and he became one of its founding members. Once he moved to Anand he was paid by FAO, so he was no longer a member of NDDB. He worked as FAO adviser and leader of the FAO experts at NDDB until 1983. With Dr Kurien, and with much help and advice from Kamla Chowdhry, Ravi Mathai and others, he also helped conceive and set up the Institute of Rural Management, Anand (IRMA).

In May 1968 I joined NDDB, the first person hired into the Management and Manpower Development group he had helped conceive, and from mid-April to about August 1968 I lived in his house on the Amul campus, opposite Dr Kurien’s, before moving to a rented room. I have written about those first months in Anand, with Paul, Dinesh and that first air-conditioned room, in Random Reminiscences of a forgetful old man, part 1. He taught me economics and corrected my English. The evening talks often went past midnight. He drafted in pencil, typed some letters himself, and dictated others. From 1968 to 1983 he edited the annual reports, the project reports, and the position papers, and turned Dr Kurien’s short notes into speeches. With Dr Aneja he built the first feasibility-study method, on the 1969 Barauni study. He shaped the Operation Flood “blue books.” Nagar, who met him on 8 July 1969 and calls him his guru, has written the larger account of that work, including the two-axis milk price, the metro studies, IRMA, and the Pakistan dairy review. I will not repeat it here.

As I said above, Dr Aneja had first met Mike at the 1965 programme.

While I was staying in Mike’s house one evening, Mike was sipping his evening regimen of whisky and I was sitting with him chatting. He was looking at his post received earlier that day, opened an envelope, read the letter, and asked me in a British accent, “Is Aneeaja an Indian name?” I responded, “Yes.” He then recalled Dr Aneja, who had completed his Masters from the University of Saskatchewan and was to visit India and then return to Canada to do his PhD. Mike wrote to Dr Aneja and requested him to visit Anand while in India. Dr Aneja did visit Anand, and Mike persuaded him to join NDDB. During that trip Dr Aneja was staying at the Amul Guest House close to Mike’s home. Dr Aneja was to meet Dr Kurien after meeting Mike. That May 1968 NDDB was having a board meeting. Dr KK Iya, the then Dairy Development Advisor to Govt of India and a member of the NDDB Board, and who was Dr Aneja’s teacher at NDRI Karnal, saw Dr Aneja at the guest house and asked him what he was doing at the Amul Guest House and what his plans were. Dr Aneja recalls how Dr Iya advised him not to join NDDB but pursue his PhD in Canada.

Dr Aneja joined NDDB. He later took study leave, did some work at Saskatchewan, and completed his PhD at Sardar Patel University, Vallabh Vidyanagar.

Dr SC Ray was the Secretary (Chief Executive) of NDDB. His house was next to that of Mike. He had already issued me an appointment letter, as I described in one of the blogs about my joining NDDB. One evening he saw me going out from Mike’s house and called me. He was sitting in the lawn having tea. He offered tea and biscuits to me also and enquired about me — was I settled, how was I doing, and what was my educational background. He then advised me to prepare and sit for competitive examinations for the civil services. I just listened and did not say anything.

So one can imagine how Dr Kurien as Chairman of NDDB was managing relationships and affairs of the nascent organisation. His board members hadn’t fully bought into the vision that Dr Kurien had for NDDB. While Dr Kurien and Mike were encouraging and persuading young professionals to join NDDB, his Board member colleagues were discouraging them from joining. Didn’t they have hope in the future of NDDB?

Friction between the views of Dr Ray and Dr Kurien came out in the open once Dr Ray left the NDDB Secretary and MD IDC posts and became President of the Indian Dairy Association and the National Cooperative Dairy Federation, both based in Delhi. Dr Ray supported the detractors of NDDB and Dr Kurien. Ultimately we in NDDB worked hard to bring changes in the Byelaws of IDA to include farmer members etc., and to bring NCDFI to Anand and make Dr Kurien its Chairman.

