The Beautiful and the Damned Page 5
The expansion, the acquisitions and the overdrive started only after Arindam entered the picture. He had wanted to go to college in the United States, but his father convinced him to enrol in the family institute as one of the first students in a new undergraduate programme in management. Before he had even graduated, he was teaching a course at the institute. ‘I took advantage of being the director’s son,’ Arindam said, laughing but making it clear that he had been perfectly qualified to teach his fellow students. Three years after finishing his degree, he started a recruitment consulting firm. His rationale was that by getting into a position where he was hiring people for other companies, he would also be able to find jobs for IIPM graduates with his clients. The placement of IIPM graduates was a pressing problem at the time, and although Arindam would disagree, it remains a problem now, after all his success.
During those early years, however, Arindam’s ambitions were disproportionate to his abilities and experience. He started a magazine and a research division, but the magazine closed quickly and his recruitment firm failed to take off. He had nothing to sell except himself. ‘In 1997, I announced my first leadership workshop for senior executives under the banner “Become a great leader”. My thinking was that if they can take leadership lessons from me, they will give me business. So they came, not realizing from the photos how young this guy was. And then it didn’t matter, because that first workshop was a rocking interactive supersuccess.’ His voice rose, his chin lifted with pride and he looked me in the eyes. ‘That is how we built a brand.’
The drive to IIPM’s campus, located roughly midway between Delhi and Gurgaon, is a fairly quick one. First come the temples of Chattarpur, modern structures with crenellated, fluted walls, where memories of old Hindu architecture have been transformed into a simple idea of excess. A gargantuan statue of Hanuman, the monkey god, stands with a mace on his shoulder, looking dismissively down at the traffic, while the temples sprawl endlessly on that flat landscape, each the capital of an imaginary Hindu kingdom that has never existed except in this shapeless present.
The road is dusty, sometimes empty, and sometimes crowded with vehicles ranging from small trucks to air-conditioned SUVs. There are occasional clusters of shops and houses, but they disappear quickly, giving way to large stretches of land partitioned off for the very rich. A few boutique hotels appear now and then, looking empty, but the land is mostly colonized by ‘farmhouses’ – weekend homes for the Delhi rich that celebrate wealth, and where entertainment for the guests can range from an American rock star on a downward career curve to upwardly mobile Ukrainian prostitutes. Nothing of this is visible from the road, of course, with the farmhouses closed off by walls, gates and security guards, and all I saw on my first drive along that route were walls edged with broken glass, the occasional flash of green from a well-tended lawn, the curve of a driveway where a gate had been left open, and a young peasant woman with a suitcase sitting in front of a large farmhouse.
It was amid these hotels and farmhouses that IIPM had its five-acre, high-walled Delhi campus. The gates were kept shut, and the campus had a sleepy air except when Arindam was due to arrive. On those occasions, the security guards hovered around the guardhouse in the front, looking at their watches and fingering their walkie-talkies. The scruffy management students on campus, who, in their odd assortment of blazers and flashy shirts, had the air of men just coming off an all-night wedding party, adjusted their postures, trying not to look as if they were loitering.
Arindam arrived in a blaze of activity, the gates being opened hurriedly for his metallic-blue luxury car, a million-pound Bentley Continental that coasted down the driveway and parked in front of the building lobby. Another flash of blue, another gathering of employees, and then Arindam was inside the building, leaving behind nothing but the frisson of his arrival and the Bentley gleaming in the fierce Delhi sun. The power and the glory! A million pounds! Custom-made in the mother country of England! A Bentley was the ultimate status symbol of the Indian rich – expensive and relatively uncommon. A business journalist, unaware that I knew Arindam, had told me the probably apocryphal story that Arindam had had the special paint scraped off when his car arrived from England, repainting it to a shade of blue that matched one of his favourite shirts.
