The Beautiful and the Damned (5 page)

One morning, Jabbar came to the hotel where I was staying. There was a coffee shop on the ground floor that was a popular meeting place for local journalists. They gathered there every morning for a couple of hours before heading to their newspaper offices or reporting beats, and Jabbar hoped to meet the journalists and hand out press releases about a compensation case coming up in the Supreme Court. Jabbar was popular with most of the local reporters, but his arrival
that morning was upstaged by the appearance of a former chief minister, a Congress politician.

A smooth, fair-skinned man with gold-framed glasses and big teeth, the politician entered with followers and a television crew in tow. The reporters, most of whom I knew and thought of as committed journalists, were suddenly transformed, laughing at every joke the politician made and hanging on to every statement of his – even though he had begun with the announcement that he had come not for a press conference but for an ‘intellectual’ exchange. When Jabbar approached the table, the politician greeted him affably, but none of the reporters had time for the badly typed press releases Jabbar had brought with him.

It was like watching a force field of power distorting all within its range, twisting the faces of the reporters. Jabbar sat in the shadows, towards the back, waiting for an opportune moment to hand out his press releases. It didn’t come. Instead, one of the politician’s followers, a man with the ostentatious caste marks of the Brahmin on his forehead, whispered that it was his birthday.

The politician laughed with delight. ‘We must celebrate,’ he said, rubbing his hands together.

Another minion stepped forward and announced that it was his birthday as well.

‘Even better,’ the politician said. He snapped his fingers. ‘Waiter, come here. Order birthday cakes from the pastry shop in the market.’

One of the reporters leaned forward and informed the politician that the birthday boys were vegetarians and that cakes would contain eggs as an ingredient.

‘Eggless cakes, then,’ the politician said, and the phrase ran like a refrain through the mouths of reporters and photographers, minions and waiters, as if the man had turned into Solomon solving, in an instant, the most fiendish of paradoxes.

Jabbar and I left just as the pink, eggless cakes arrived, borne high in the air by turbaned waiters and escorted to the table by a couple of the politician’s armed security guards. Outside, in the lunchtime chaos of rickshaws, scooters and cars, I remarked to Jabbar that his venture to the hotel had been in vain.

‘I’ll come back tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Eventually, they will look at the press releases and write about them. The politician will be gone in an hour, but I will always be around.’

It took me a long time after I left Bhopal to understand that Jabbar had been right. I understood that his slow, stubborn activism was as much a story of the new India as the frenetic milieu of the call centre workers I had written about earlier in the year. I grew increasingly interested in these apparent opposites – visibility and invisibility, past and present, wealth and poverty, quietism and activism – as I returned to India over the next few years and criss-crossed a landscape that was sometimes intimately familiar and sometimes completely unknown. I wanted to write about the lives of individuals: the urban and the rural; the rich, the middle class and the poor; men and women; the technology-driven work that is seen as symptomatic of the new India as well as the exhausting manual labour that is considered irrelevant.

In each case, I tried to get inside the details of the stories of individuals, and although my own opinions are clear enough, I have tried to give every person his or her say. I haven’t made anything up, but I am aware that I was the one who chose to pursue these characters and subjects and that my perspective may be as distorting as any, especially as I have chosen to tell only five stories from the countless stories available in a country of one billion people. In all cases but one, I have used real names for the main characters (there are a couple of minor characters whom I haven’t named or whose names have been changed, but this is indicated in the text). The only exception among the main characters is Esther, the young waitress portrayed in the final chapter, who asked me to protect her identity.

Inevitably, the process of working on this book turned out to be more complicated than I had assumed. It ended up taking nearly five years from reporting to writing, and India itself changed in some significant ways as I went about my work. Yet I hope this is ultimately a unified narrative, the story of a vast, fascinating and grotesquely unequal country, an account of people who, either as celebrated representatives of the new India or as statistical details of the other, old India, might be able to tell us who they really are.

