India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (2 page)

Captain Gopinath offers me a cold beer. As he prises off the bottle-top, the whoosh of gas disturbs Leo, his one-year-old Labrador, who looks up alarmed from the pillow of his big black paws. Seeing all is calm, he returns to his slumbers, nodding off at his master’s feet to the rhythmic buzz of insects around the poolside light.

It’s close to ten o’clock. We’re sitting on the paved garden terrace of Captain Gopinath’s heritage-status bungalow. The night has crept in on us, stealthily, the glow of a million street-lamps cheating the evening of a graceful farewell. My host apologises for the time. It’s been back-to-back meetings all week. Tomorrow morning, he’s leaving for a business trip to the US. Another round of funding. ‘But now, now’s good,’ he says. ‘So let’s talk.’

I expected him to have a commanding presence, but his demeanour is modest and his tone warm. Legs crossed, he is dressed in an ankle-length dhoti. The cotton garment is entirely white but for a narrow navy line running along the trim. His back is impeccably straight, a throwback to his army days as a younger man. He slowly strokes his greying moustache. His other hand reaches into a bowl of masala chips.

The house is located down an exclusive cul-de-sac just off Vittal Mallya Road in central Bengaluru. The ambient noise is remarkably hushed, as if the tree-lined garden were somehow soundproofed. The grand, two-storey building looks squat beside the towering apartment blocks that now surround it. Captain Gopinath is a recent arrival to the neighbourhood and has just given the house a tasteful refit. Inside, thriving ferns stand tall in empty corners and loom behind sofas like the feathers on a peacock. The presence of so much greenery gives back to the listed building something of its original colonial feel.

Captain Gopinath – ‘Please, call me Gopi’ – is in ebullient mood. A recital of his favourite Carnatic folk music earlier that evening has warmed his senses. He directs our discussion to the content of his bookshelves. ‘My father was a published poet, did you know?’ Since his student days, he’s cherished a fondness for Tolstoy and the Russian greats. Emerson’s essays. Mandela’s
Long Walk to Freedom
. Tagore, of course. No management books, though. Only a few biographies of business people that he particularly admires. Vernacular authors occupy a section to themselves. At school, he was taught in the regional Kannada language. His daughter, on the other hand, is studying English literature at Liverpool University. Both facts are points of pride for the one-time village boy.

‘But you haven’t come to natter about books. What is it you would like to know?’ he says, reaching for his own glass of beer.

Gopi’s colourful curriculum vitae is already well known to me from his autobiography. A recent best-seller,
Simply Fly
sticks faithfully to the rags-to-riches storyline: started out with nothing (born into a remote village in Karnataka, Brahmin parents educated but penniless, walked to school), escaped his fate (winning a place at the distinguished National Defence Academy, joining the army, rising up the ranks, fighting in the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971), had an early-life crisis (injured in a climbing accident, bedridden, much spiritual soul-searching, resigning his papers, buying a motorbike, travelling the US and India), found his purpose (becoming a farmer, getting into debt, getting out of debt,
finding a wife, winning acclaim as a silkworm cultivator), changed direction (setting up a motorbike dealership, buying a small hotel, establishing a stockbrokerage firm, launching an agricultural consultancy, running for public office), took a risk (moving to Bengaluru, purchasing a helicopter, purchasing another, starting to ferry rich clients around), struck on a good idea (pioneering low-cost flying, opening new routes to small towns, taking on the big boys, becoming India’s largest domestic airline), and made his millions (selling up, pocketing a fortune). And, come the closing chapter, India’s aspiring classes have themselves a modern-day hero: the self-made man, the archetypal Indian entrepreneur.

A smartly attired houseboy appears from the shadows with two hot chicken kati rolls. My host waves towards the cutlery. ‘You must try the dhal too,’ he insists, pushing a small bowl of lentil paste across the glass-topped table towards me.

I had arrived at the electric gate of Gopi’s home with two parallel images of the successful Indian entrepreneur. The first finds its origin in real life. From India’s rich list, in fact. Men – they are predominantly men – like steel tycoon Lakshmi Mital, planetary industrialist Mukesh Ambani and his sibling Anil, and beverage giant Vijay Mallya. Cut-throat deals and takeover bids occupy their days. Rich food and private clubs, their nights. They are the rough-handed, handsomely attired heirs of Old India, cast into the New with weapons of wealth and patronage, confidence and contacts. Every bit as imperious as the most powerful of the maharajas who preceded them, they are the Entrepreneur Monarchs.

