The Beautiful and the Damned (11 page)

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.

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 existed 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.

We were meeting at a shopping plaza just across the street from where I lived at the time, an odd mix of multinational franchises and run-down shops that was especially popular with young people who worked at call centres. Nambiar led me up the stairs to an Italian restaurant called Azzuro. It was quite empty: the call centre workers preferred the kathi roll stand around the corner or the T.G.I. Friday’s outlet across the square, and it was too early for the Western expats and upper-class Indians who liked the place.

Nambiar was a regular at Azzuro. The waiters knew him, as did the woman who ran the restaurant. He took off his sunglasses, ordered with a flourish and began telling me about his career with Planman. He had been a student at IIPM Delhi, joined the company on graduating and been put in charge of the media division almost immediately. He was twenty-three years old. Sutanu, whom I had met at the very beginning of my involvement with Arindam, was junior to him in the hierarchy of the company.

Arindam had put considerable thought into sending Nambiar to meet me. If his primary business was churning out management graduates, he had sent me his finest product, glistening and confident, someone who could compete effortlessly with the MBAs from IIM. Nambiar’s shaven head shone in the bright afternoon light coming in through the windows as he spoke about how he had negotiated with
Foreign Affairs
about bringing out an Indian edition (and although the effort had been unsuccessful, he had apparently impressed
Foreign Affairs
with his presentation, according to a friend who worked there). He didn’t know much about the content of the publication and didn’t think journalism was very interesting, but he liked marketing. He had travelled around the world with Arindam, and in a few weeks he would be leaving for Oxford, where he would do an MBA. When he returned, he expected to work at Planman again.

I asked him about Arindam’s conspicuous consumption, and he was delighted to give me the details. ‘The car?’ he said. ‘It’s a Bentley Continental four-door. Actually, he got it because of me. We were in London, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and I saw a Bentley parked outside this restaurant where I was having lunch with friends. I had one of them take a picture of me leaning on the hood of the Bentley with a glass of champagne in my hand.’ He laughed, waiting for the image to be fully processed in my brain. ‘It looked so cool, you know? Then I went to see Arindam at the Ritz, where he was staying. I was showing someone else the picture on my laptop, and he grabbed the laptop from me, looked at the picture, and said, “What kind of car is that? I’m going to get one.” ’

Arindam had another Bentley in Bombay, as well as a Jaguar
Sovereign. His wife, Rajita, drove a Porsche. Arindam’s mobile phone, a birthday gift from his wife, was a Vertu.

‘You don’t know what a Vertu is? Look it up on the Web,’ Nambiar said encouragingly.

I asked him if he could describe Arindam’s office for me.

‘Let me think,’ he said. ‘I’d say it has a nightclub in the daytime look.’

We laughed at this. Nambiar’s laughter had a double edge to it, containing the knowledge that he himself was too sophisticated to make such a mistake but also revealing his admiration for a man who had the money to flaunt his taste, no matter how questionable. He described for me the main chamber that had a fluorescent red leather couch curving around the wall, the shelves filled with management books and magazines. There was an anteroom to one side, containing a treadmill, a television and a pull-out sofa where Arindam’s son, Che, sometimes slept in the afternoon. The office floor had blue granite tiling, and the building itself had tinted blue glass. From the windows of Arindam’s office, Nambiar said, it was possible to see the Ernst & Young building on the left.

It sounded quite recognizably like Arindam’s office, and very much like his house, which had been written up in the pages of the
Hindustan Times
a few weeks earlier:

What gave Nambiar’s description a touch of virtual reality was the fact that Arindam’s office no longer existed. It had been closed down for violating zoning laws and survived only in the images created so expertly by Nambiar.

When I asked for the bill, the waiter said that it had already been taken care of by the manager.

‘She’s my girlfriend’s mother,’ Nambiar said.

‘That’s really too bad, because I was hoping to treat you.’

I told the waiter to bring me the bill, insisting that I would pay for lunch.

The waiter smiled and disappeared, while Nambiar looked surprised. I said something about journalistic ethics, but I could see that this made no sense to him. I was beginning to lose my temper, and I wondered why I was losing my temper. Who would really care if I let Nambiar’s girlfriend’s mother pay for lunch? Who would think that my honesty as a writer had been compromised because of this? Yet as I cornered the waiter again and forced him to bring the bill, I felt that I was beginning to lose my own self in this world of appearances and aspirations and that paying the bill was the only way I could return to steady ground.

After Nambiar had left, I walked around the shopping complex for a while. I came often enough to the shopping complex, sometimes with my two-year-old son. There was a group of street children who hung out near the fountain choked with rubbish, one of them a girl of ten or eleven with a baby in her arms. There were other forms of life surviving in the cracks of the marketplace, like the puppies that lived with their mother between the fountain and the cigarette shop and were given scraps of food by the vendors and security guards. My son was especially fond of the puppies, and a vendor asked me why I didn’t just take one home. ‘It’ll make your son happy,’ he said. ‘And at least one of these dogs will get a good life.’

But I didn’t think of any of this then. I thought instead of Nambiar’s confidence, and looked at myself in a shop window. I wondered why I didn’t have a suit, designer sunglasses and car keys. I wondered why I wasn’t making money at this time in India when moneymaking opportunities seemed to be everywhere for the asking. I was an aspirer, finally, oblivious to anything but my own inchoate desires, filled with a sense of victimization as well as a trembling awareness of opportunities that it was perhaps not too late to capitalize on. ‘I don’t like an image of me that isn’t me,’ Arindam had told me early on, anxious to clarify his essential self. And here was I, not liking the image of me that was me.

These thoughts stayed with me as I walked back home, but eventually they gave way to other considerations. I often wondered, in
the years that followed, if the papers would some day carry the news that Arindam’s empire had collapsed. Until that moment came, though – if it ever did – the advertisements would keep appearing, offering a background rhythm as I made my way into other lives and other stories. When I saw those advertisements, I would peer closely at Arindam’s face, as opaque and unfathomable as ever, and I would wonder whether I had ever known the man at all.

A society does not usually change direction with a sudden jolt. It alters course in incremental amounts, running small, secret simulations of experiments that achieve their full-scale elaboration only much later. Its project of transformation contains repeats and echoes, and it is always possible to trace earlier versions of an organization, a phenomenon, or even a person. That is what I began to think after my encounter with Arindam, when a niggling feeling of déjà vu started to take over, as if I had met an earlier version of him somewhere, and whose source I finally traced back to my first job, in the early nineties, in Calcutta.

The position had come to me after some hard years in the city, when unsuccessful job applications and humiliating interviews were punctuated with one-off ventures that paid little or no money. In a city that still contained the black-and-white corridors and alleyways tunnelling through the films of Satyajit Ray, I had been a black-and-white protagonist sweating rage, obsessively counting the change in my pocket to figure out just how far I could travel on a bus, or cursing the man who had called me for an interview and then cancelled the appointment without explanation. It was a relief to leave all that behind when, soon after my university examinations, I found work that involved travelling across the eastern flank of the city, past the tanneries of Chinatown and the mountainous Dhapa landfill, where sections of garbage set on fire sent up volcanic plumes of smoke, to a two-storey house in south Calcutta.