The Beautiful and the Damned Page 8

  In The Great Gatsby, there are two questions asked of the central character. Where did Gatsby get his money from? And where did he go to college? These are necessary questions in a Gilded Age, in a time when money is being made too fast and in too many ways for established social networks to keep track of all upwardly mobile individuals. For those on the move, this gap between old networks and the rapidly changing times can become an opportunity, and this is what Gatsby tries to cash in on. He hopes he can make good the promise of capitalism: that ambitious, driven people can have second acts to their lives. So when Gatsby tells people, in a voice inflected by British affectations (‘old sport’), that he went to Oxford, he is trying to transform his new money, procured by questionable means, into old money. And because his assuming the persona of a blue-blooded heir leads naturally to questions about why he hasn’t attended one of the Ivy League colleges where wealthy young men like Tom Buchanan are sent to receive a final polish, he comes up with Oxford as his alma mater, a place so far away that it is difficult for people to check up on him.

  Arindam, unlike Gatsby, wasn’t a working-class upstart from the interior of the country. He was a middle-class man who had grown up in Delhi, alert from the very beginning to the opportunities provided by the capital city, and who thus demonstrated that even the mobility provided by the new India is significantly more limited than what might have been possible in America at the turn of the new century. As for the degrees claimed by Arindam, they came not from some exotic overseas institution but from the business school set up by his father. But the question of pedigree, the bloggers realized, could be transferred back one generation, to Arindam’s father, to ‘Dr’ Malay Chaudhuri and his claim to have a doctorate from the Berlin School of Economics.

  The bloggers discovered that it was hard to pinpoint any such school with certainty. Dr Chaudhuri had once contested elections to the Indian parliament – he received so few votes that he lost his deposit – and in his application to the Election Commission, he credited his doctorate to an institute in the other Berlin, in the former East Germany. What records could one possibly access when the country itself no longer existed? The bloggers concluded that there had never, in all likelihood, been a Berlin School of Economics and that Malay Chaudhuri’s doctorate was simply the first of many fictitious degrees handed out by the Chaudhuri clan and their business.

  I could see the rationale of the bloggers. In spite of the friendliness with which Arindam treated me, he gave the impression of being on guard when it came to certain details. There were all those unanswered questions about revenues and the size of the company, made even more interesting because I discovered that it was under investigation by the Indian tax authorities. Although Arindam’s company had spent 31.6 crore rupees on advertising in 2006, it had paid no income tax that year or the previous year. There was also the company’s social responsibility campaign, directed through its charitable Great Indian Dream Foundation. Arindam claimed that it was building schools in slums and villages, setting up a hospital in a rural area of West Bengal and giving ‘experimental’ seeds to farmers. ‘We will have fifty-two schools in seven metros by the end of the year. Sixty thousand villages will be covered in the future. Eventually, I hope to fulfil my father’s dream of doing something for the downtrodden in Africa.’ Underneath the glittering capitalist, there was a closet radical, someone who admired Che Guevara so much that he had named his only son Che. But I found it impossible to verify any of these claims, and Arindam’s promise to take me to a school for the poor in a Delhi slum never materialized.

  There were other things that remained beyond my scrutiny. When I stopped to think about it, I had met Arindam only in hotels and at the main IIPM campus in Satbari, where he had talked, in expansive terms, of expanding to America. ‘Let Harvard fume, “We are two hundred years old,” ’ Arindam had said, lopping a century and a half off Harvard’s past. ‘Eventually they will recognize how good we are.’ It was astonishing, this idea of America, through Harvard, as the old, while the India he represented was the new – younger and more modern by far than America. And perhaps he was right. His institute was a fluid, virtual business school of the future, one that had done away with the arduous task of institution building.

  The school’s first campus had been in Gurgaon. Arindam had then moved it to the Qutab Institutional Area, on the southern fringe of Delhi, operating from a leased building that finally fell foul of the city’s zoning laws. Now they were operating from Satbari, somewhere between Gurgaon and Qutab, but even this building, its bright colours and abstract designs done to Arindam’s specifications, its small gym and swimming pool throwing out a challenge to the well-funded IIMs, might not be the final stop. It was a leased space, and Arindam told me that negotiations were already in progress to set the campus up somewhere else.

  If the school was mobile, Arindam was even more so. I had wanted to meet him in his office. ‘I don’t really operate from a fixed space,’ he said. ‘I am so much on the move.’ One day in September, he sent me a text message at 7 a.m. ‘Good morning!’ it said. ‘Totally totally forgot that day. However in the airport right now. And free. Can call. Do let me know if you’ve woken up! Sorry about this early morning missive!’

  I called him back hurriedly, trying not to sound sleepy. Arindam was attending a film festival in Toronto, where one of his films, The Last Lear, was being screened. During the stopover in London, he would be joined on the plane by the stars of his film, the young actress Preity Zinta and the bearded superstar Amitabh Bachchan, who has gone from playing thin angry young men in the seventies to corporate patriarchs in the new millennium. After attending the festival in Toronto, Arindam would stop in at his London office for a couple of days.