The second image owes even less claim to reality. Its voice is that of the bustling marketplace, its stride that of modern India. It finds its essence in Balram Halwai, the fictional owner of a Bengaluru-based taxi firm. My introduction to him came via Aravand Adiga, in his fast-paced novel
The White Tiger
. The son of a rickshaw-puller and a one-time chauffeur, Adiga’s creation is frank and ambitious, street-smart and irreverent. He is also a murderer. He slits the throat of his employer Ashok, and pockets a suitcase of his money to get his foot on the business ladder. It’s not the crime that dominates my mental picture of Balram, but
his hunger: a hunger to escape his social confines, to move up in the world, to break out of the prison of poverty in which his birth has trapped him. He is the entrepreneur who longs to be rich so that he may no longer be poor. He is the one I see staring back at me from the traffic lights, eyes filled with hurt and hate and vengeance. He is the Famished Entrepreneur.

Gopi’s ease has disarmed me. His hospitable welcome, the singular way in which he looks me in the eye as he talks, the absence of flash cars in his driveway, the works of local artists on his walls, the fact his wife runs a bakery – all speak of a different character from those occupying my imagination.

Then my memory triggers a phrase from his autobiography. I read it back to him from my notebook. ‘My story is the story of New India.’ The words had sounded trite when I first read them, an all-too-obvious trope scripted by his marketing people. I ask if he might flesh out the phrase in his own words. What does it mean to him?

India’s Mr Ryanair sits forward, suddenly animated. His homeland, maybe for historical reasons, whatever, has always been a ‘diffident country’, he explains. When he set up Air Deccan in 2003, India was emerging as a new nation. ‘You could feel it, you could touch it.’ He grabs at the air, clenching his fist and turning his wrist as he does so. ‘It was vibrant, resurgent. There was a spring in its step. These were all things that were not there earlier.’

He talks quickly, in soft, precise English. After a brief pause, he recollects an experience to illustrate his point.

‘I remember once driving through one of the villages close to my farm. I found a board in the centre of the village saying “Computer School”. So I parked up. I found a young guy there from the village, who had done his diploma in computer science. He hadn’t found a job when he graduated so he’d started a school. Running a business doesn’t seem odd because of examples like this. The vision of business as a preserve of the rich, of privilege – it’s changing.’

I enjoy the anecdote. It turns out that he has a cupboard-load of them. He reaches into the drawer and pulls out another. This
one also features a journey, on this occasion by helicopter. He was flying over a village in a nearby rural district when he saw something glinting in the sun below, dozens of silver pools refracting the light. His curiosity piqued, he dropped down to get a closer look. Could I guess what it was? I couldn’t, eh? They were TV-dish antennas, dozens of them. Star TV, Tata Sky, Airtel Digital, Sun Direct, all now inextricably built into India’s rural landscape. Could I believe it? ‘Oh my God,’ I thought at that moment. ‘This is a different country.’

The fact that things are changing is not lost on me. Anyone who arrives in Bengaluru International Airport cannot escape the fact. Fifteen years ago, I had rocked up in the same city on an overnight train from Chennai. Back then, travel was, almost by definition, a hot and time-consuming experience. But it was one you shared with millions of others, which, in a sense, made it endurable, even enjoyable. Today, for many new arrivals to Bengaluru, the grit and grime have gone. They drop in from the sky on cheap chartered planes and taxi up to a shimmering terminus. ‘Welcome to Karnataka: the knowledge hub of Asia,’ a huge advertising hoarding in Arrivals tells them. ‘700+ MNCs [multinational corporations] have reaped Karnataka’s abundance,’ another proclaims.

‘But, tell me, how does your story in particular reflect this new India?’ I ask, trying to move the conversation on to more personal ground.

By ‘your’, however, he hears ‘Air Deccan’. In that sense the two stories are symbiotic. India is a country of a billion or more hungry people, he continues. At the same time, it can be seen as a billion or more hungry customers. That’s what the TV dishes taught him. In the future, India will have just one class: the consumer.

Cue his big idea: modern people like to fly; what they need is a low-cost model to help them do so.

