The Beautiful and the Damned (7 page)

But where was the audience? The auditorium had emptied out rapidly, while outside, in the passageway, the crowd was thick around the buffet tables laden with Western and Indian food, guests and waiters collaborating in a chaotic dance that involved plates piled with alarmingly red tandoori chicken. At the ends of the passageway, fresh-faced young women waited behind stacks of free Planman magazines, smiling hopefully but in futility; it was always going to be a losing contest with the tandoori chicken. I made my way past the buffet tables to the open-air balcony. It was packed, with people pressed hard against the bar, releasing cigarette smoke into the
evening air while far below the traffic honked and swerved its way towards the brightly lit Nehru Place flyover.

Throughout the awards ceremony, Arindam had been standing at the back of the Royal Ballroom. When I returned from the bar, he was still there, shaking hands with people who stepped into the nearly empty auditorium and addressed him in low, conspiratorial voices. Arindam was dressed in blue, his clothes and slicked-back hair giving him a glamorous look amid the Indians and the Japanese (presumably representatives of Yamaha) wearing staid suits or chinos and polo shirts and the IIPM students (or Planman employees) in their uniform-like formals. Even the band – the men in tight jeans and sleeveless shirts, the women in sequinned skirts – couldn’t compete with Arindam’s star value, serving as no more than a noisy backdrop for the primary business of the evening.

As I watched people circling around Arindam in the Royal Ballroom, it seemed to me that the evening was not so much about the recognition of other companies and products as about making a statement on the Arindam power brand and
his
4Ps (product, price, place and promotion). This was why Arindam was working instead of lining up for the buffet, shaking hands and exchanging small talk. I hovered near him, receiving swift appraising glances from the strangers delivered to Arindam by an efficient assembly line of ambition. Those meeting him expressed deference, desire and nervousness; some were matter-of-fact, one business tycoon talking to another, as it were; others were proprietorial, expressing mild outrage that he hadn’t noticed them yet or that they would have to wait for the person ahead of them to finish; a few, it seemed to me, concealed hostility even as they ingratiated themselves with him. The only time I saw Arindam get away from the constant handshaking, from the pleasantries and the promises, was when Doordarshan, the government television channel, interviewed him on the state of the economy, taking him to a small lobby and posing him in front of a painting of an Indian raja with a resplendent moustache and red robes.

There would presumably have been more glamorous television channels at the event if Arindam had been at the very top of the pecking order of wealth. Or was it that – as Sutanu had suggested – the largest
media organizations were spurning him for his anti-elitism, for the crusading zeal of his magazines? They had certainly embraced him wholeheartedly when he first became a celebrity. At the IIPM campus in Satbari, I had picked up a brochure that featured a double-page spread of the articles that appeared when Arindam first made his mark as ‘The Guru with a Ponytail’. The earliest pictures displayed a baby face; the designer glasses were not yet part of his appearance. Indistinguishable from press releases, these articles reproduced Arindam’s thoughts on everything from ‘how not to create more Osamas’ (the solution, apparently, was ‘wholesome education’) to ‘the MBA mafia’ monopolizing management education in the country through the IIMs. But if Arindam was ‘Guru Cool’ in these articles, he was also combative (and the combative stance certainly enhanced the ‘cool’), attacking the IIMs and pushing his ‘Theory i Management’ (the lower-case ‘i’ stood for ‘india’) to speak about a compassionate form of capitalism that took into account the overwhelming presence of poverty in the country. He talked about ‘trickle-down economics’ and ‘survival of the weakest’, and although it was never clear from these extracts how such concepts could actually be put into practice, they exhibited Arindam’s desire to project himself as a thinker as well as an entrepreneur.

But Arindam’s desire for greater influence also created a conflict with his closed style of running the company. Within Planman, he was surrounded by loyalists, people who subscribed to the cult of Arindam. Relatives became colleagues, while former students and classmates became employees and continued to refer to him in the nice, middle-class Indian way as ‘Arindam sir’. The employees were so enamoured of Arindam that when I visited him at the IIPM campus or stood near him at the Power Brands Awards Night, some of them displayed a barely disguised hostility. Upset at the proximity I had stolen, sensing perhaps that I did not entirely share their faith in the guru, that I was not one of them, they seethed with the desire to protect Arindam from me.

