Devil in Pinstripes (17 page)

Amit had just returned from a trip to Delhi that afternoon. He walked into office and straight to his shared room. Chander had been retained in another role and hence his room did not get allotted to Amit. He continued sharing his room with Sangeeta.

Sangeeta had gone out. As Amit settled down in his den, he glanced at the table in front of him. On the table was a sheet of paper with a grid on it. The grid had names of the people in the branch and their performance ratings. It was the end of the year and therefore appraisal time and performance rating time too. ‘Impressive. She is quite organised,’ he thought to himself as he casually flipped through the piece of paper. Ideally he should not have looked at it. It’s inappropriate to look at someone else’s documents without the person knowing about it. But all this protocol was damned in NFS.

‘Let’s see if she is a tough boss,’ he said to himself as he picked up her sheet to see how she had rated her people. He had heard that women made terrible bosses.

What he saw shocked him no end. In that list were names of people from the mortgages business who operated out of the branches, people from the auto loans business, and people from the credit team among many others.
What the hell are these names doing here? Who has rated them? Why was I not told?
He had been working on those ratings himself.

At that very moment Sangeeta walked in. ‘Hi Amit,’ she tried to be nice.

‘What’s this Sangeeta?’

‘Oh this? These are the performance ratings of people in my team.’

‘My team! Won’t you guys ever give up?’

‘What?’

‘Who gave you the authority to decide the performance ratings of these guys?’

‘I think you should ask Gowri that question. I will do what I am told to do.’ And she turned and walked away.

A furious Amit charged into Gowri’s room. ‘Gowri, how many times have I told you to stay away from me and my team?’

Gowri looked at him and did not say anything.

‘What’s this?’

‘How do I know? It is in your hands.’ Gowri was cheeky.

‘Don’t try to be smart Gowri! You have asked Sangeeta to do the performance appraisals of all staff in the branches including those in my vertical.’

‘That’s the way it has been done so far.’

‘I thought we changed it.’

‘You wanted it to be changed. I didn’t change it. The guys have a reporting into the branch managers as per the approved organisation structure.’

‘Only for administrative purposes,’ retorted Amit. Since the business model of NFS involved doing business in remote locations, the branch manager had oversight only for administrative purposes and they were still controlled by Amit in his business vertical.

‘Year after year, I have been doing this. What’s different now?’ That was a fact. Every year, Gowri had bulldozed the business managers and used his overbearing personality to brow beat them into agreeing with his rating. Ratings drove increments and decided bonuses for every individual. Over time people realised that it was Gowri who was their ‘
annadaata
’ and not the business managers themselves. That’s how he managed to build an aura around himself. He was called the king for nothing.

‘Enough! I will speak with HR. Let’s see what they say.’

Amit walked across to Sunil, the head of HR. He was furious. Gowri was a guy who was known to be a wheeler dealer. What about HR? HR should have been unbiased in the entire show. They couldn’t be seen as taking sides. Something like this would never happen in NYB. But NFS was like a banana republic. Anything could happen here as long as Gowri willed it.

Sunil had no explanation for what had happened. All he said was that it was incorrect on the part of HR to have asked Gowri for the ratings. Someone in HR at the lowest rank had just followed last year’s process. The earlier business managers didn’t have an issue with this process. The fact that Amit wanted it differently was not communicated down the line in HR.

The head of HR tried to talk Amit into letting it be. ‘Why don’t you give your inputs to Gowri and let him incorporate the feedback in his ratings?’

‘Fuck no! Sunil, I manage my team my way. He cannot decide who gets what in my team. I can bet my ass the guy would have screwed around with the mortgage guys in the performance ratings.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Sunil was vociferous in his defence. ‘He is quite fair in his approach.’

‘Fair my foot!’ Amit was furious. ‘Why don’t you check?’

Sunil and Amit then got down to checking the ratings of the individuals in the mortgage team. NFS operated on a performance rating scale of one to ten. If an individual was given a performance rating of one, it indicated a stellar performance and a performance rating of ten was indicative of a horrible performance – a performance which meant the person was no longer required in the organisation. They did some analysis of the ratings given by Gowri for the personal loan guys in the branch network and compared them with the mortgage guys.

It took them approximately thirty minutes to come up with the analysis on an excel spreadsheet.

The numbers were staring at them.

‘Do I need to say anything more Sunil? Ninety-one percent of the personal loans guys have got a rating better than five and only sixty percent of the people in mortgages have got a performance rating higher than five. Even in the top performer’s bracket, twenty-six percent of personal loans are top performers while only eight percent of the staff in mortgages are rated as top performers. Is this the right way to do things? No wonder you have glamorised personal loans, Mr Gowri Shankar’s product, in this organisation. Everyone wants to get out of mortgages and move to personal loans. To the branch business. Isn’t it time to set it right? You have the responsibility, Sunil, to ensure that such shit doesn’t happen.’ And then he paused. Sunil didn’t say anything. ‘Please correct this. I will send you my ratings by this evening.’ And he walked away. He stopped outside his cabin and stretched his neck to look back into the room and added, ‘Sunil, if I complain about this, you could lose your job.’

