Arty Party

From childhood I was a recluse. I preferred assembling my Meccano set to going out and playing with other children. This continued in my adult life, too. I would sit in my college library and spend all my non-class hours reading up on various serious subjects. My working life followed the same pattern. Evenings would be spent reading from the scriptures or books on philosophy.

Two years back I started subscribing to six daily newspapers. Initially I would discard the supplement pages without even a glance. Then out of curiosity I started seeing the photographs of well-dressed people who generally seemed to be having a lot of fun. As days progressed I found that I would read the supplement first. I got a vicarious thrill seeing the same people being featured day after day. Somehow, I started getting a feeling of emptiness in life. Something seemed to be missing. I had this sudden urge to be with that crowd.

I consulted an old class-mate (now a corporate head honcho but nicknamed Rowdy in college), whom I went to every time I needed advice. Oh, you want to be part of the P3 crowd, he asked? I had never heard of that term before. He told me that there were two easy ways of getting in. I should join a Wine Society or an Art Society. I was a bit shocked at the first suggestion as the strongest drink I had till date was a cola. Plus, I found that I would have to buy at least ten bottles of expensive imported wine every year to retain my membership. The other suggestion was more to my liking. Unfortunately, my only links with art were cheap reprints of amateur paintings of the Eiffel Tower and India Gate respectively.

On my friend’s suggestion I joined a course called “The Science of Art appreciation”. In addition to Early, Medieval and Post-Medieval Art, this course offered Western and European art - modern and classical. Chinese, Japanese and South East Asian Art. At the end of the course I took part in a slide identification examination to evaluate the observation power of the students and their newly acquired knowledge. I was now armed with a very artistic looking certificate. The course also included free membership of the Neo-Artistic Society of South India.

I started receiving invitations to art exhibitions almost every week. Most of these were in the banquet halls of five star hotels. This would be followed by a cheese and wine session (so I had the added bonus of being a wine consumer gratis).Today, I can stare at a mediocre painting and spout such extravagances as “This artist paints with an enormous capacity for absolute empathy; a complete identification of himself with the figures he paints. He sets forth what it feels like to do something; not what somebody looks like doing it."

Life’s good!

Taxi,taxiiiii....

It was heartening to read in the press that our very own Ambassador car was voted the best taxi in the world, though one would not agree with it if one had the misfortune to take a rickety one in Kolkata. Over the years, I have travelled in taxis in several countries right from a Maruti 800 to an obscenely ostentatious Lincoln stretch limo. The experience varied from place to place.

I love getting in to conversation with taxi drivers. Unfortunately, my pseudo ‘Burra Sahib’ ego stops me from sitting in the front passenger seat. However, this does not prevent me from holding unfettered discussions with the cabbie. I suppose that being cooped up in the front seat the whole day, the driver also craves for some banter.

Taxi drivers in Singapore do not encourage idle gossip. The distances are short and they are already looking for the next passenger. They return your change exactly and are on their way. So is the average London cab driver. He is polite but the way the taxi is designed, there is no way one can have a proper dialogue. The private taxis in the UK are slightly different from the London cabs. On my first visit, there was this smart guy in a black suit with a board with my name. I presumed that he was a senior executive or the owner of the taxi company. I later found out that this was the standard uniform for these drivers.

The China cabs are a bit funny. The driver sits inside a fibreglass cage. I was quite puzzled until I was told that it was to protect the driver from a possible car-jack.Apart from this, of course, is the language barrier. At the airport, they help you with a diagram to your destination that you hand over to the driver. So, until the destination there is no conversation.

Australia has an interesting cauldron of ethnic mixture in its taxi drivers.I have been driven by cabbies from Egypt,Lebanon,CIS countries and ,off course,our very own Indian boys.Most of the Indian drivers are students,mostly from Punjab and Haryana.They take up part-time cab driving to take care of their living expenses.

In the US, things are a bit different. It is not in every city that you get a proper city cab. New York is a good example to chat with drivers as they are invariably from the Punjab (it does not matter from which side of the border). I have had a tête-à-tête in my poor Hindi about Bollywood films, the popular stars and their personal lives. In Detroit, I had a Pakistani driver. He was a qualified doctor from a proper medical college in Lahore. His was an arranged marriage with a US citizen and so relocated. Poor guy could not practice in his new country. He revealed to me that unlike Asian doctors, the US medics would never come to a quick diagnosis, in spite of clear symptoms, for fear of medical malpractice suits. There were times when the local doctors consulted him for his opinion.