  I remembered reading an article in the Financial Times where he had said that he would be opening his London institute at Chancery Lane, and so I asked him, ‘Where exactly is your London office?’

  There was a pause. ‘That’s a good question,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’

  He sounded boyish and vulnerable, and I found myself wanting to respond kindly, as if speaking to a child I didn’t want to embarrass about an insignificant lie. ‘It’s hard for you to keep track of all the offices you have,’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s right,’ he said, apparently relieved that I had offered him a way out.

  I had once asked Arindam about the criticism that his institute didn’t really offer careers. It was undoubtedly successful in attracting students, but the students, on graduating, seemed to end up mostly in the very organization that had given them their expensive degrees, teaching at the institute and working for Planman as its managers. Arindam’s response was that his organization was a ‘family’, one that offered a continuation of the camaraderie experienced by the students. He also pointed out that, unlike the IIMs, he was not using public money to produce a small number of MBAs who then received extravagant salaries from multinational corporations. ‘They’ve cornered hundred-acre campuses in India. The six IIMs, taken together, teach a thousand students. And because they have so few students, the average pay package is eight to nine lakhs. That is aura! Wow!’

  He was right in pointing out how higher education for the Indian elite, from the engineering colleges like the Indian Institutes of Technology to the IIM business schools, was being funded by the state, producing technocrats and corporate executives who then went on to attack the state for being inefficient and wasteful. ‘Every American president should start by thanking the Indian taxpayer,’ he said, noting that it was US multinationals that benefited most from the training given to IIT and IIM graduates. By contrast, Arindam said, he had privatized management education, applying to it the genuine rules of the marketplace. His graduates might get smaller starting salaries. They might be working, he said sarcastically, for distinctly unglamorous companies like ‘Raju Underwear’ and ‘Relaxo Hawaii Chappals’, but they were not coasting on the taxpayer’s money. He was training many more MBAs, people who would
work in Indian organizations that needed their skills. ‘Our placements are improving. Foreign companies are also coming,’ he added defensively.

  The bulk of IIPM students still ended up working for Arindam. It was hard to get an answer to how much they were paid when they joined him, but I had a rough idea because Arindam had, in a different context, divided his organization’s salary structure into three groups; those getting up to 25,000 rupees a month, those getting up to 75,000 rupees a month, and those making more than 75,000 rupees a month. It seemed reasonable to assume that a starting IIPM graduate was in the first category; at 25,000 rupees a month or 3 lakhs a year, they were pulling in a third of an IIM graduate, which doesn’t seem bad. But this is also just double the amount a call centre worker with a basic – and cheap – college degree could earn, although the managerial work presumably offers more upward mobility and better hours than a call centre job.

  Yet the problem with Arindam’s approach lay deeper than the salaries his graduates made. Even in the world of closed Indian companies, Arindam’s organization is unusual. It is not publicly traded, and it was incorporated only very recently. The success and failure of IIPM students depends largely upon what happens to Planman, and what happens to Planman depends on what happens to Arindam. As for what happens to Arindam, that depends on whether the students keep coming. If the business school produces the greater part of the company’s revenues and employs most of the graduating students, this model can keep functioning only as long as there is a growing body of students willing to put up substantial sums of money for their degrees, at which point the whole thing starts looking like a pyramid scheme.

  7

  But even though the bloggers were right in much of their criticism, they seemed unable to comprehend that the questionable practices of IIPM and Planman were an expression of the times, and that Arindam wasn’t so much a rogue management guru as a particularly blatant manifestation of the management principle of making money. For all of Arindam’s tendency to evade questions about his business by referring to the elite IIM mafia, it was true that the initial criticism had been started by Bansal, an IIM Ahmedabad graduate and then picked up by Sabnis, who had studied at IIM Lucknow. It was equally true that there was a marked element of snobbery in the remarks of the bloggers. Along with the more substantive criticism of IIPM and Planman, there were many comments on the way Arindam and his acolytes dressed and spoke, with an element of resentment and surprise that such pretenders could claim to belong to the corporate world that most of the bloggers came from.

  None of the bloggers seemed willing to consider that the corporate practices they cherished necessarily spawned imitators. IIPM had the same relationship to IIM as knock-off goods do to branded products, which is to say that there is always a market for the knock-off version among the aspirational crowds. In other ways too, the cult represented by Arindam – and the bloggers were puzzled by the vehemence by which IIPM students, the people apparently being defrauded, defended him – was only part of the larger cult that was India Shining.

  Arindam’s management factory produced something less tangible but more resonant than durables or consumer products. It took people who aspired and had a fair bit of money but little cultural or intellectual capital and promised to turn them into fully fledged partners of the corporate globalized world. The students at IIPM were not from impoverished backgrounds. They couldn’t have been, since the courses were expensive. Many came from provincial towns, from small business families that had accumulated wealth and were canny traders and now felt the need to upgrade themselves so that they could compete in the realm of globalization. Arindam gave youth from these backgrounds a chance to tap away at IBM laptops, wear shiny suits and polished shoes, and go on foreign trips to Geneva or New York. All this involved a considerable degree of play-acting, and the students spent the most impressionable years of their lives in what was in essence a toy management school – mini golf course, mini gym, mini library – but play-acting was what most of the Indian middle and upper classes were doing anyway, wandering about the malls checking out Tommy Hilfiger and Louis Vuitton.