The campus building was split along two levels. Most of the classrooms were on the basement floor, filled with the chatter of students, some of them dressed in suits if they happened to be attending a class in ‘Executive Communications’. The ground floor contained a computer lab, a small library and some classrooms. On the other side of the panopticon boardroom was the open-plan office, with Planman employees at their computers and phones. They were mostly in their twenties and thirties, and although they looked busy, they didn’t give the impression of running a global megabusiness. Arindam and his division heads referred to the people behind the desks as ‘managerial staff’, although when I introduced myself to one of the managers – a balding, middle-aged man – he seemed to be making cold calls, looking up numbers from a database and asking people if they were interested in taking management seminars.
Almost all the Planman employees – 90 per cent of them, according to Arindam – were former IIPM students. The same was true of the faculty members, who tended to morph from students to teachers as soon as they had finished their courses. Many of the faculty members did ‘consulting’ work for IIPM. Some, like Rohit Manchanda, a short, dapper man in a suit who probably would have been shorter without the unusually high heels of his shoes, taught advertising and headed Planman’s small advertising agency. The dean of IIPM, Prasoon Majumdar, a man with a smart goatee, was also economics editor for the magazines published by Planman. Then there were the employees who were family members as well as former students. Arindam’s wife, Rajita, a petite woman who drove a Porsche, had been a student of Arindam’s before they got married and now taught Executive Communications. Arindam’s sister’s husband, a young man with shoulder-length hair, shirt left unbuttoned to reveal a generous expanse of chest and carrying a copy of The Omnivore’s Dilemma when I first met him, was a former student, a faculty member and features and lifestyle editor of the magazines published by Planman.
When Arindam met his division heads, all of whom had been his classmates at IIPM, they joked and chatted for the first hour or so before turning to the work at hand. I sat in on a meeting one morning, and they seemed to derive immense collegial pleasure from demonstrating to me just how close-knit they were. ‘We’re like the Mafia,’ Arindam said.
It was a comparison that had occurred to me, although there were other metaphors that also came to mind. They were like the Mafia in their suspicion of outsiders, like a dot.com in their emphasis on collegiality and like a cult in their belief in a mythology made up of Arindam’s personal history, management theories and the strange ways in which the company functioned. But perhaps all this is simply another way of saying that they were a business, operating through an unquestioning adherence to what their owner said and believed.
Arindam, in our first meeting, had explained to me in a monologue that lasted five hours that his business was built around the ‘brand’ of Planman Consulting, the group that includes the business school and numerous other ventures from media and motion pictures to a charitable foundation. To an outsider, however, the brand is Arindam. Even if his role is disguised under the description of ‘honorary dean’ of IIPM, the image of the business school and Planman is in most ways the image of Arindam Chaudhuri. With his quirky combination of energy, flamboyance, ambition, canniness – and even vulnerability – he is the promise of the age, his traits gathering force from their expression at a time in India when everything seems combustible, everyone is volatile and all that is solid melts into air.
3
One evening, after receiving a text-message invitation from one of Arindam’s many minions, I showed up at the Park Royal Hotel in south Delhi. The auto-rickshaw I had flagged down took me past Select Citywalk, a new
shopping mall in its final stages of construction, a pharaonic dream of glass and granite rising amid broken sidewalks where daily-wage labourers huddled under dwarfish tents made from sheets of plastic. The road to the Chirag Delhi crossing was jammed, the traffic squeezed into narrow lanes by a wide aisle in the centre where the government was trying to build a high-speed bus corridor. It remained crowded all the way on to the Ring Road, with buses, cars and motorcycles brawling for space, and I was relieved to get off outside the Park Royal, where a sign forbade auto-rickshaws from entering.
I walked up a steep driveway towards the brutalist, looming structure of the Park Royal. The traffic smog and summer heat gave way to an artificial chill as I stepped past the bowing doormen, and time itself seemed to slow down on the thick carpeting, anxious not to provoke the flashy Indians and foreign tourists wandering around the overpriced restaurants and handicraft shops. I was at the hotel to witness the ‘Power Brands Awards Night’ sponsored by 4Ps, one of the three business magazines published by Arindam. The sign in the lobby announcing the event, gold letters arranged on a red board like an unfinished Scrabble game, was pathetically small, and it took me a while to find the place where the event was being staged.