The Harvard doctorate

Mike’s best-known piece of thinking at NDDB was on “conversion efficiency”. Some people argued that India could not afford milk, because feeding cattle took food away from people. Mike showed that Indian cattle live mostly on crop leftovers such as straw and stalks, and on natural grass, which people cannot eat anyway. So milk in India does not compete with food for people. At Dr Aneja’s urging he sent the paper to Professor Ray Goldberg at Harvard Business School, and on the strength of it Harvard gave him his doctorate in 1979. It was published that year as “Producing an adequate national diet in India: Issues relating to conversion efficiency and dairying” in the journal Agricultural Systems.

Tushaar Shah remembers

Tushaar Shah, now Professor Emeritus at IRMA, worked at NDDB in his early years. After reading this post he wrote to me:

I think Mike contributed to my intellectual growth more than he did to many others. Do you remember Economics of the National Diet (END)? It was an econometric model of India’s food-agriculture system. I had done an econometric model for my PhD, and Mike wanted me to do it for agriculture. NDDB’s computer would not do, so he got NDDB to pay for PRL computer time for me to run all the regressions.

I did not see much point in building such a detailed cropwise model. Moreover, despite my efforts, many people could not understand how it worked. But Mike derived childlike joy every time I returned with more regressions. He kept egging me on to finish it. Finally, the END document was ready and Mike had Dr Kurien sign dozens of letters forwarding END to the Planning Commission, state and Union secretaries and other biggies.

Weeks later, he told me we needed to show NDDB has high-level formal planning capability to plan and implement a programme of the scale and complexity of Operation Flood II.

Apparently, the END work made an impression in the Planning Commission and the World Bank, although it was never put to any use within NDDB!

I think Mike also deserves a book.

(PRL is the Physical Research Laboratory in Ahmedabad.)

Coming back to Mike’s story: in his house, to give me company, were Paul, the cook, and Dinesh. Later Kanti, Bharat, and Robin were his helpers when Mike moved to the Campus in A2 Bungalow. Mike helped these three young men to set up a restaurant, the Three Muskatiers. Robert, who lived with Mike for seven or eight months, says the change in spelling of Musketeers to Muskatiers was not a dairy joke. Mike thought that if the boys kept the original spelling, someone might try to blackmail them for breach of copyright. In 1974 Mike paid for Robert to take Robin and Kanthilal out of Anand. They had never left the town. Robert took them to Goa, and to Kashmir. Bharat came with Mike to London. Robert was back in Anand in 1993 with his wife. They ate at the restaurant, met Kanthilal, met Mrs Uma Vyas, Chief of Tribhuvan Das Foundation, and saw Dr Kurien briefly. Dr Kurien had come to London more than once, Robert says, even with his family, and had tea at Robert’s grandmother’s home at 52a Greenfield Gardens in north-west London, the same house where Mike lived as a Highgate schoolboy.

The restaurant was first started in the Amul commercial complex. It was closed for some years, but the next generation of the Three Muskatiers have now restarted it at a different place in Anand, still with Mike’s spelling on the sign.

Robert also remembers a young Indian he called “Vasen”, who lodged with the family at their home in Cricklewood for about two months, played chess with him, and took him for his first Indian meal. Robert thought it was around 1964, but the years are now clear. This was G. Srinivasan, whom we called Vasan, from the third batch of IIM Ahmedabad. (From the second batch Mike had picked Vyas for Amul and P.V. Mathew for NDDB. I had joined NDDB before those two.) Vasan did the two-year programme in 1968 and 1969. In the summer of 1969 Mike paid for him to do his summer placement in London with R.W. Halse Ltd, the family butcher’s business, and that is when he stayed with Robert’s family. In 1970 Mike brought him to NDDB for three months to work on the Indian Dairy Conference held at Vadodara, and Vasan was my flatmate in Anand during those months.

Mike left for World Bank work in Sri Lanka in 1983. Robert saw him there and says it was devastating. Mike had no money. Robert believes the two sisters had the pension suspended because Mike was giving his money away, and because people were exploiting that generosity. Mike told him the Sri Lanka mission failed because of corruption, and that this, together with the injury from a bite by a rabid dog, led to a nervous breakdown. These are Robert’s memories from the call. I have not checked them against papers.