A phenomenally wealthy Indian who excites hostility and suspicion is an unusual creature, a fish that has managed to muddy the waters it swims in. The glow of admiration lighting up the rich and the successful disperses before it reaches him, hinting that things have gone wrong somewhere. It suggests that beneath the sleek coating of luxury, deep under the sheen of power, there is a failure barely sensed by the man who owns that failure along with his expensive accoutrements. This was Arindam Chaudhuri’s situation when I first met him in 2007. He had achieved great wealth and prominence, partly by projecting an image of himself as wealthy and prominent. Yet somewhere along the way he had also created the opposite effect, which – in spite of his best efforts – had given him a reputation as a fraud, scamster and Johnny-come-lately.

We’ll come to the question of frauds and scams later, but it is indisputable that Arindam had arrived very quickly. It had taken him just about a decade to build his business empire, but because his rise was so swift and his empire so blurry, it was possible to be quite ignorant of his existence unless one were particularly sensitive to the tremors created by new wealth in India. Indeed, throughout the years of Arindam’s meteoric rise, I had been happily oblivious of him, although once I had heard of him, I began to see him everywhere: in the magazines his media division published, flashing their bright colours and inane headlines at me from little news-stands made out of
bricks and plastic sheets; in buildings fronted by dark glass where I imagined earnest young men imbibing the ideas of leadership disseminated by Arindam; and on the tiny screen in front of me on a flight from Delhi to Chicago when the film I had chosen for viewing turned out to have been produced by him. A Bombay gangster film, shot on a low budget, with a cast of unknown, modestly paid actors and actresses: was it an accident that the film was called
Mithya?
The word means ‘lies’.

Still, I suppose we choose our own entanglements, and when I look back at the time in Delhi that led up to my acquaintance with Arindam, I realize that my meeting with him was inevitable. It was my task that summer to find a rich man as a subject, about the making and spending of money in India. In Delhi, there existed in plain sight some evidence of what such making and spending of money amounted to. I could see it in the new road sweeping from the airport through south Delhi, turning and twisting around office complexes, billboards and a granite-and-glass shopping mall on the foothills of the Delhi Ridge that, when completed, would be the largest mall in Asia. Around this landscape and its promise of Delhi as another Dubai or Singapore, I could see the many not-rich people and aspiring-to-be rich people, masses of them, on foot and on two-wheelers, packed into decrepit buses or squeezed into darting yellow-and-black auto-rickshaws, people quite inconsequential in relation to the world rising around and above them. The beggar children who performed somersaults at traffic lights, the boys displaying menacing moustaches inked on to their faces, made it easy to tell who the rich were amid this swirling mass. The child acrobats focused their efforts at the Toyota Innova minivans and Mahindra Scorpio SUVs waiting at the crossing, their stunted bodies straining to reach up to the high windows.

I felt that such scenes contained all that could be said about the rich in India, and the people I took out to expensive lunches offered me little more than glosses on the above. Mittal, Ambani, Dabur, Swarovski crystals, gold-plated toilets, stud farms, nightclubs, private aircraft. They sounded boring, unlike Arindam, who seemed a little different, with images and contradictions swirling around him:
ponytail, controversy, management guru, bloggers, business school, magazines, Bollywood movies.

‘I’ve spoken to the boss about you,’ Sutanu said. ‘But the boss said, “Why does he want to meet me?” ’

Sutanu ran the media division in Arindam’s company. We met at Flames, an ‘Asian Resto-Bar’ up a steep flight of steps with a forlorn statue of Buddha tucked away in the corner, the view from the restaurant opening out to sanitary-goods stores, franchise eating outlets and large cars being squeezed into minuscule spaces by scruffy parking attendants. Sutanu was in his forties, a dark man with thick, clumpy hair parted to one side, a bushy moustache and glasses, his raffish 1960s air complemented by a bright-blue shirt and a red tie patterned with elephants. He was accompanied by Rahul, a studious-looking young man in kurta and jeans who worked at one of the magazines published by the company. Although they couldn’t have been there long, their table gave an impression of a party that had been in progress through the morning and had peaked. It held two packs of Navy Cut cigarettes, a partly empty bottle of Kingfisher beer and a battered smartphone with a black-and-white screen that rang out in insistent drumbeats throughout our conversation.

‘The boss is a great man, and sure, his story is interesting,’ Sutanu said. ‘The question is whether he’ll talk to you.’

