Devil in Pinstripes (14 page)

A
mit walked in confidently on the second day. Hari was not expected to be in office. There was an arrogant swagger in his walk as he raced up to the second floor. By now the security guard knew him and did not stop him, as he had done on the first day.

Gowri was in his room, checking his email. Suzanna was in her small cubicle trying to act busy. Amit walked up and stood next to her for a couple of minutes. From the corner of his eyes, he could see that Gowri was looking at him, pretending though that he was busy.

‘Suzanna, can you please help me with a cup of coffee?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘And please tell the pantry boy not to add any sugar. Sir does not like coffee with sugar. Right Amit?’ It was Manish, who had walked in behind Amit. ‘Second day in wonderland!’ he chimed in and followed it with a song as he walked into his own cabin.

Amit turned and walked towards the cabin on Manish’s left, the cabin that was to be his. It was open. He walked in and settled down on the other side of the table – the side where visitors would have normally sat down.

Gowri walked towards Suzanna and murmured something into her ear. Even if it was related to work, it didn’t matter. Manish, being the exuberant of the senior management team, walked out of the room into the open area, and looked around. Seeing Amit, he walked towards him again, ‘Arre . . . you are sitting here?’

By then Gowri had also come out of his room. A cup of tea in his hand, he walked towards the two of them.
‘Kya haal hai Amit
?’ and seeing him formally attired, commented ‘Arre, no one wears a tie here. All this happens only in your bank . . . at NYB.’

Gowri conveniently stayed clear of discussing the cabin issue with Amit and began gossipping about other mundane stuff. The gossip went on for a few minutes when it veered towards the loan policies of NFS. Amit asked Gowri if he had the document which outlined the loan and credit policies of NFS.

Before Gowri could answer, Manish chipped in, ‘Of course we have. Do you want me to send it to you?’

‘My email ID is not set up yet. Can you please send it to Suzanna? I will ask her to print it out for me.’ He then looked at Gowri and as an afterthought added, ‘With your permission.’ Gowri nodded in response.

Before Gowri could answer, Manish again butted in, ‘Ya, ya. No problem. Anyway she acts busy. She doesn’t have a full day’s job. But you know what? I don’t need to send it to her. She should have it. A few days ago she had circulated those policies to the branch network. Let me ask her to print them out.’

‘Ae, Suzanna,’ he called out. ‘Remember, you sent out the latest C2P2 last week?’ Amit was part of the same group and hence he knew that C2P2 was an acronym for Consumer Credit Process and Policy, the inhouse loans bible. Suzanna nodded.

‘Will you please print them out for Amit? Also, printout the covering email which I had sent. That’s important too.’ Suzanna made a face, but she didn’t have an excuse for not doing what was asked of her.

For the next twenty minutes, a frowning Suzanna printed reams of paper for Amit. Over two hundred at last count, including the covering mails, which Manish had forwarded to her and she had sent to the entire branch network, at Gowri’s behest.

When Amit saw them, he was amused. Below every email, was a signature, an addition which gets attached to an email, every time you send one, provided it is programmed into your email settings. Below every email which she had printed out for him was a signature:

Regards,

Suzanna

Secretary

NYB Financial Services

Mumbai

Phone Number…….

Mobile……

Normally you would find seniors in an organisation attaching their signatures to email IDs. It was not common, and was actually unheard of, for secretaries to add their signature to emails. But NFS was a different animal. A different kind of organisation and the team in which she worked was of a different make.

This entire episode screwed up Suzanna’s morning. She was so pissed with this that she walked up to Gowri’s room after all this and was closeted with him for over thirty minutes. Their discussion, one could make out, was animated and furiously gesticulative. Though there was no reason for Suzanna to be upset, there was nothing inhumanly wrong in Amit and Manish asking her to printout those manuals.

Half an hour later, she walked out of Gowri’s room and went straight to the wash room. She emerged after about ten minutes, looking calm and composed. It was actually Amit’s turn to play mind games now.

He walked up to her. ‘Chander mentioned to me that you have the entire branch list with telephone and address details of the branches. Can you please printout a copy for me? Chander wants it too. Please send the list to him as well.’

This time Suzanna didn’t smile. She just nodded her head. Within five minutes she was at Amit’s desk and handed over the printout to him.

‘Thanks Suzanna.’

‘Sangeeta was mentioning to me that she will be sitting in this room.’

‘Oh yes. Where is she?’