The call from Sri Lanka

One day when I reached home from office (my house was behind NDDB, sharing a boundary wall), Kiran said there had been a call from Sri Lanka. The caller wasn’t clear, but he gave a number, which she noted. I immediately thought of Mike, who had been in Sri Lanka working on a World Bank assisted dairy development project on the Anand pattern, and who had sent hundreds of Sri Lankans to Anand for training and field exposure. I had no international dialling at home, so I walked to the IRMA gate and called the number Kiran had noted.

The reply from the other side was, “This is Durdans Hospital. What can I do for you?” I said there had been a call from this number. Taking a chance, I asked, “Can I speak to Dr Michael Halse?”

I was connected to Mike’s room. When I introduced myself, Mike’s voice was close to tears and he began apologising: “Shai, my friend” (he used to call me Shai), “I am so sorry. I have abused you. I have been very bad. Please forgive me.” I told him, “Sir, you haven’t been in touch for over two years. You haven’t spoken to me.” He said, “I didn’t?” I said no. It went on like that for a while. When he calmed down, I asked him why he was in hospital. He said he had been there for over three months and had no money to pay the bill and get discharged. He added that he hadn’t received his pension. Apparently he had not sent in his life certificate.

I said, “Don’t worry, Sir, we will take care of it.” The next day Dr Kurien wrote to the Director-General of FAO, Dr Edouard Saouma, about Mike’s pension. The pension was restored, Mike was rescued, and he went to England. He used to write to me and said he wanted to write a book. He was invited to Anand and stayed in the DX quarters, the NDDB guest house for VIPs, then came back again and was given quarters at IRMA. In those days he would come to my place most evenings, and we would have dinner at the Three Muskatiers, the restaurant he had helped set up.

In those days Mike came often to our house. Drink was a problem. I have photographs from those evenings, one of them with Peter Block.

From Anand, it was Dr Aneja who helped Mike go to Kenya, to do a study of milk in Kenya, Madagascar and Tanzania. Dr Aneja was then with the World Bank in Kenya; he later left for Jamaica on an ODA assignment. Mike stayed on in Kenya. Then I left NDDB. In Gurgaon I got a letter from his sister Gillian saying he had not been in touch with the family for over six months, and she was looking for Dr Aneja. I told her Dr Aneja was no longer in Kenya, and I contacted Thomas Joseph, of the first IRMA batch and once Mike’s student, who was then heading ActionAid in Kenya. His note follows. The rest is history, a sad one.

A note from Thomas Joseph, Nairobi

Thomas Joseph, my friend, was ActionAid’s Country Director in Kenya from 1998 to 2003. In December 2012 he sent this note to his batchmates. I give it here in his own words.

For what it is worth, I am sending you a note I had sent to all my batchmates about Michael Halse; perhaps it could add to notes about this great man. I wrote it in December 2012 when Mukesh too was suffering and the last sentence refers to my dear friend and bridge partner Sanjoy Ghose – all fallen colleagues…

I see references to Michael Halse these past few days so felt perhaps I should share the circumstances around his final days.

I was working in Kenya from 1998-2003 as ActionAid’s Country Director. Out of the blue, my friend Shailendra Kumar from NDDB wrote to me saying that Michael Halse was last traced in Kenya and his sister was worried because she had not seen him for years but knew he was drawing funds from his FAO pension. She thought he was somewhere in Nairobi but no one knew exactly where he was. Shailendra asked me to find him and check his welfare. I won’t go through my search process but I finally tracked him down at an address in a relatively poor part of Nairobi. I went there one day and found him in a ramshackle little house with a tiny living room and kitchen and the cheapest possible basic furniture. At the gate, I was met by four young Kenyan men who were suspicious of me and why I wanted to see Dr. Halse. With difficulty, they finally “allowed” Dr Halse to come to the gate and I re-introduced myself to him. He was surprised and pleased to see me and surprisingly almost seemed to need the permission of these young men to invite me in. There I sat on a plastic chair with a plastic table and a few other plastic chairs the only furniture in the room. The young men hovered close and kept interrupting. I conveyed Shailendra’s concern to Dr. Halse and asked if he needed help. He said he was fine but he did not look very happy. I think also he was embarrassed for me to see him in such shabby conditions and circumstances. I took the opportunity to convey to him the great regard that so many held him in and that there were many who would be able to help him return to England and that his sister worried about him. He insisted he was fine and wanted to stay on in Nairobi. I left, feeling more than a little fear for him. I had known, of course, about his extreme generosity (the famous Three Musketeers in Anand) but now I wondered whether he was really in control or if his young friends were taking advantage of him. I bid goodbye with sadness. I reported back to Shailendra and urged him to encourage Dr. Halse’s sister in England to ask the British Ambassador to intervene. When there is no case of any sort, no violence or demands, it appears that the adult has free will to live as he/she likes and so nothing further was done and a few months later Dr. Halse had died – or so I heard because I had left Kenya by then.