From what Sutanu told me that afternoon, Arindam was very much a man of the times. He had started out in 1996 with a lone business school called the Indian Institute of Planning and Management. Founded by Arindam’s father, it had been – Sutanu said dismissively – a small, run-of-the-mill place located on the outskirts of Delhi. But Arindam had expanded it into nine branches in most of the major Indian cities, and he was now going international. He had an institute in Dubai, had tied up with a management school in Belgium with campuses in Brussels and Antwerp, was opening an institute in London by the end of the year, and would have another one in the United States, in an old factory building in Pennsylvania. And that was just the management institute. Arindam’s company, Planman, had a media division that included a newsweekly,
The Sunday Indian
, ‘perhaps the
only magazine in the world with thirteen editions’. There were three business magazines, a software company, a consulting division that managed the ‘HR component of multinationals’, and a small outsourcing company. The outsourcing company was small only because it was new, but it already did the entire online content of the
Guardian
as well as the proofreading and copy-editing of the
Daily Mail
.

‘There’s also a film division, and he’s produced a major Bollywood blockbuster,’ Sutanu said.

‘It was meant to be a blockbuster,’ Rahul said quietly. ‘But it flopped.’

‘Yeah, yeah, no big deal,’ Sutanu said. ‘He’s on other blockbuster projects. He’s a man of ideas. So sometimes they flop.’ He lit a cigarette and waved it around, the rings on his hand flashing. ‘What he’s doing, he’s using intellectual capital to make his money. But people don’t get that and because he’s been bad-mouthed so much, he’s become suspicious. He’s been burned by the media. You know, cynical hacks they are. They make up stories that he’s a fraud. A Johnny-come-lately. Everyone asks, “Yaar, but where does all that money come from?” ’

There was a moment of silence as we contemplated this question.

‘They don’t ask these things of other businessmen,’ Sutanu continued. ‘That’s because when the mainstream media does these negative stories on him, just hatchet jobs you know, they’re serving the interests of the big industrialists. The industrialists don’t like him because our magazines have done critical stories on them. The government doesn’t like him and harasses him all the time. They say, “You can’t use the word ‘Indian’ in the name of your management school because we don’t recognize your school.” That it’s forbidden in the constitution to use “Indian” in the name of an educational institution unless it’s been approved by the government. Something like that. They send us a letter every six months about this. Then, the elite types are after him. The Doon School, St Stephen’s, Indian Institute of Management people. There were these bloggers – a
Business Today
journalist and a man who worked for IBM – who started writing silly stuff about him, saying that the institute doesn’t give every student a laptop as promised in the advertisements. You want
to know how he makes money? It’s simple. There are two thousand students who pay seven lakhs
¹
each. The operating costs are low – you know how much teachers get paid in India. So the money gets spun off into other businesses.’

We ate hot and sour soup and drank more beer, our conversation widening out into discussions about careers, lives and the unforgiving city of Delhi. Rahul, who had been a television journalist, told us a story about covering the war in Iraq and being arrested by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard while crossing over the border from Jordan.

When it was time to depart, I felt reluctant to break up the drunken afternoon bonhomie. Nevertheless, I asked, ‘When do I get to meet Arindam Chaudhuri?’

‘The good thing about the boss is that he’s a yes or no sort of person,’ Sutanu replied. ‘You’ll find out in a couple of days whether he wants to meet you.’

The couple of days stretched into a week. Now that my interest in Arindam had grown, it was hard to miss his presence. Every newspaper and magazine I came across carried a full-page advertisement for the management school, with Arindam’s photograph displayed prominently in the ads. It was the face of the new India caught in close-up view. His hair was swept back in a ponytail, dark and gleaming against a pale, smooth face, his designer glasses accentuating his youthfulness. He wore a blue suit in the picture, and his teeth were exposed in the kind of bright, white smile I associated with American businessmen and evangelists. But instead of looking directly at the reader, as businessmen and evangelists tend to do to assure people of their trustworthiness, Arindam was gazing at a distant horizon, as if along with the business he was promoting, there was some other elusive goal on his mind.