There weren’t too many people inside the Royal Ballroom auditorium on the eighth floor, and those attending seemed visibly impatient. The vast chandeliers loomed above rows of empty chairs, and on the stage, a projector played endless clips of motorcycles zooming along deserted highways. Eventually, people began to trickle into the front rows, men in suits whose expressions of self-content seemed to suggest that they were among the power brands being felicitated that night. After a while, a dapper, shaven-headed man showed up onstage to give out the awards. His name was A. Sandip and, in keeping with the multiplicity of roles held by people at Planman, he was a senior executive at the company, editor in chief of all the magazines and dean of the business school. Polite applause followed the handing out of each certificate and plaque, the claps punctuated by clips of revving motorcycles – Yamaha was an event sponsor and one of the power brands being celebrated – and then the ceremony was over. Smoke rose from the stage and a local band began belting out a Hindi pop song, asking the audience to start jiving as they sang.
But where was the audience? The auditorium had emptied out rapidly, while outside, in the passageway, the crowd was thick around the buffet tables laden with Western and Indian food, guests and waiters collaborating in a chaotic dance that involved plates piled with alarmingly red tandoori chicken. At the ends of the passageway, fresh-faced young women waited behind stacks of free Planman magazines, smiling hopefully but in futility; it was always going to be a losing contest with the tandoori chicken. I made my way past the buffet tables to the open-air balcony. It was packed, with people pressed hard against the bar, releasing cigarette smoke into the evening air while far below the traffic honked and swerved its way towards the brightly lit Nehru Place flyover.
Throughout the awards ceremony, Arindam had been standing at the back of the Royal Ballroom. When I returned from the bar, he was still there, shaking hands with people who stepped into the nearly empty auditorium and addressed him in low, conspiratorial voices. Arindam was dressed in blue, his clothes and slicked-back hair giving him a glamorous look amid the Indians and the Japanese (presumably representatives of Yamaha) wearing staid suits or chinos and polo shirts and the IIPM students (or Planman employees) in their uniform-like formals. Even the band – the men in tight jeans and sleeveless shirts, the women in sequinned skirts – couldn’t compete with Arindam’s star value, serving as no more than a noisy backdrop for the primary business of the evening.
As I watched people circling around Arindam in the Royal Ballroom, it seemed to me that the evening was not so much about the recognition of other companies and products as about making a statement on the Arindam power brand and his 4Ps (product, price, place and promotion). This was why Arindam was working instead of lining up for the buffet, shaking hands and exchanging small talk. I hovered near him, receiving swift appraising glances from the strangers delivered to Arindam by an efficient assembly line of ambition. Those meeting him expressed deference, desire and nervousness; some were matter-of-fact, one business tycoon talking to another, as it were; others were proprietorial, expressing mild outrage that he hadn’t noticed them yet or that they would have to wait for the person ahead of them to finish; a few, it seemed to me, concealed hostility even as they ingratiated themselves with him. The only time I saw Arindam get away from the constant handshaking, from the pleasantries and the promises, was when Doordarshan, the government television channel, interviewed him on the state of the economy, taking him to a small lobby and posing him in front of a painting of an Indian raja with a resplendent moustache and red robes.