This worried Sunil. He had never looked at the performance ratings in this manner. This could seriously land him in trouble if Amit went ahead and executed his threat.

‘Let me fix this for you,’ he said.

‘You better!’ muttered Amit as he walked away.

Within the next fifteen minutes, Sunil was in Gowri’s room. They were closeted for over thirty minutes. Sangeeta was called in a couple of times. Amit could imagine what was going on.

Within moments of Sunil exiting the room, Amit got a mail from Sangeeta who was sitting three feet away from him.

The mail was marked to Sunil and Gowri. Amit saw the mail and smiled. This could have been done earlier. Why did they have to get into a confrontation?

Oblivious to all this, Chanda was going about doing her work as usual. She had just come out of a training session on personal loan products for new joinees. This part of her job was something she liked. Training came naturally to her. It helped her escape the stress, the tension, and the worry of her strained relationship with her boss. When she was inside the room with all the new joinees, she would go into a different world. A world of make believe . . . a world where everything was hunky-dory. Where people tried to be nice and build harmonious relationships with each other. It took her away from the compulsions of reality.

After the training, she walked to her desk. Someone from the branches had sent her an approval request for the payment to be made to a sales agent. It was nearing 7.30 p.m. In the normal course, she would have logged off and left for home. She tried calling Amit on his extension. No one picked up. Maybe he had gone to the loo. She decided to wait.

‘If I have to wait, might as well finish the pending work. Less work for tomorrow,’ she thought and opened her email. A few sales agency payment requests were responded to. Some approved and a few rejected. A job had to be done with diligence irrespective of motivation levels, and she was not the ones who would allow her state of mind to impact her work. Amit had also taught her to lay down ground rules and processes for everything at work so that they don’t need to revisit requests again and again. ‘If someone sends you an approval request, he must know with a reasonable degree of certainty if it will go through or not.’ She smiled to herself when she thought of that. After sending out the approvals, she normally printed a copy of every approval given and filed them separately. She did the same today and walked towards the printer on her floor. Its toner had run out and hence it couldn’t print. She then decided to spool it to Suzanna’s printer on the corporate floor, which was just a floor above hers. ‘I will anyway have to go to that floor to check on Amit,’ she thought as she fired the prints.

She collected her bags, logged off her system and walked up. ‘I will collect the printouts and file them tomorrow,’ she said to herself as she climbed the stairs.

Amit was there talking to Manish Kakkar who was also ready to leave. When he saw her, Amit reacted, ‘
Chalen
. . . let’s go?’

‘I am waiting,’ she said as she walked up to the printer. She picked up her lot of printouts and stood at the door waiting for Amit to come.

‘Amit . . . Amit . . . are you there?’ It was Karen who came running out of the MD’s cabin to speak with Amit.

‘Karen? You haven’t gone home? It’s well past your bed time,’

Amit smiled at her.

‘I am just leaving baba. Your boss wants you for a minute.’

Amit looked at Chanda and she smiled partly in desperation, partly in irritation. She walked to the nearest sofa and plunked herself. Looking around, she saw that all the cabins were empty, except Amit’s and Manish’s. Everyone had left for the day. The clock above the board room door was pushing 8.30 p.m. She was hoping Amit would come out fast. Casually, she ruffled through the papers that she was carrying, the ones she picked up from the printer. There were six sheets in all that she had printed and she started counting them in her mind as she went through them. Two sheets of payment computations, one blank sheet from somewhere unknown – probably a problem in the page setup, an email to Suzanna, an order for a print . . . wait a sec. Email to Suzanna? She didn’t print it. Probably picked by mistake. She needed to put it back. It was not hers. She got up and removed the email from the lot of papers she was carrying. As she was taking it back to the printer she saw her name in the email and her curiosity was aroused. After all, she too was human. A quick glance told her that there was nobody on the floor who was observing her. Except for Manish, there was nobody there. Period. Amit and Karen were the only others and they were in Hari’s room. Satisfying herself that she would not be caught infringing into someone else’s space, she started reading the mail. After she read the mail, she glanced up, looked round the room, quietly folded the mail, put it into her bag and went and sat down on the sofa. The smile had been wiped off from her face.

Quietly, she waited for Amit to come back. Fifteen minutes later they were driving on Marine Drive, on their way back to Bandra. Initially Amit thought that she was upset about his making her wait for him. However, after a few miles of driving, he realised that was not the case.

And now Amit was sitting in Bandra reclamation, with a howling Chanda, wondering what was wrong.

He put his arm around Chanda and pulled her up. ‘Will you please tell me what is wrong? If you keep howling like this without telling me what happened, I can’t do anything.’

She had regained composure by then. Dipping her hand into the bag she fished out a neatly folded piece of paper and passed it on to him.

Amit took it from her and opened it. It was dark outside. He switched on the car lights and strained himself to read it. It was an email sent to Suzanna—from Gowri.