The Beautiful and the Damned Read online

  Arindam wasn’t a natural speaker. In prolonged one-to-one conversations, he had the tendency to look away, not meeting the listener’s gaze. This wasn’t quite such a problem in a public gathering, but he also had a high-pitched voice and a tendency to fumble his lines at the beginning. He started that evening by asking people what leadership meant to them. As his listeners spewed out their answers, using phrases (‘dream believer’, ‘reaching the objective’, ‘making decisions’, ‘simplifying things’) that seemed to have been lifted from some ur-text of self-help and management, they seemed both eager and slightly combative, as if they were not entirely convinced of his ability to teach them about leadership. ‘Here’s the great Arindam Chaudhuri,’ a man next to me muttered, using ‘great’ in the Indian way to mean someone fraudulent. Arindam seemed aware of the hostility. His responses were rather hesitant and his English sounded uncertain and pronouncedly Delhi middle class in its inflection.

  As the session went on, however, it became evident that these qualities weren’t drawbacks, not among the people he was addressing. The mannerisms gave Arindam an everyday appeal, and it was the juxtaposition of this homeliness with his wealth, success and glamour that created a hold over the leadership aspirants in the audience. By themselves, the Bentley Continental, the ponytail and the designer glasses, or the familiar way Arindam had of dropping names like Harvard, McKinsey and Lee Iacocca, would have made him much too remote. But the glamour was irresistible when combined with his middlebrow characteristics. He was one of the audience, even if he represented the final stage in the evolution of the petite bourgeoisie.

  From the way Arindam played on the sensibilities of his audience throughout the evening, he was well aware of this. If he wasn’t a natural speaker, he nevertheless had that ability of performers to gather strength the longer they stay up on the stage. His energy was unflagging, as I discovered in my first interview, which had gone on for five hours. And after about thirty minutes into the leadership session, as I began to be drawn into his patter, I felt that Arindam was telling the rising Indian middle class a story about itself, offering them an answer to the question of who they were. ‘I am trying to be a mirror,’ he said, a comment remarkably insightful in the way he represented a larger-than-life version of the people in the audience.

  His listeners had come to the session with a rough sense of who they were supposed to be. They received feedback about this from the culture at large, from the proliferating media outlets that obsessed about them as members of ‘India Shining’ (the phrase coined by the BJP government in 2004 to describe the new India), and they were characterized in a similar manner by the West. They knew that as middle-class, well-to-do Indians, they were supposed to be modern and managerial. They were characterized as a people devoted to efficiency, given to the making of money and the enjoyment of consumer goods while retaining a touch of traditional spice, which meant that they did things like use the Internet to arrange marriages along caste and class lines.

  Still, they needed reaffirmation of the role they were playing, and this is what Arindam provided, distilling down for them that cocktail of spurious tradition and manufactured modernity, and adding his signature flavour to the combination. He told his listeners stories about travelling to America, Europe and Japan. These, after all, were the nodes of the modern world, places that middle-class India was emulating and suddenly found within its reach. Yet the modern world was also remote; not many of the people in the audience had been there, and even if they had gone to these places, they would not have encountered them with any degree of intimacy. The very sites they were most drawn to – the business centres, the shopping plazas, the franchise restaurants, the tourist spots and the airports – would appear slightly illusory, never really experienced in spite of the photographs taken, the souvenirs bought and the money spent.

  In the Royal Ballroom, though, these places were rendered anecdotally and brought down to the same plane as the India the audience knew – or the India they thought they knew. So there were jokes about national stereotypes, comments about the different strengths and weaknesses of the Americans, the Japanese, the French and the Indians. There were no individuals in these stories, merely nameless businessmen being met by Arindam in anonymous boardrooms, and the world itself seemed no more than a string of Royal Ballrooms, each dominated by a different ethnic group of capitalists.

  After Arindam had given the audience this touch of the foreign, he came home to more familiar territory, turning to the established prejudices of his audience. He made fun of regional Indian identities, something done more easily in a largely Hindi-speaking, Delhi crowd that tended to see itself as national. He pandered to their middle-class prejudices, attacking the government as inefficient and corrupt, but he also satisfied their nationalism by praising the Indian Army as the most efficient and disciplined wing of the state.

  As Arindam became more comfortable, he started slipping into Hindi, segueing into the story of the Mahabharata as a way of approaching his ‘Theory i Management’ concept of leadership. Like many contemporary Hindus who have tried to cut out of their sprawling range of beliefs the hard lines of a modern faith, Arindam wasn’t interested in the complex ethical questions or sophisticated narrative strategies of the Mahabharata. Instead, his focus was on the Bhagavadgita, originally not much more than a long episode in the Mahabharata where Arjuna, wracked by doubt on the eve of going into battle against friends and family, is given a speech on duty by the god Krishna.