Within four months of his inaugural flight, he was presiding over India’s largest airline. His fleet of aircraft expanded by a plane per month throughout the first four years. It quickly became, to
use the former army captain’s own words, ‘a massive business’. More than that, it proved the precursor of a gigantic industry. India’s no-frills airlines now transport over fifty million passengers per year, more than the entire population of Spain. Many of them have never flown before.

There’s a metaphor here, surely? A symbol of the nation taking off? I put the suggestion to the aviation pioneer.

He responds with another anecdote. Again, it is travel-related, this time about a passenger on a flight from Delhi to Bengaluru. ‘She was an uneducated lady. As we were disembarking, she recognised me from my picture in the in-flight magazine. She looked towards the cockpit and pointed to the pilot in the seat. Then she quoted a passage from the Ramayana. The bit when the Hanuman carries a mountain in his hand . . .’

I look quizzical.

‘ . . . Hanuman, you know?’

I nod. The Hindu deity, a loyal defendant of Sri Lord Rama and avatar of Shiva.

‘Well, because he was so powerful, he was sent to a mountain in the Himalayas to get a life-restoring herb. Lakshmana, the companion of Ram, was unconscious and had to be revived. But Hanuman didn’t know which herb to take, so he took the whole mountain instead . . .’ Quick thinking.

I nod again.

‘. . . The woman made a sign like this . . .’

He cups his hand, as if weighing up a juicy melon at the market.

‘. . . All the old calendars and pictures show Hanuman like this, flying with the mountain in his hand. She imagined that scene. And she kept telling me the pilot who was flying the plane was like Hanuman . . .’

I find myself smiling. There is something of the raconteur about this inveterate entrepreneur. He speaks with his facial muscles as much as his larynx. Storytelling comes naturally to him.

The memory of the old lady prompts him to recall other notable passengers. The Dalai Lama tops his list. Tibet’s spiritual leader used to fly regularly from the base of his exiled government
in Dharamsala to the Indian capital, Delhi. In fact, a photograph of the beaming monk sitting by the emergency exit appears in Air Deccan’s early publicity materials.

The village-boy-turned-entrepreneur has a vignette or phrase for all the famous people with whom he’s crossed paths: the Indian guru Sai Baba (‘He has his little kingdom’), British entrepreneur Richard Branson (‘He had a notebook and he kept writing and writing’), and
Men are From Mars
author John Gray (‘He was crazy for temples and swamis’).

I ask about the celebrity businessman Vijay Mallya. The question brings the line of conversation to a sudden stop. The brewing magnate happens to live next door to Gopi’s bungalow. It’s his father’s name that’s attached to the main road at the end of the street. Gopi and Mallya’s back gardens meet. Their minds, however, do not.

By late 2007, the dreams of the cheap-flights pioneer were taking a nosedive. Competition had grown fierce. Air Deccan pilots and engineers were deserting to rival companies. Passengers were migrating. The airline needed more planes. Gopi needed more money to buy them. For months, Mallya had been making overtures towards him. The Air Deccan founder recounts the ‘awe’ he felt on entering his palatial home to discuss a possible deal. But for Gopi, a merger was a non-starter. Mallya wanted too much control. Old Money India, the ex-army officer foresaw, would quickly swallow the New. The Kingfisher boss promised otherwise. With losses of one crore (ten million) rupees a day, Gopi’s room for manoeuvre was shrinking. Then the Indian stock market crashed. Reluctantly, the aviation entrepreneur sold his stake.

The businessman in him rationalises events as best he can. ‘The market was white-hot,’ he says. ‘I didn’t have the right to gamble on other people’s money.’ Captain Gopinath, the self-made man, is still smarting though. In person, Mallya is ‘charming, very generous’, he admits. In business, forget it. ‘He becomes a very different man. He is very clear about what he wants to do.’ And it didn’t involve poor Gopi. Air Deccan was subsumed and the airline’s founder sidelined. Just as predicted.

It does not require a military strategist to have seen the ugly end of the Kingfisher–Deccan ‘alliance’. Culturally, the men are miles apart. Mallya, the Entrepreneur Monarch, is not for sharing. Overweight and over-the-top, the millionaire’s son revels in his self-concocted image as ‘King of the Good Times’. For the price of a small regal state, he has pegged his whisky brand to a Premier League cricket team (‘Royal Challengers’) and his philosophy to a Formula One team (‘Force India’).