In a matter of a few weeks Jhaveri's desperation turned to joy.
Now, he hardly has time to meet visitors during trading hours. Average commodity futures volumes in India have jumped by more than six times to about $680 million a day in the past year.
But a couple of years ago India, the world's biggest consumer of both gold and sugar, did not even have a futures market to trade them.
When traders needed commodity price trends, they looked to the COMEX division of the New York Mercantile Exchange, Bursa Malaysia Derivatives (BMD) or the London Metal Exchange.
At that time, the volume of commodity futures was just $110 million a day in India, despite it being the world's number one tea producer, the second-largest producer of sugar and the third-biggest producer of cotton. Every year, Indians buy $8.5 billion worth of gold and $9 billion of edible oils.
Commodity futures started opening up in the past decade, but it got a real boost in 2003 with the approval of the National Commodities and Derivatives Exchange and the Multi Commodity Exchange, which started online trading in all commodities.
Within two years, commodity futures are expected to overtake India's stock market volumes - now at about $4.6 billion a day - thanks to the launch of new bourses with online trading, nation-wide reach and professional management.
"The stock market is stagnating as the possibility of launching new instruments is limited. But with every commodity, you get a new set of people to trade in futures," said Anjani Sinha, chief executive officer of the Multi Commodity Exchange.
Experts say commodity futures hold great potential in the country of more than 1 billion people, where the farm sector contributes about a quarter of gross domestic product and provides a living to two-thirds of the population.
"Today, I am looking at COMEX and KLC for price trends. Tomorrow, the world will look at us as we are leading players in many agricultural commodities," said Hardik Jain of ISJ Comdesk, referring to the BMD, once known as the Kuala Lumpur Commodity Exchange.
More than two dozen Indian commodity bourses, with regional presence, open outcry systems and controlled by traders or industry groups, will eventually get marginalised or merge into two or three "progressive" exchanges, the way transition had taken place in the stock market, industry experts say.
India has dozens of regional stock exchanges, but today 95 percent of the trading volume is contributed by only two - the Bombay Stock Exchange and the National Stock Exchange.
"We had anticipated huge potential in commodity futures. We thought if we didn't join now, we would be left out," said Kaushal Shah of Kaycee Commodity Services Pvt Ltd.
Commodity futures in India date back to the 18th century, but formal trading began in 1875. The Chicago Board of Trade had started formal grains trading only a decade earlier.
During the period 1918-39, India had as many as 300 commodity bourses.
The mid-1960s witnessed an unprecedented rise in prices of major oils and oilseeds as a result of a sharp fall in output. Futures trade was banned in most commodities to contain speculation, which the government thought was fuelling inflation.
The prohibition continued for about three decades, during which some trade went underground and a younger generation switched over to other markets such as securities.
Two years ago, 70 percent of trading volume generated by India's 20-odd commodity futures came from only one exchange - the National Board of Trade, based in the central city of Indore, the hub of India's soy trade.
But the two new bourses - Multi Commodity Exchange and the National Derivatives Exchange, in which many leading companies have a stake - went online from day one and reached remote corners of the country, giving an opportunity to real players to hedge their trading risks.
They now handle four-fifths of India's commodity futures volume.
"We see tremendous growth prospects in future," says Kewal Ram, chairman of the Forward Markets Commission, the market regulator. "We are satisfied with the progress."
But traders say the government's indirect control on trading of "politically sensitive" commodities such as wheat, rice, cotton and sugar may limit the growth of the futures trade.