  The Gita emerged as a foundational religious text only in modern times, when Hindu revivalists reeling from colonialism sought something more definitive than the amorphous set of practices and ideas that had characterized Vedic religion until then. It received a new life again in the early nineties when the Indian elites simultaneously embraced free-market economics and a hardened Hindu chauvinism. They discovered in the Gita an old, civilizational argument for maintaining the contemporary hierarchies of caste, wealth and power, while in the story of Arjuna throwing aside his moral dilemmas and entering wholeheartedly into the slaughter of the battlefield, they read an endorsement of a militant, aggressive Hinduism that did not shirk from violence, especially against minorities and the poor. Given this appeal of the book among the Indian middle and upper classes, Arindam’s use of it was a canny choice. He was extending into the realm of management theory a story that his audiences would be both familiar with and respectful towards, so that to challenge Arindam’s ideas would be tantamount to questioning a sacred text.

  Arindam began the elaboration of his theories, naturally enough, by pulling a red Gita out of a pocket. A Planman photographer ran forward frantically to capture the moment and, for the first time in the session, the audience began scribbling notes. Arindam turned to the laptop as if he was going to boot Krishna and Arjuna into existence, but the laptop refused to cooperate. As one, two, three and then four people gathered around the laptop, trying unsuccessfully to get it to display slides, Arindam gave up, turned away from the computer, and faced the audience.

  Recovering rapidly from the technological failure, he began a performance that was part television soap and part stand-up comedy, hamming the roles of housewives, husbands returned from work, fathers and babies, management trainees and their bosses, the audience bursting into laughter as each little cameo was played out. The laptop had been finally made to work, and on the screen floated a matrix of different character types Arindam had extracted from Hindu scriptures. There was the tamas or pleasure-loving type, who could be led only by domination; the rajas, ambitious but greedy, who needed a combination of encouragement and control; and the satvic, who was brilliant and talented and needed to be left alone. ‘Leadership is about changing your colours like a chameleon to suit the situation,’ Arindam said, citing Krishna, the androgynous, slippery god, as the role model for the ideal CEO. Labourers or blue-collar workers were tamasic, young management trainees rajasic and highly skilled professionals like research scientists were satvic.
He had reinvented the caste system in two hours.

  Arindam finished to all-round applause, and as he came down the stage, he was mobbed by his listeners. I went outside to the passageway, where tamasic workers in overalls were rapidly installing gates decorated with marigold garlands for a wedding reception that would take place later in the evening. I sat on one of the couches, next to a middle-aged, dishevelled-looking man in a suit who was holding a plastic shopping bag that said ‘More Word Power’.

  He had attended the entire day’s session, and when I asked him what he had thought of it, he said that it had been interesting. Some of the earlier speakers had been good and he had been especially impressed by A. Sandip.

  ‘And what did you think of Arindam Chaudhuri’s talk?’ I asked.

  ‘Rubbish. It made no sense at all,’ he said. He fell silent, avoiding my gaze, and when he looked at me again, it was with embarrassment. ‘You are a friend? You work for the company?’ He cheered up as soon as he found out that I was writing about Arindam. ‘The man is a fraud,’ he said, ‘but a very successful one.’

  He was a small publisher who churned out language education books. He would be releasing a management book during the World Book Fair in Delhi in February, a work written by a Canadian living in Beijing. ‘It is mostly China-focused. You are aware that there is great interest in China these days? So I wanted to have an event like this for the Canadian during the book fair, and I decided to come and see this. You are writing about Arindam Chaudhuri?’ He handed me his business card, leaned towards me, chuckled and said, ‘You must find out how he makes his money.’

  6

  Arindam had told me a story about his childhood that involved a strike at his father’s management school in Gurgaon. He described the strikers as ‘rowdy elements’, students who had failed their courses and objected to the academic discipline imposed on them. The strike climaxed in a telephone call late one night to his father. An anonymous man, speaking hurriedly, said that a student had been stabbed on campus. Arindam’s father took a taxi, accompanied by one of his employees, a canteen manager. Around 200 metres from the campus, he saw a group of students, armed with iron rods, waiting for him. He asked the driver to turn around, came home and took his family to a hotel. The stabbing had been a ruse to bring him to the campus, and even the canteen manager accompanying him had been part of the conspiracy.

  The strike continued for four months. When the Chaudhuri family eventually moved back from the hotel to their home, they were greeted by protesting students. ‘They were carrying horrible placards calling us thieves and murderers,’ Arindam said. ‘The neighbours, who talked to the students, began calling my father “Bada Chor” (“Big Thief”) and me “Chota Chor” (“Little Thief”).’ But what was most distressing about the incident, Arindam said, was that they eventually discovered that members of the faculty were behind the strike, inciting the students. ‘All the people we trusted were involved, and I decided that I would not let this happen ever again.’