However, in India itself there are varieties of taxis. The most ‘dented-and-not-painted’ ones are in Kolkata. In the seventies right in Park Street, my driver parked his car, got out and joined a morcha that was passing by. I looked silly sitting in the back seat not knowing when I would reach my destination.

One danger of becoming too familiar with the cabbie is that you end up being morally bound to be generous with the tip. Nevertheless, that is a small price to pay in return for some verbal stimulation.

Life of crime

For several years my wife has led a life of leisure, with most of her domestic work being handled by hired help. Every now and then, to make herself relevant she gets in to her house-spring-cleaning mode. I dread this because generally my belongings are her target to jettison.

Recently she unearthed from the loft a large plastic bag containing assorted items and confronted me with that. Initially I was inclined to follow Emraan Hashmi in “Ghanchakkar” and claim temporary amnesia about the contents. Instead, I decided to pursue the manly route a la John Abraham in “Shootout at Wadala” and took the flashback path to narrate my life of crime.

Like any criminal I started off in a small way. A few months in to my working life, I got a chance to travel on official work to Delhi. The hotel where I stayed was beyond anything that I had experienced. On the last day I gathered courage and put the hotel stationery in the room in my briefcase. My heart skipped several beats till I was ensconced in the safe confines of the taxi taking me to the airport.

After that I was like a shark who had tasted blood. Stationary was passé. I graduated to soap, shampoo and body lotion. As I went up the ladder and began staying at better class of hotels, the first thing I did after entering my hotel room was to check out the items ripe for the picking. Back home my collection increased to toothbrushes, combs, sewing kits, laundry bags, shoe shiners, shoehorns and a variety of ball pens. The housekeeping staff at the Trump Hotel, New York must still be mystified at the sudden disappearance of a bathrobe from one of the rooms.

I went out of control when I started my overseas travel. Anything ‘foreign or imported’ had a different aura. The airline cutlery was particularly tempting. There are still some of them being used in our home even today. Unfortunately, nowadays airlines are taking the safer route of plastic items that are not worth pilfering.

One mystery that I have not been able to solve occurred nearly forty years back. Our company CEO was on a visit to Bangalore and invited a few of the staff to a five star hotel in High Grounds. I was a staunch teetotaler those days. However, my boss convinced me that Bloody Mary was just a spicy tomato juice. I loved the taste and soon finished six of those. We then went upstairs to the Chinese restaurant for dinner. Next morning on waking up in my bachelor pad I had no recollection about what had transpired the previous night. I also had no clue how I had become a proud possessor of a red and white checked napkin that was wrapped around a set of shiny fork, knife and spoon with the hotel name engraved on them. To compound this further, there was also an unwrapped roll of toilet paper.

Today, I am a reformed criminal. But there are times when temptation mocks me. Like when I visited Barcelona…

The Rise and Fall of Satyam

In an interview with Business Standard published a year ago, Vineet Nayyar, Chairman, Mahindra Satyam (now Tec h Mahindra) says that for him, “Ramalinga Raju is a ‘Tragic Hero’ who plotted his downfall step by step and while people commit crime out of greed, Raju did it ‘out of pride’.”

He is spot on. To understand this, one must go back in to the mid-nineties when the company was so small that it ranked a lowly No. 14 in DataQuest’s ranking of Indian IT companies. When I joined Satyam in 1996 I was shocked that the company treated its Annual Report so light-heartedly that it printed copies on cheap news print with lot of typos.

The wisest decision that Satyam took was in going all out for the Y2K bonanza. This is where TCS, Infosys and Satyam benefited but Wipro and HCL lost out because they looked down on that business. We added marquee names, particularly in the US Healthcare and Insurance business that allowed the company to ramp up rapidly. In addition, the GE business, though of low margin, added value to the brand. By 2000 we were on a roll and risen up the rankings. The mood in the company was upbeat. Even after Y2K, the company did succeed in holding back some of the clients for more value added services.