So, this man who spent his life helping the growth of dairy cooperatives in India died unknown, alone except for some very new young friends in a small corner of Nairobi in Kenya.

Robert’s last conversation with Mike was a telephone call from Japan, on 21 September, a birthday they shared. He thinks it was about 2002 or 2003. Mike was in Kenya, and hard to reach. Robert called a mobile that belonged to someone else. About two weeks before our call, Robert asked his cousin what more he knew. Robert’s wife had spoken to his two aunts. Joyce’s husband, Patrick, had gone to Kenya and had found Mike. The year is not known.

Friends long believed that Mike was taken back to England and died there, and that is what I wrote in 2019. The family’s account is different.

In October 2026 Robert Halse wrote to me after speaking to his brother, Richard Halse. Richard says Mike died in Kenya on 8 October 2003. There is no death certificate. Richard assumes Mike was cremated in Nairobi and that his ashes were brought back to the UK, and he has written to the British High Commission in Nairobi to try to confirm these details. A memorial service was held at Child’s Hill, London, in December 2003, attended by family members. Robert was working in Japan at the time.

A few things from the call should not be smoothed into the dairy story, because they are Mike as Robert knew him. He drank, and he smoked through a metal filter which he cleaned twice a day. Someone once accused him of using that cleaning, in meetings, as a psychological weapon. Robert thought that was funny, and also sad. Mike was widely read, and he cared about theatre. Carly, Robert’s niece, is an actor. She became interested because her father Richard gave her a script Mike had written, a screenplay shaped from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. Robert still has photographs. A briefcase of Mike’s papers was badly burnt in a fire.

Mike also had much to do with the film Manthan (1976), the story of how the milk cooperatives began. Its director, Shyam Benegal, was a very good friend of Mike. Shyam made films outside the mainstream. He was a socialist by belief, and he had great respect for the work Dr Kurien and Mike did through Amul and NDDB, where we all worked. In 1976 Mike took Robert to the London premiere of Manthan at the Royal Festival Hall. Much later, in the mid-1990s, Mike met Shyam in Mumbai with the script of his own version of The Tempest. Shyam Benegal died in December 2024.

The briefcase reminded me of Mike’s brown leather briefcase. He always carried it with him. When Nagar and I went to England in 1972 Mike gave it to me to carry it to London and give it to John a taxi Driver friend of Mike for some repairs. We gave John the briefcase. I also remember John took us around London and spent almost the whole day showing us places of historical importance. He didn’t charge any money for the day’s ride. Mike must have paid him.

Dr Aneja’s wife, who did not usually join such talks, once knocked on the window of Mike’s office and asked whether he was trying, single-handedly, to repay what the British had done here for two hundred years. Dr Aneja said on the call that Mike was a primary force behind the white revolution, and that he has been given far less recognition than he deserves. Robert, signing off from a car in Australia, said the same thing to whoever was with him: without Mike they would not have had the white revolution.

I wish we had found a place for Mike to live in Anand, but it was not to be, and the opportunity to work in Kenya was interesting. He took it and never returned.

A lesson from his mother

One evening when I was staying with him at his home in Anand, Mike asked me about my joint family, in which my great-grandfather, his two sons, and their sons, with their wives and children, all lived under one roof. He was curious, and he felt that the joint family would not survive. Then he told me a story from his own childhood.

During the war, when London was being heavily bombed, Mike, his brother, his sisters and his mother used to go and stay in the countryside at the home of a family friend, a place the Halses also visited in summer, while his father stayed behind to look after the business. During one such stay, which lasted for months, their London home was burgled and all the valuables, including family heirlooms, were stolen. His father was worried about how Mike’s mother would take the news, and Mike was asked to tell her.

