The Beautiful and the Damned (6 page)

Beneath the picture, there was information about the Indian Institute of Planning and Management, with nine campuses in seven cities that encircled the Indian subcontinent and left vacant only a small
stretch of unconquered territory in the east. There were few details about the programme or admission requirements, but there were many small, inviting photographs of the Delhi campus: a swimming pool, a computer lab, a library, a snooker table, Indian men in suits and a blonde woman. Around these pictures, in text that exploded into a fireworks display of italics, exclamation marks and capital letters, were the perks given to students: ‘Free Study Tour to Europe etc. for 21 Days’, ‘World Placements’ and ‘Free Laptops for All’. Stitching these disparate elements together was a slogan. ‘Dare to Think Beyond the IIMs’, it said, referring to the elite, state-subsidized business schools, and managing to sound promising, admonishing and mysterious at the same time.

I kept pestering Sutanu, calling and text-messaging him. Then it was done, an appointment made, and I entered the wonderland to meet Arindam Chaudhuri, the man in the picture, the management guru, the media magnate, the business school entrepreneur, the film producer, the owner of IT and outsourcing companies, to which we should add his claims of being a noted economist and author of the ‘all-time best-sellers’
The Great Indian Dream
and
Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch
.

Arindam was a few shades darker than his picture, with glossy hair tied back in a ponytail. He wore a blue pinstriped suit, with a white shirt open a third of the way down his smooth, shaved chest. There were rings on his fingers and bright, sparkling stones on the frame of his designer glasses. He sported silver cufflinks on his sleeves, and argyle socks and shiny pumps on his feet. I felt under a mild sensory assault from all those glittering surfaces, but they were accompanied by a youthfulness that softened the effect. He was thirty-six, younger than me, with a boyish air that was particularly pronounced when he became sarcastic about his critics and rivals and said, ‘Wow!’

We were meeting at the Delhi campus of IIPM, in a boardroom that looked out at an open-plan office to one side and to classrooms
at the other end. The furniture was in bright shades of red and blue, with a projection screen flickering blankly on one wall. There were about fifty chairs in the room, most of them pushed to one side, and Arindam and I sat at one end of a long table, our chairs swivelled to face each other. The air conditioning was fierce, and after a couple of hours I began to feel cold in my summer garb of a short-sleeved shirt and cotton trousers, but Arindam went on speaking, slowing down only slightly when a worker brought us chicken sandwiches on paper plates and cups of Coca-Cola.

Like most of the new rich in India, Arindam hadn’t started from scratch. He had inherited his management institute from his father, Malay Chaudhuri, who began it in 1973. But the original institute had hardly been cutting edge. The office, in a house in south Delhi, had been a family bedroom at night. As for Gurgaon, where the institute was located, ‘it was the least developed place on earth’. I understood why Arindam wanted to emphasize this. Gurgaon, an area just across the Delhi border in the state of Haryana, is now a modern suburb, hosting office parks for multinationals, as well as condominiums and shopping malls. Forty minutes from south Delhi on the new highway, it is a satellite city serving India’s upper-tier professional classes, offering a branch of the London department store Debenhams and an Argentinean restaurant serving imported beef. But in the seventies, when Arindam’s father ran his management institute in Gurgaon, the place had been little more than an assortment of unpaved roads meandering through fields of wheat, with electricity and phone lines in short supply, a no-man’s-land between Delhi and the vast rural hinterland of India where a management school would have seemed like just one more of those strange, minor cults that crop up in India from time to time.

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.

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.