However, the organization structure did not really allow for high growth. Satyam was like a loosely put-together federation. We had the core management with several Strategic Business Units (SBU) and a few subsidiaries. Some of the senior managers had joined the company from larger companies when Raju was still finding his feet. They tended to throw their weight around particularly at the monthly Executive Council meetings. In fact, at some of the EC meetings I attended it was embarrassing to watch the Chairman of the company being harangued by a few of the SBU heads. Raju used to accept this with some equanimity as he needed these managers more than they needed him. However, it was also true that some of them were conveniently using the Satyam name and money to further their own ambitions.

Some of the SBUs were also city centric with the result the heads were like czars zealously guarding their fiefdom. In fact, a popular tale was that one SBU head would not allow staff from any other city to come to his office without prior permission from him. Whenever I had a press release published in the media the same SBU head used to regularly crack a joke that I was hired to keep the Satyam stock price up. In fact, even the corporate HR department could not implement a lot of its plans as the SBUs and subsidiaries recruited their own HR heads. In theory they reported to the corporate HR but in practice the local HR person listened only to the SBU head.

However, in the flush of the Y2K bonanza a lot of these issues were swept under the carpet. But, even then a lot of business opportunities were lost because of internecine issues. In 1997 the techies at one SBU had developed an internet-based product called SearchPad that was well ahead of its time and a great product. SearchPad combined artificial intelligence and pattern recognition concepts to provide a personalized information filtering system. Imagine, at that time Google was not even a gleam in the eye.

Unfortunately, ego hassles between the SBU head and the head of Satyam’s sales & marketing prevented the company from putting all its might behind the product launch. Eventually, a junior person in the SBU, who was still wet behind the ears, was entrusted with the global sales. The product bombed. A real pity as I was involved in holding an intra-company competition for the product name and also for the global media release. My firm view is that Indian IT companies do not have the resources nor the bandwidth to market consumer technology products on a global scale. Satyam would have earned millions of dollars if it had sold the technology to a multinational IT company instead of trying to market it on its own.

The subsidiaries were a drain on the resources as the investment in setting them up was pretty high but the income generated was nothing to write home about. In fact, at one stage Financial Institutions and major investors were pushing for these subsidiaries to be sold, closed down or merged with the parent company as it was affecting the valuation of Satyam. Eventually this was done but it was too late.

One subsidiary that has an interesting story was Satyam Infoway. This case also revealed the visionary element that lurked somewhere in Raju. In the early nineties, Raju was convinced that people, wherever in the world they were located, looking for information on any subject should be able to call one telephone number and get that information. To this end he set up a small office in Secunderabad and hired a retired librarian with a PhD (Raju had great regard for people with doctorates and hired several of them later) whose job was to gather information. By 1995 the Internet Age was in the nascent stage, but Raju recognizing the potential hired a senior professional to relook at the whole business. Thus, Sify was evolved and created an internet revolution in India. Unfortunately, the subsidiary had to be sold much later because of pressure from major institutional investors.

But the saddest case was one about a product called VisionCompass, a web enabled EPM tool developed by Satyam. The product helped an organization put in place a measurement system that tracked and monitored its performance. It was considered far superior to the then popular Balanced Scorecard. This was a product developed from Raju’s obsession with the idea that performances at all levels across any organization could be measured in numbers. The idea was okay but he drove the technical development team crazy for almost two years. He would keep changing the brief at every monthly progress meeting. This resulted in a huge cost overrun. Finally, even a subsidiary was set up in the US with a highly paid American CEO. The first thing he did was change the look and feel of the product. This resulted in more delays. Eventually, the product bit the dust. Financial Institutions forced Raju to close the subsidiary. Overall the company spent over $100 million on VisionCompass but the income from it was zilch.

Post Y2K, the business environment had changed and IT companies had to look at more value added services to retain clients or bid for new ones. Ideally, Satyam should have exploited the situation to keep up its pace of growth. Unfortunately, some of the management changes that Raju made did not really produce the results expected by him.

Raju always felt that to sell in global markets a company needed to hire locals at a senior level. In 1998 Raju hired an American as the global head of sales and marketing. He was highly experienced and a go-getter. Unfortunately, the system brought him down. Culturally, the senior managers based in India could not (or would not) adjust to his style of working. Some of the SBUs wanted to sell directly to prospective customers instead of going through the US based sales & marketing department. This caused a lot of confusion. Three years later the sales head left the company. Another cultural shock for India based executives was the US designation of ‘Director’. Actually, that designation referred to nothing more than a Manager in Indian terms. However, whenever someone in the US was given the designation of Director it raised a red flag here and caused a lot of heartburn.