Years later, with a puff of smoke from his cigarette filter and a sip of his whisky, Mike told me what she said: “You know what my mother said? She said, ‘Micky, don’t worry. What they took were just thingy.’” (Micky, I took, was her pet name for him.)

It seems to me now that this stayed with him all his life. He earned well and lived a full life, yet he held his possessions lightly, until the sad last years in Kenya.

Colleagues remember

“In my lifetime, I have had the privilege of having thousands of student teachers. Michael Halse stands at the top of the list of those student teachers. He was the best Doctoral student as well.” He called Mike “an unsung hero for his enormous professional contributions to the fight on poverty and malnutrition throughout the world.”

Prof. Ray Goldberg, Emeritus Professor of Agribusiness, Harvard Business School (Dairy India Yearbook 2014)

“If Dr. Kurien was the architect of India’s white revolution, Mike was its ‘structural engineer’. And we all know that an architect’s vision can find right expression only when it is rightly understood and supported by the structural engineer of matching caliber.”

R.K. Nagar

“Mike had a belief in young professionals and he groomed them to succeed.”

V.S. Behla

“Mike was a brilliant man. Many brilliant people are arrogant; Mike was the opposite. He looked for opportunities to help others develop to and beyond their expectations. He happily avoided credit for his contributions, and he always gave credit, sometimes more than deserved, to others. I suspect that he drew strength from knowing that his contributions would live long beyond him.”

Tom Carter

“Introductory training/orientation for our team of novices was held under the able guidance of the late Dr. Michael Halse.”

Ram Chandra Choudary, who joined NDDB’s Planning Cell in 1973

“He put me at ease. His guidance on how to proceed further facilitated the process of my joining NDDB. I gratefully acknowledge his support.”

“His mind was always full of new ideas and concepts, and each interactive session with him used to be educative, inspiring and ‘different’.”

P.T. Jacob, who met Mike at Anand in November 1970 and joined NDDB soon after

In June 1967, a year before I joined NDDB, I worked on a project Mike was coordinating at IIM Ahmedabad, “New Foods for National Development”. That month I did a survey of the food buying habits of 30 households in Delhi, and put together All-India figures on food production and consumption for a workshop on nutrition and high-protein foods. On 24 June 1967 Mike wrote me a reference letter about that work. I found it again only recently, and I am sharing it here as he wrote it.

How his old school remembered him

After Mike died, The Cholmeleian, the magazine of Highgate School, where he was a boarder, carried an obituary in its Spring 2004 issue. Here are some of its words:

“A recognised authority on food production in developing countries, ‘Mike’, as he was known far and wide, spent most of his working life in India.”

“His desire to help young people and his intense sympathy for youngsters who had a lesser start in life than himself later manifested itself in his educating three boys in Anand and ultimately helping them to set themselves up in an extremely successful restaurant venture – the first of its kind in Anand.”

“Mike did not spare himself. He was ruthlessly determined, not giving a rap for convention, and his enthusiasm was infectious – as was his joy at every success.”

“His sensitivity and eccentricity endeared him to his family.”

The Cholmeleian, Highgate School, Spring 2004

The magazine’s account of his Indian years differs from the record in places, and I have used the details we have been able to check.

Mike’s ending, and The Tempest

Dr Kurien and Mike gave their lives to the same revolution, yet their endings were different. Dr Kurien’s last years had something of a Greek tragedy about them.

Mike’s story is closer to Shakespeare’s The Tempest. Like Prospero, he was learned, generous and gifted, and he lived far from home, not once but twice: from Anand to Sri Lanka in 1983, and later to Kenya. He himself was drawn to the play and wrote a film treatment based on it. He hoped, I think, to bring order and kindness to the world through his work and his art, and to find a way home. The film was never made. But the young people he taught and the institutions he helped build are his story’s fuller ending.

My thanks to my friend and former colleague Dr Arvind Gupta, whose suggestion to keep this piece centred on Mike, his life and his work, kept me honest as I revised it.

Thank you, Mike.