Yet Arindam’s business could not be contained entirely within the walls of Planman. It had a centrifugal force to it, spiralling outwards. In June 2005, nearly a decade after his first failed attempt at starting a magazine, Arindam began publishing a business magazine called
B&E
. This
led to the newsweekly
The Sunday Indian
, and to the marketing magazine
4Ps
. They were all printed on glossy paper, heavy on graphics and syndicated material, thin on original content and, going by the misspelled names appearing on
The Sunday Indian
covers (‘Pamela Andreson’), short of copy editors. In 2007, Arindam began bringing out an Indian edition of
PC Magazine
under licence from Ziff Davis Media. At the same time, he began discussions with
Foreign Affairs
in New York to bring out an Indian edition of the magazine, and when that fell through, he began negotiations with
Foreign Policy
in Washington, DC.

‘In the school, I have an audience of only six thousand students,’ he had said to me. ‘Now, every week, I reach one lakh people.’

The business schools also produced ‘academic’ journals with names like
The Indian Economy Review, The Human Factor, Strategy Journal
and
Need the Dough?
But the most significant arena of influence was occupied by films, turning Arindam almost into a household name.

In 2002, Arindam had entered the movie business. A few days before his first Bollywood film was to be shot, Arindam said, the director walked out on him. Arindam, naturally, decided to direct the film himself. He admitted to me that he had perhaps not been entirely qualified to do this. ‘But I hope, some day, when I have more experience, to make a truly revolutionary film.’ Without the necessary experience, his first directorial venture turned out to be neither revolutionary nor a blockbuster. With a plot that had been lifted from the American comic strip
Archie
, it was a commercial flop and panned by critics. Even the DVD stores in the Palika Bazaar underground market that specialized in cinema of all kinds, mostly in pirated editions, were unable to procure a copy for me, and the only interesting thing about the film seemed to be its title,
Rok Sako to Rok Lo
, which translates into
Stop Me if You Can
.

A country that has seen a sudden infusion of wealth and a rapid disengagement with its past tends to throw up people who are travelling very quickly and seem to have no clear antecedents. A few days after
I attended the power brands ceremony, an email from a friend directed me to the annual world wealth report produced by the investment banking firm Merrill Lynch, which had ranked India, with 100,000 millionaires, as the world’s second-fastest producer of millionaires, running just behind Singapore. It made me think of a factory producing millionaires at high speed, and when I surfed around on the Internet, checking out related articles from
Forbes
and
The Economist
, I felt as if I had been granted a slightly dizzying satellite vision of the country, one remarkably different from the view on the ground.

There were carefully produced graphics on these websites, with towers thrusting out from the flat map of India, their different heights announcing the amount and concentration of personal wealth in the country. Bombay, now known as Mumbai, had the tallest tower, which made sense. There, India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani (who, in a piece of news concocted by the Indian media, had become the world’s richest man in October 2007, ahead of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett) planned to build a skyscraper in the most expensive area of the city. Sixty storeys high, it would have just twenty-seven floors because of its vertiginously high ceilings. And the only residents in the building apart from the Ambani family would be their retinue of 600 servants.

A little over forty years ago, the
New Yorker
writer Ved Mehta visited the country of his birth and wrote a piece called ‘The Richest Man in India’. This august personage, according to Mehta, was not an industrialist or a politician. He was the Nizam of Hyderabad, a southern ruler who had been stripped of his monarchy and much of his wealth by the Indian state in the years following independence in 1947. Although the Nizam was a political nonentity by the time Mehta wrote about him, he was still reputed to be the richest man in India and one of the richest in the world. Leafing through the pages of an official biography, Mehta found the Nizam described as ‘a national asset of incalculable value’, especially in a modernizing India whose ‘most crying need is liquid investable capital’.