‘She is in Pune. Travelling.’

‘Oh, okay. I just decided to share it with her. You think she will have a problem? She can sit in the proper side. Till I find some space I will occupy the other side, or the side which is less desired. What do you say?’

‘You will have to ask her,’ she said curtly and walked away.

‘I guess everyone in this place has an attitude,’ said Amit to himself as she moved away from him. Amit looked at the paper she had brought for him. It was the printout of the mail she had just sent Chander. It had the list of branches of NFS – all of them, with their addresses and phone numbers. As his eyes trailed the top of the mail and went down the first page, it stopped on something very interesting. It said:

Chander

Fyi

Regards

And then the signature. He stopped. A victorious I-know-what-that-means sort of smile slowly crawled across his face. This time the signature was different from the ones he had seen in her mails in the morning. It now read:

Regards,

Suzanna

Secretary to Gowri Shankar

Head – Branch Network

NYB Financial Services.

The difference was the third line – ‘Secretary to Gowri Shankar’. Aah! Now it’s working. He now knew the reason for the thirty-minute discussion in the morning. He knew the reason for the anxiety, for the chaos. It was him. Hadn’t he managed to get under the skin of Gowri and Suzanna? His eyes were glowing with wolfish mischief now. Gowri had asked Suzanna to change her signature to reflect his name. This was just to send out a signal to everyone that she was only his secretary. Till now no one had even remotely questioned his authority. For that matter, even Amit hadn’t. But he was the guy from the bank. He had to be shown his place. He had to be told through surrogates that Suzanna was not his secretary.
Ha ha! Gowri Shankar had been roughed up. Wow!
And how easy it was. He hadn’t even done anything yet, and had managed to ruffle feathers.

And then he remembered Aditya’s statement a few years back. ‘Listen Amit,’ he had said, ‘in life, you should never ever take stress upon yourself. And if you see it coming, ensure that you stress out others. Your stress will automatically disappear.’ How true! Yesterday the sly Gowri was scheming, on the very first day in office, to put him through discomfort. Today he had easily turned the table on him. All he did was go and occupy Sangeeta’s room when she was not there and ask his secretary repeatedly for help. It was easy.

The remaining part of the day passed peacefully without much of excitement. Chander was very helpful. From his perspective, he was on his way out. The sooner he got Amit to speed up things, the sooner the organisation would relieve him. Manish was not at all affected by his arrival. By nature, he was a cool guy. Gowri was an outlier. He was the one who had an issue with Amit. Though on the face of it, he was sweet to Amit, the latter was under no pretensions. He knew that the façade would crumble one day. And if Gowri had his way, that day would be far closer than his comfort.

T
he takeover from Chander lasted for about a week. By the end of the first week, Amit got a hang of the dynamics of the business and became quite self-sufficient. Sitting in his room on the claustrophobic powerhouse called Head Office, he had learnt whatever he could. It is normally said that leadership is all about managing people. As one goes up the ranks in any organisation, success is defined more by the way you manage your teams, your people’s expectations, the way you motivate them into delivering what you expect, and how you stand by your people and lead from the front. These are things which make you stand out, rather than subject matter expertise. The latter was not too much of an issue though. Amit had handled mortgages in his earlier roles at NYB. It was not rocket science either. Amit though was a great believer of the former. Something he had learnt from Aditya and practised to the core. He wanted to implement the same values and philosophies in NFS as well.

‘Where’s Amit? Hasn’t he come to work?’ Gowri queried Chanda one morning, when he found Amit missing in action. ‘Hope all is well?’

‘Oh ya. He’s travelling.’

‘What? On vacation? Without you? Ha ha!’

‘No, no! No holiday! Would I be here if he was on a holiday? He has gone to Kolkata for a business review. Chander had set it up.’

‘Arre, he didn’t tell me. I could have requested him to do something for me in Kolkata.’ These things made Gowri very insecure and despite best attempts at concealing, it showed.

‘You can call him. He is carrying his mobile.’

‘No it’s okay.’ And the discussion ended as abruptly as it had begun.

A few moments later, after Chanda had left, Gowri was at Suzanna’s side. ‘Can you get me Amit on his mobile?’ and he walked back into his room.

‘Hi darling!’ Seeing a call from office, Amit instinctively assumed it was Chanda. He knew that Chander was on leave that day and it was too early for anyone to call him from office.

‘Amit. Suzanna here.’