Another senior management recruitment that caused a lot of angst was that of a person who was brought in as Executive Vice President, the highest designation after Raju and his brother Rama Raju. In Raju’s true style he did not want this designation to be made public, but obviously that was not possible. He was later made the COO which again was not made public. This issue caused me some amount of embarrassment. After the ADR listing on NYSE in 2001 I released to the press a group photograph of the senior management taken on Wall Street. Below the photograph was mentioned the names and designation of the people. This manager had given me his business card that clearly mentioned his designation as COO. At 5 am in New Jersey, where I was visiting after the listing, I was woken up by a call from Raju asking me how that had happened. I was puzzled as I did not understand what he was referring to.

Finally, he told me about the issue. Apparently all the business heads in India were up in arms when they came to know that this particular executive had been secretly given the designation of COO. They came to know about this only after seeing the photograph published in the Indian dailies. This person was an egoist. He once told me that at all Satyam functions he should be given the front row seat next to the Rajus. He was later elevated to the Board of Satyam and had to leave the country in a hurry when the scam broke.

More or less this was the stage when Satyam’s growth slowed down.

Midlife crisis

When Elliott Jaques coined the term ‘midlife crisis’ he must have had me in mind. Some years back at that critical stage in my life I began to question where I was heading; had I reached that point where I wanted to be; or simply put, was I a washout?

The lack of excitement in my working life seemed to be the problem. To my wife’s horror I chucked up a comfortable job and embarked on a journey to ‘discover’ my true self. Easier said than done.

A classmate in engineering college now ran a tabloid. His admiration for my writing capability was based on the wall newspaper I published in our hostel. When he offered me a job I was hoping to become a sports correspondent which would get me a ringside seat at cricket matches gratis. I ended up as a cultural critic.

The first assignment was an arangetram. My knowledge of any dance form was restricted to The Twist, Rock ‘n’ Roll and whatever Hema Malini espoused about Bharatha Natyam in a leading film magazine. At the auditorium, pretending to be knowledgeable I followed suit whenever my neighbour clapped. From the speeches it seemed that the guru was pretty famous and the dancer her favourite pupil, which presumably she claimed at the arangetram of all her students.

Back in office I just paraphrased all that was written in the glossy brochure and wracked my brain to add something original, too. The next day the office was invaded by an irate parent. I never realized that my innocent sentences that read, “The dancer looked somewhat ‘healthy’. Probably a reduced intake of carbohydrates would enable her to balance herself better when on one leg,” would cause such a furore. Result: immediate transfer as culinary correspondent.

Assigned to cover a newly opened French restaurant I looked forward to the free      food .After being seated at the designated table, a gentleman whom I deduced to be the steward came and introduced himself in French. I just smiled as I could not comprehend what he said in his nasal twang. I could not decipher the menu either so I just pointed a finger at two listings: le cassoulet and la bouillabaisse. The items were a disaster as I had forgotten to inform the staff that I was a vegetarian and both these dishes were patently non-veg. It was rather embarrassing after that. But a review needed to be written within the deadline. A neighbour who worked at Alliance Francaise helped me translate the menu.

That also marked the end of my journalistic career as the restaurant owner objected to my referring to his maître d'hôtel as being supercilious and that the portions were rather anaemic. My friend had the unenviable task of deciding between me and the threat to withdraw all advertisements from his publication.

Soon I could sense that my wife was also fed up of scrimping on our daily essentials and threw broad hints about the need to earn a regular salary. After dipping in to my savings to pay my children’s fees I woke up.

I caught hold of a headhunter and  I ended up in an IT company where I worked till I retired.

The quest for creative awards

Several senior creative executives recently were given the boot from one of India’s largest advertising agencies. Their crime? They produced some ‘inappropriate’ advertisements for a leading global brand of cars, just to win awards. The brouhaha was less because of the ads but more because the guys got caught as this was a common practice in the advertising field.