  It was a touching story, a young boy seeing his father threatened by enemies and deciding to take them on. ‘My father named me Arindam,’ the grown-up man in front of me said. ‘That means “destroyer of enemies”.’ Since he had been named a decade and a half before the incident, Arindam’s father had either possessed a remarkably clear ability to foresee the future or a pronounced sense of enemies lurking everywhere. But the enemies, whether those drifting through Arindam’s father’s mind or the people I had been told about, were abstractions. The rowdy students, the traitorous canteen manager and the conspiratorial faculty members had no discernible motives in the story Arindam told me. They were there mostly to provide an opposition so that Arindam could have a motive for his success. They were also present to demonstrate a lesson about how people couldn’t be trusted. It was as if Arindam was explaining to me why his business was so close-knit; why outsiders were viewed with suspicion by people in his organization; why his public relations person had demanded, unsuccessfully, that I show him everything I wrote; and why this same person refused to respond to the most elementary queries about the company’s business practices or its revenues. There was more than the usual organizational secrecy at work here. Instead, a fundamental vision of life was involved, and underneath all the expansive theories of management with solutions for every problem in existence, below all the chatter of a world brought closer by corporate globalization, there was, ultimately, only this Manichean idea of people divided into the loyal and the disloyal, of Arindam at odds with the rest of the world.

  This sense of tribalism had become especially pronounced after Arindam became successful. He had started, he said, by competing with the ‘mafia’ of management education in the country, but he provoked them beyond endurance by beginning a media division. ‘The elite now saw that I was challenging them directly, in the realm of ideas.’ He was no longer operating merely within the confines of business schools but in society as a whole, breaking down ‘the establishment hold on thought’. Arindam’s voice dropped low. ‘That is the reason why I am hated by a lot of people.’

  He had a specific incident in mind that involved a harsh piece about his institute by a woman who was an alumna of the elite IIM Ahmedabad business school. ‘It was the world’s most stupid article,’ Arindam said, adding that he couldn’t remember the name of the journalist. The article, which came out a couple of years earlier, was commented upon and linked to by a blogger, who was then sent a letter by Arindam’s legal department, objecting to his characterization of the institute. ‘We had no clue on what is the blogger world,’ Arindam said. He found out soon enough, as other bloggers retaliated. Their attacks were picked up by the mainstream media, including a magazine called Businessworld. The war between Arindam and the establishment intellectuals was out in the open.

  Because much of the skirmishing against Arindam took place on the Web, it is relatively easy, if somewhat overwhelming, to find out what the bloggers and other critics had to say. The journalist whose name Arindam couldn’t remember was Rashmi Bansal. She had written the original offending article ‘The Truth Behind IIPM’s Tall Claims’ in JAM (Just Another Magazine), a small periodical that she published herself and that was targeted at a youthful, English-speaking crowd. Her article said that IIPM’s advertising was misleading: only the Delhi campus had the facilities prominently displayed in the pictures (from swimming pool to library), and the campuses in other cities were housed in crowded office buildings; the scholars from institutions like Wharton, NYU, Columbia and Harvard claimed as ‘visiting faculty’ were people who had just passed through, delivering one-off lectures; the degrees IIPM awarded were not recognized by the Indian government; the company fudged data from media surveys to claim top rankings; and contrary to its claims, it had not placed its students in multinational concerns like McKinsey.

  These allegations led to a sudden scrutiny of IIPM. Businessworld, where Bansal was a columnist, reported that it had accepted Arindam’s request to look fairly into the case for and against his institute, but was fobbed off with generalities about IIPM and its enemies when it asked for specific information. As a result, the article in Businessworld ‘When the Chickens Come Home …’, while more moderate in tone than Bansal’s piece, was sceptical of the claims made, especially the details about the placement of IIPM students and the consultancy work done by Planman. Most of the multinational corporations named in IIPM advertisements, when contacted by Businessworld, said that they had few, if any, dealings with Arindam’s organization.

  Planman struck back in curious ways. A reporter writing about the controversy in the news magazine Outlook noted that the IIPM website brandished supportive quotes from ‘luminaries like Noam Chomsky, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer’, but that ‘these reactions vanished within days of being posted on the Web’. The students at IIPM threatened to make a bonfire out of the IBM laptops they used because Gaurav Sabnis, the blogger who had linked to the offending piece by Bansal, worked
at IBM. Sabnis announced his resignation from IBM, claiming that he was doing so voluntarily, in order to spare his employers embarrassment. His fellow bloggers, however, felt that he and his company had been pressured by IIPM – which, after all, was an important client of IBM’s. In the minds of the bloggers, Sabnis was a martyr to truth and freedom of expression, and so they went about the task of challenging IIPM’s claims with even greater energy, discovering, among other things, that IIPM’s campuses in Antwerp and Brussels had no more than a loose affiliation with a rather questionable institute that was not recognized by the Belgian government.

  In sifting through the long, labyrinthine posts on the anti-Arindam blogs, it is hard to avoid the impression of a virtual world being hammered at by virtual tools. Most often, the claims made by IIPM and Planman had depended on no more than a careful selection of pictures, comments and data, and the creation of numerous websites. This approach had worked well because it was part of a larger narrative of corporate success in India. Most mainstream journalists were too lazy and untrained, and too enamoured of wealth, to subject these claims to the most basic scrutiny. But this was not true of the bloggers, who revealed an unflagging ability to probe the Web, sending out emails to people listed by IIPM as contacts, checking IP addresses, and conducting background research. The most interesting investigation the bloggers carried out involved IIPM’s history, focusing not merely on the qualifications of Arindam and his faculty but also on the credentials of Arindam’s father, the man who had started it all by beginning a management school in the then rural surroundings of Gurgaon.