A brief moment of embarrassed silence later, Amit found his voice to say, ‘Oh hi. I thought it was Chanda.’

‘Gowri would like to speak with you. Transferring the call.’ As usual her voice was icy cold.

‘Hi Amit!
Kidhar hai
? Where are you?’

‘I’m in Kolkata. Came to meet the team.’

‘Kya hua
? Any stress?
Koi problem?
’

‘No. Just getting to know my team better. If I have to take charge from Chander, I need to take over the team as well. Process and policy can be anyway learned in due course. What do you say?’

‘Oh ho!
Bata diya hota
. You should have told me.’

‘Why?’ he said brusquely and then after a pause added ‘did you have some work here? Tell me. I’m sure I’ll get some free time. I can manage if you want me to do something for you.’

‘No, its okay. You come back. We will chat. When are you back?’

‘In office the day after. Tomorrow, I am going to Raipur. Will reach Mumbai late tomorrow night.’

The conversation ended there. But Gowri was very bitter after it. He did not like the way the conversation went. He was definitely not used to this. How could someone question the authority of THE king? Nobody visited the branches without a prior discussion with him. Even Chander had followed that rigour. If he knew about and tacitly approved any location visits, before they were to happen, he could stage manage them to ensure that he is in complete control of what goes on during those site visits. His rulebook also assumed that nobody can have the guts to do things without his nod of approval and Amit had just managed to successfully get his goat!

All the product managers informed him before they travelled to any other location. Amit was setting a trend which he didn’t like. The self-appointed dictator decided that this had to be fixed before the other product managers also start doing their own thing.

That night, when Amit called up Chanda, he was not surprised at what he heard. ‘Gowri was furiously jumping up and down the floor throughout the day. He seemed like a maniac let loose! Something was definitely wrong. I couldn’t figure out what the reason was, but he was quite worked up.’ Amit kind of knew what had influenced his behaviour and felt gleefully manipulative.

Amit landed in Raipur the next morning. It was a short flight from Kolkata. The landing was rough. Earlier, the take-off was rough and the flight too had been quite bumpy. Ominous signs of an impending rough visit to a remote city. However, on landing there, he was pleasantly surprised to find that Raipur was a quaint city in eastern India – well maintained and clean. It was quite different from what he had expected to see.

Unfortunately, the taxi which was supposed to have picked him up did not arrive. Muttering a few inane abuses under his breath, he finally chose to hire a private cab. After hunting for over thirty minutes, he finally found one and managed to land at the NFS branch.

As he walked into the branch, blank, quizzical, irritated and amused looks greeted him. No one recognised him. It was his first visit. ‘I am here to see Ratnesh Jha,’ said Amit in a crisp voice to the customer service executive.

‘He has not come in today,’ said the man with the most mechanical and bored voice on earth. How was he to know who Amit was?

‘Why?’

‘Don’t know sir. I will just check.’ And he walked into the branch manager’s cabin.

‘Sir, Ratnesh hasn’t come in? There is someone asking for him? What should I tell him?’

‘Yaar, take down his number. We will call him back. Tell him that Ratnesh will come tomorrow. He has got stuck.’

‘
Hua kya sir
? What happened to him?’

‘Arre nothing. Some idiot is coming from Mumbai.
Uska boss hai
. Last night Gowri had called me. He wanted me to ask Ratnesh to stay at home and instead wanted me to meet this guy. That’s why he is chilling at home.’

‘Okay sir.’

‘And listen. Keep this to yourself.
Fizul mein naukri jayegi nahin toh
.’

The branch manager’s room was about fifteen feet from where Amit was standing. He couldn’t see Amit; else, he would have realised that he was indeed the guy from Mumbai. An even bigger folly was that he did not shut the door or keep his volume low when talking to the customer service executive. Amit heard every single word that he uttered.

To Amit’s maturity, he did not say anything. He did not even let the people in the branch know that he had heard all of it. If he had to battle this, he had to do it smartly. What’s the point in proving his superiority to the guys in the locations? He had to battle it out with Gowri.

The reality in NFS was staring him in his face. A hundred and fifty branches of NFS were spread across locations far and wide, but the entire branch network was completely and solely under Gowri’s stronghold. At all locations, the branch manager was the senior-most guy. All the product sales guys for car loans, two wheeler loans, and even mortgage loans implicitly or explicitly reported to the branch manager. This was a structure which allowed Gowri unparalleled access to and control on every business which even the business heads couldn’t exercise.