The passage of four decades has seen to it that India is awash in liquid investable capital, if only in select areas, and the Nizam appears
even more of an oddity now than he did to Mehta at the time. A five-foot-three, ninety-pound waif who took his meals on a tin plate while squatting on a mat, the Nizam’s relation to his personal wealth was royally idiosyncratic, supremely indifferent to portfolio diversification or conspicuous consumption.

Every age gets the rich people it deserves. In contemporary India, the new rich are the anti-Nizams. They are people in a hurry, expressing fevered modes of consumption, flaunting gargantuan appetites meant to astonish and dazzle the rest of us. They acquire things that are better, bigger and more exclusive, and while coolly expecting public admiration, they also attempt to carve out their own affluent nations, towers from the tops of which float prayers in a strange language, expressing desires that most of us can’t comprehend. This is because there is a paradox at the heart of such affluence, where each rich individual, while being celebrated for his or her wealth, also expects to be something other than his or her wealth. People are the amount of money they make, but even in the world of the Indian rich, that is no longer enough.

This paradox of wealth became evident to me one evening at the Delhi Gymkhana Club, a formerly colonial establishment sited next to the prime minister’s residence. I had been taken there by friends amused by my interest in India’s new money. After we parked the car and walked past empty rooms with high ceilings, and long corridors featuring sepia tints of colonial clubgoers, we entered a crowded and noisy bar. From our corner table, chosen for its sweeping view, I watched the generously proportioned Delhi residents – business-people, civil servants and politicians – consume subsidized food and liquor, ringing little bells to call waiters to their overflowing tables. It was Thursday, a dance night at the club, and as the evening progressed, a sizeable contingent of the city’s youth appeared on the scene, sending the middle-aged men in the crowd into a frenzied search for prospective partners among the young women in tight jeans.

The man who approached our table soon after the dancing began possessed a shock of white hair, a bushy moustache and two gold chains under his green polo shirt. My friends introduced us, but it
was hard for me to make out what he did above the rendition of ‘Hava Nagila’ from the club band.

‘I work for the world,’ he said.

It seemed an especially unlikely claim in that setting, and I felt compelled to ask, ‘Yes, but what exactly do you do for the world?’

‘Ambassador,’ he said. ‘I am an ambassador for the world.’

He looked at my friends, looked at me and smiled at his private joke. Then he passed me his business card, which read:

The World
was a cruise ship sailing across the globe, registered in the Bahamas and managed by a Miami-based company. Varma wanted to impress upon me just how exclusive this cruise ship was. People bought an
apartment
on the ship –
apartment
was the word he emphasized with some violence, just as he had emphasized
world
and
ambassador
before – for half a million dollars, at the very least. The money covered all expenses incurred on board, and the amount of money paid determined the number of votes residents had, who then, through the democratic exercise of their voting powers, determined the itinerary of the ship. When people went ashore, they partied, paying out of their own pockets for the pleasures of terra firma, but they tended to live more quietly on the ship, dabbling in refined pleasures like haute cuisine and art. Americans formed a large part of the contingent, but there were many Indians as well, and Varma’s role was to match the right people from the Indian subcontinent to this floating signifier of his.
The World
was a cruise ship, its ambassador a salesman.

As for the clients, those who bought a piece of the world, Varma was both guarded about them and insistent about their
exclusivity
. He wouldn’t give me the names of his clients, usually picked out from
marketing lists compiled by companies like American Express, but he said that he had to see that people wouldn’t board
The World
and start talking about the amount of money they had made.

I understood why Varma was concerned that people might talk about money on board the ship. India was full of people talking about money. Just half an hour earlier, in the men’s room, I had passed a drunken group listening to a man who was saying, ‘All the people I went to school with, they became doctors, engineers. I’m the one who became an ordinary garment exporter.’ He waited a beat before delivering his punchline. ‘I earn a hundred times more than them,’ he said, producing a burst of appreciative, alcohol-fuelled laughter from his listeners.