The quest to win awards for creativity starts from one’s childhood. For instance, the school fancy dress competition. The complacent (or lazy?) mother enters her offspring as Gandhi, pirate or Mother Teresa. Easy ones with raw material readily available at home. Unfortunately for the child, the competition comes up with a toothpaste tube, or caterpillar or even a tree with a sign proclaiming “Save the environment. Join the chipko movement.”

The other platform for a creative prize is the school exhibition where samples of children’s SUPW projects are displayed. This actually reflects the mother’s inventive talent and not the child’s. For his project my younger son had to make a model of a house. My wife, in turn commissioned her architect cousin to design something exotic. The result was a Spanish hacienda which my son submitted as his handiwork without an iota of guilt.

This competitive spirit continues in adulthood and manifests itself rather strongly in people in artistic fields like advertising and films. For a creative person awards help in career advancement and also in fattening one’s wallet.

A person aspiring to become a hotshot copywriter is brought down to earth within a few months of joining an advertising agency. What he or she thought of as a great idea is dissected and filtered, first by the client servicing executive and then the client. The first signs of frustration start here. It is particularly more so while handling international FMCG brands because the creative work ends up going through a committee. The end product has a nil chance of getting any prize for creativity.

By the seventh year or so the copywriter just goes through the motions of writing. That is the time when every copywriter through generations writes inane headlines like, “The soap with a difference.” Or “The better noodle.”You can substitute any product in these headlines.

I once made the mistake of taking my creative director to a presentation. He took it personally when the campaign was rejected and got into an argument with the client. He later blamed me for not ‘selling’ the campaign strongly enough.

My time in the sun (or almost) came several years back. I had won an award at the Advertising Club, Mumbai. Luckily I was in that city on the day of the function. When my category was announced I got up from my seat. To my surprise I found that my colleague from the local office had made his way to the stage and collected the award and got photographed with the chief guest. Later I found that he was not aware of my presence. At least he had the grace to hand me the trophy.

The advertising awards season will start soon and you can be sure that murmurs of a ‘fixed’ match will manifest itself from the losers.

Golfing woes

With television sports channels going on overdrive to telecast golf tournaments, it is but natural that more people are showing interest in playing that game. Unfortunately, in India one needs to be a member of a golf club to enjoy the sport. That is easier said than done. On an average, one needs to wait more than ten years after applying to start playing, unless one is ready to pay an obscene sum to get early membership. I struck gold some years back and now play regularly in a nice golf course. 

I underestimated the skill required to play the game when I started. Thanks to watching a few videos of some professionals easily hitting long shots, I presumed that my old skill at college level cricket would serve me well to master the new game.

The first day on the course was eventful. I was dressed no different than any of the professional golfers one sees on TV. Plus, a brand new golf set acquired through a relative in the USA. I placed the ball on the tee and took a couple of practice swings with my club. I was now all set to hit my first shot on a golf course. I took an almighty swing and was confident that the ball was headed towards the flag. There was a hushed silence all around from the spectators. To my horror, and embarrassment I found that the ball was still there in all its glory on the tee just the way I had placed it. To cut a long and tragic story short, my ball moved about a hundred yards after five shots. The next day I enrolled for coaching.

Golf and Bridge have two things in common. A post-mortem of the game, and exchange of recrimination between the losing partners. However, unlike in the card game there is a therapy centre at the golf course to calm frayed tempers. It is universally called the 19^th hole where a few mugs of beers will soon cool down the antagonists. This is also the place where one drops names and talks about one’s encounter with Tiger or Rory or Jeev (it will always be first names to show familiarity).

For a golfer, the Old Course at St. Andrews, Scotland has the same status as Tirupati, Mecca or the Vatican. It was my dream for a long time to breathe the air there. A year back, with a reluctant wife in tow, I reached the course. I went through the normal routine of photographs of me against the background of the club house, to prove to my pals that I actually visited the course. Then it was off to the proshop to buy some mementos to give to my golf pals. Like in any other tourist spot the prices were a rip off. Today I can proudly claim that I am St. Andrews returned.

Like horse-racing, golf also has a handicap system. The lower the handicap the better you are as a player. Unfortunately, with my stratospherically inclined handicap golfers find it embarrassing to play with me. So I plough a lone furrow on the course week after week. But I am not going to give up.