There would presumably have been more glamorous television channels at the event if Arindam had been at the very top of the pecking order of wealth. Or was it that – as Sutanu had suggested – the largest media organizations were spurning him for his anti-elitism, for the crusading zeal of his magazines? They had certainly embraced him wholeheartedly when he first became a celebrity. At the IIPM campus in Satbari, I had picked up a brochure that featured a double-page spread of the articles that appeared when Arindam first made his mark as ‘The Guru with a Ponytail’. The earliest pictures displayed a baby face; the designer glasses were not yet part of his appearance. Indistinguishable from press releases, these articles reproduced Arindam’s thoughts on everything from ‘how not to create more Osamas’ (the solution, apparently, was ‘wholesome education’) to ‘the MBA mafia’ monopolizing management education in the country through the IIMs. But if Arindam was ‘Guru Cool’ in these articles, he was also combative (and the combative stance certainly enhanced the ‘cool’), attacking the IIMs and pushing his ‘Theory i Management’ (the lower-case ‘i’ stood for ‘india’) to speak about a compassionate form of capitalism that took into account the overwhelming presence of poverty in the country. He talked about ‘trickle-down economics’ and ‘survival of the weakest’, and although it was never clear from these extracts how such concepts could actually be put into practice, they exhibited Arindam’s desire to project himself as a thinker as well as an entrepreneur.
But Arindam’s desire for greater influence also created a conflict with his closed style of running the company. Within Planman, he was surrounded by loyalists, people who subscribed to the cult of Arindam. Relatives became colleagues, while former students and classmates became employees and continued to refer to him in the nice, middle-class Indian way as ‘Arindam sir’. The employees were so enamoured of Arindam that when I visited him at the IIPM campus or stood near him at the Power Brands Awards Night, some of them displayed a barely disguised hostility. Upset at the proximity I had stolen, sensing perhaps that I did not entirely share their faith in the guru, that I was not one of them, they seethed with the desire to protect Arindam from me.
Yet Arindam’s business could not be contained entirely within the walls of Planman. It had a centrifugal force to it, spiralling outwards. In June 2005, nearly a decade after his first failed attempt at starting a magazine, Arindam began publishing a business magazine called B&E. This led to the newsweekly The Sunday Indian, and to the marketing magazine 4Ps. They were all printed on glossy paper, heavy on graphics and syndicated material, thin on original content and, going by the misspelled names appearing on The Sunday Indian covers (‘Pamela Andreson’), short of copy editors. In 2007, Arindam began bringing out an Indian edition of PC Magazine under licence from Ziff Davis Media. At the same time, he began discussions with Foreign Affairs in New York to bring out an Indian edition of the magazine, and when that fell through, he began negotiations with Foreign Policy in Washington, DC.
‘In the school, I have an audience of only six thousand students,’ he had said to me. ‘Now, every week, I reach one lakh people.’
The business schools also produced ‘academic’ journals with names like The Indian Eco
nomy Review, The Human Factor, Strategy Journal and Need the Dough? But the most significant arena of influence was occupied by films, turning Arindam almost into a household name.
In 2002, Arindam had entered the movie business. A few days before his first Bollywood film was to be shot, Arindam said, the director walked out on him. Arindam, naturally, decided to direct the film himself. He admitted to me that he had perhaps not been entirely qualified to do this. ‘But I hope, some day, when I have more experience, to make a truly revolutionary film.’ Without the necessary experience, his first directorial venture turned out to be neither revolutionary nor a blockbuster. With a plot that had been lifted from the American comic strip Archie, it was a commercial flop and panned by critics. Even the DVD stores in the Palika Bazaar underground market that specialized in cinema of all kinds, mostly in pirated editions, were unable to procure a copy for me, and the only interesting thing about the film seemed to be its title, Rok Sako to Rok Lo, which translates into Stop Me if You Can.
4
A country that has seen a sudden infusion of wealth and a rapid disengagement with its past tends to throw up people who are travelling very quickly and seem to have no clear antecedents. A few days after I attended the power brands ceremony, an email from a friend directed me to the annual world wealth report produced by the investment banking firm Merrill Lynch, which had ranked India, with 100,000 millionaires, as the world’s second-fastest producer of millionaires, running just behind Singapore. It made me think of a factory producing millionaires at high speed, and when I surfed around on the Internet, checking out related articles from Forbes and The Economist, I felt as if I had been granted a slightly dizzying satellite vision of the country, one remarkably different from the view on the ground.