  There was an occasion when I saw the overlap between the pretenders and the legitimate management schools on proud display. One morning, I dropped in at Taj Palace Hotel, walking past the smiling women at the front desk to the venue where the Indian Chamber of Commerce was holding a marketing conference. I was there to hear a talk on ‘luxury brands’ in India by Vijay Mallya, a liquor baron, an airline owner and one of the wealthiest individuals in the world. Mallya was also a nominated member of parliament, and when he arrived at the Taj Palace Hotel, he came with gun-toting government bodyguards in tow. A crowd of photographers and cameramen followed him, trying desperately to record every facial crease and every sparkle of his diamond earrings as he walked to the stage.

  Mallya had a pale, fleshy face with a salt-and-pepper goatee, and his hair was rakishly long at the back. He was a portly man, handsome in a grizzled lion sort of way, keenly aware that his status in that gathering was something close to royalty. When a panellist asked him to share his ‘wisdom’ with the crowd, he began a rambling speech that contained words shouted out very loudly, which, when I looked at my notebook later that day, seemed to come to this:

  VODKA – WINE – YOUTH – ROCKING – DEMANDS – DRIVES – SMIRNOFF – ROMANOFF – SURVIVE – WHITE MISCHIEF – CAMPAIGN – EVE TEASING – FUN – MISCHIEVOUS – BORE – OLD-FASHIONED – POISON – YOUNG – DARING – CONTROVERSIAL – POISON LAO.

  After the speech was over, Mallya offered more nuggets of his philosophy in response to questions from the floor. When he was flattered by the questioners, as was often the case, he was pleased but slightly bored. When he really liked a question, he sounded kingly as he responded, ‘There is merit in your comments.’ He remained prickly and nervous throughout the questions, however, his left leg furiously working an invisible foot pedal, and he became flushed like a watermelon when a female member of the audience asked him why his companies objectified women with their pin-up calendars and risqué advertisements.

  As the questions went on, however, I realized that the corporate individuals among the questioners were heavily outnumbered by management students and faculty members, each of whom turned to the audience to announce the institute with which he or she was affiliated before asking the question. Here were the aspirers again, rubbing shoulders with wealth and power, their hopes visible in the style of asking the questions, which involved blurting out the question and turning away from Mallya before quite finishing, looking sideways at a companion with a smile of triumph, and then sitting down and disappearing from the scene as if they had never even been born to trouble the world with their dreams.

  There were no IIPM students in the crowd, and yet it was the same phenomenon at work, of young men and women raised to believe that somewhere up there in the hallowed corporate corridors existed all the wisdom and fruits of modern life. Arindam offered his students proximity to this world by his own style and the take-them-on attitude he breathed. Joining IIPM, for which not much was required other than a high school degree and the ability to pay steep fees, they were suddenly up to par with the nobility of the globalized world. IIM, Harvard, McKinsey: these were the names Arindam shouted out with familiarity the day he strode up and down the aisle while addressing a class of graduating students. And because the students, in spite of the money spent and the Executive Communication classes taken, still sported bad haircuts and wore awkward clothes, they appreciated the adversarial air projected by their honorary dean. They formed an army of Gatsbys, wanting not to overturn the social order but only to belong to the upper crust, which is why they felt compelled to defend Arindam and IIPM against the bloggers.

  8

  Arindam, I had been told at the very beginning of my encounter with him, was a man of the times. His flamboyance, his ambition, his moneymaking: if his lightning-rod persona made these aspects visible, it did so because these qualities already ex
isted as charged elements in the atmosphere of contemporary India. As I came to know him, though, I felt that there was another crucial aspect in which he was a representative of the times. His fortune, ultimately, was built on the aspiration and ressentiment of the Indian middle class. Without the aspirers looking up, emulating, admiring and parting with their cash, moguls like Arindam would not exist. He had made a business out of their aspirations, calibrating the brashness and insecurity that had come to them on the wings of the market economy and its political partner, right-wing Hinduism. Arindam understood well how these aspirers had been given a language of assertion by the times they lived in, and how they had also been handed a vocabulary of rage that is quite disproportionate to their perceived provocations. It is one of the triumphs of our age that aspirers can be made to feel both empowered and excluded, and that all over the world, one sees a new lumpenbourgeoisie quick to express a sense of victimization, voicing their anger about being excluded from the elite while being callously indifferent to the truly impoverished.

  I had begun feeling some of this aspiration myself. I remember one particular afternoon when I had lunch with a former IIPM student who was also one of Arindam’s prized employees. His name was Siddharth Nambiar, but apart from the common first name, there was nothing about him that suggested he was a doppelgänger come to reveal my secret life to me. Wearing a suit and designer sunglasses, his head shaven, he appeared in front of me with long strides, car keys dangling from his right hand. He was late because he had rammed his car into the back of a bus, but he was unfazed by this ‘fender bender’, as he put it.