The question was to what extent would he be able to wean people away using his personal charisma? They would never listen to him. They would do only what the branch manager told them to do. And the branch manager would listen only to Gowri. They had been conditioned that way. Gowri was the godfather. Irrespective of what he said or did, the organisation structure was flawed and he knew that.

Today’s Raipur example was a case in point. The sales person for mortgages in Raipur knew that Amit was coming. Amit was the senior-most person in the mortgages business. However, Ratnesh decided to heed to the branch manager’s command. Things seemed to be crystal clear to Amit now. It couldn’t get more real than this. He had to do something. Sitting in Mumbai, there was no way he could get control over the sales teams unless he fixed Gowri. The proximity his sales teams had with the branch manager would only ensure that his authority over them gets diluted.

‘One battle at a time,’ he said to himself and walked into the branch manager’s cabin.

‘Hi! Amit from Mumbai. I am here to see Ratnesh.’

‘Oh sir, good morning.’ The BM got up from his chair and gave the most nervous handshake that Amit had ever encountered. He had not expected him to walk in so early. The realisation that Amit might have heard his conversation with his staff had not dawned on him yet.

Amit though was extremely nice and courteous to the branch manager. With an expression that made him look like he could never know what goes on in the dirty corridors of corporate power struggles, he sat down with the branch manager and patiently reviewed the market and its dynamics and NFS’ performance in the Raipur market. Never during his three hour discussion with the branch manager did he give any indication of the fact that he knew about the politics that was being played behind his back. After the review, he asked for and met folks from the debt recovery teams, the personal loan sales guys and also the customer service people at the branches. Apart from the branch manager, everyone else was quite happy to see him. The entire machinery through which the power-hungry Gowri operated seemed to be well-oiled. The nuts and bolts were in their places. ‘Okay,’ thought Amit, ‘. . . time to loosen up the first screw!’

‘When was the last time anyone from Mumbai came here to see you guys?’ He realised that no one from the head office had come and met them in ages and tried to needle the branch manager. Hadn’t he intentionally chosen one of the smallest markets for a review? He knew that no one would have visited the location in ages.

‘Kakkar sir was here about six months back.’

‘And Gowri?’

He came for the branch inauguration last year.’ And after a pause added, ‘We do regular reviews with him.’ The branch manager was beginning to get defensive.

‘I understand. However, a review over the phone is not as good as a visit. Do not worry, now you will have enough seniors coming in to check on the health of the branch.’ His parting remark left the branch manager sheepishly wondering if it was a threat or a compliment!

As he was leaving the branch, his mobile started beeping. It was Manish.

‘Hi Manish!’

‘Abe Amit,
kahan
? Raipur
mein hai?
’

‘Ya Manish. Just finished with the branch.’

‘When is your flight?’

‘Some time later.’

‘Will you do me a favour?’

‘Of course, tell me what do you want from here?’

‘I don’t want anything. I need you to do something for me. It will not take much time.’

‘OKAY.’

‘How well do you know Raipur?’

‘As well as one can get to know a city on his first visit.’

‘Okay. Understood. Look, Shanti Nagar is not too far from the branch. If you take an auto rickshaw from the branch, you will be in Shanti Nagar in ten minutes. In the Shanti Nagar main road, look for a big Nathu’s restaurant. You cannot miss it . . .’ and he gave him continuous instructions for the next three minutes after which he hung up.

‘I will call you if I get stuck,’ Amit had promised.

He was beginning to get excited. Unwittingly he had got an ace up his sleeve.

It took him a little over ninety minutes to finish the work which Manish had asked him to do. Post that, he headed to the Raipur airport and waited for his flight. From the airport shop, he picked up a copy of
If God was a Banker
. Flipping through the pages, he wondered whether the days of God being a banker were over? These days, bankers behave as if they were the Gods . . .

When the boarding announcement was made, he walked through the security check and boarded the waiting Jet Airways flight to Mumbai. He looked at his watch and noted that it was exactly 7.40 p.m. – two and half hours to Mumbai and another forty-five minutes to get home. By 11 p.m. he should be home. That meant another nine hours before he left for office. Any other professional would have been muttering abuses under his breath under such circumstances. However, Amit’s mind was a different place altogether. He was wondering how he would pass his time. His excitement guaranteed sleep deprivation. The wait for tomorrow was going to be excruciating . . . and tomorrow was fourteen hours away.