busy, they didn’t give the impression of running a global megabusiness. Arindam and his division heads referred to the people behind the desks as ‘managerial staff’, although when I introduced myself to one of the managers – a balding, middle-aged man – he seemed to be making cold calls, looking up numbers from a database and asking people if they were interested in taking management seminars.
Almost all the Planman employees – 90 per cent of them, according to Arindam – were former IIPM students. The same was true of the faculty members, who tended to morph from students to teachers as soon as they had finished their courses. Many of the faculty members did ‘consulting’ work for IIPM. Some, like Rohit Manchanda, a short, dapper man in a suit who probably would have been shorter without the unusually high heels of his shoes, taught advertising and headed Planman’s small advertising agency. The dean of IIPM, Prasoon Majumdar, a man with a smart goatee, was also economics editor for the magazines published by Planman. Then there were the employees who were family members as well as former students. Arindam’s wife, Rajita, a petite woman who drove a Porsche, had been a student of Arindam’s before they got married and now taught Executive Communications. Arindam’s sister’s husband, a young man with shoulder-length hair, shirt left unbuttoned to reveal a generous expanse of chest and carrying a copy of
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
when I first met him, was a former student, a faculty member and features and lifestyle editor of the magazines published by Planman.
When Arindam met his division heads, all of whom had been his classmates at IIPM, they joked and chatted for the first hour or so before turning to the work at hand. I sat in on a meeting one morning, and they seemed to derive immense collegial pleasure from demonstrating to me just how close-knit they were. ‘We’re like the Mafia,’ Arindam said.
It was a comparison that had occurred to me, although there were other metaphors that also came to mind. They were like the Mafia in their suspicion of outsiders, like a dot.com in their emphasis on collegiality and like a cult in their belief in a mythology made up ofArindam’s personal history, management theories and the strange ways in which the company functioned. But perhaps all this is simply another way of saying that they were a business, operating through an unquestioning adherence to what their owner said and believed.
Arindam, in our first meeting, had explained to me in a monologue that lasted five hours that his business was built around the ‘brand’ of Planman Consulting, the group that includes the business school and numerous other ventures from media and motion pictures to a charitable foundation. To an outsider, however, the brand is Arindam. Even if his role is disguised under the description of ‘honorary dean’ of IIPM, the image of the business school and Planman is in most ways the image of Arindam Chaudhuri. With his quirky combination of energy, flamboyance, ambition, canniness – and even vulnerability – he is the promise of the age, his traits gathering force from their expression at a time in India when everything seems combustible, everyone is volatile and all that is solid melts into air.
3
One evening, after receiving a text-message invitation from one of Arindam’s many minions, I showed up at the Park Royal Hotel in south Delhi. The auto-rickshaw I had flagged down took me past Select Citywalk, a new shopping mall in its final stages of construction, a pharaonic dream of glass and granite rising amid broken sidewalks where daily-wage labourers huddled under dwarfish tents made from sheets of plastic. The road to the Chirag Delhi crossing was jammed, the traffic squeezed into narrow lanes by a wide aisle in the centre where the government was trying to build a high-speed bus corridor. It remained crowded all the way on to the Ring Road, with buses, cars
Almost all the Planman employees – 90 per cent of them, according to Arindam – were former IIPM students. The same was true of the faculty members, who tended to morph from students to teachers as soon as they had finished their courses. Many of the faculty members did ‘consulting’ work for IIPM. Some, like Rohit Manchanda, a short, dapper man in a suit who probably would have been shorter without the unusually high heels of his shoes, taught advertising and headed Planman’s small advertising agency. The dean of IIPM, Prasoon Majumdar, a man with a smart goatee, was also economics editor for the magazines published by Planman. Then there were the employees who were family members as well as former students. Arindam’s wife, Rajita, a petite woman who drove a Porsche, had been a student of Arindam’s before they got married and now taught Executive Communications. Arindam’s sister’s husband, a young man with shoulder-length hair, shirt left unbuttoned to reveal a generous expanse of chest and carrying a copy of
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
when I first met him, was a former student, a faculty member and features and lifestyle editor of the magazines published by Planman.
When Arindam met his division heads, all of whom had been his classmates at IIPM, they joked and chatted for the first hour or so before turning to the work at hand. I sat in on a meeting one morning, and they seemed to derive immense collegial pleasure from demonstrating to me just how close-knit they were. ‘We’re like the Mafia,’ Arindam said.
It was a comparison that had occurred to me, although there were other metaphors that also came to mind. They were like the Mafia in their suspicion of outsiders, like a dot.com in their emphasis on collegiality and like a cult in their belief in a mythology made up ofArindam’s personal history, management theories and the strange ways in which the company functioned. But perhaps all this is simply another way of saying that they were a business, operating through an unquestioning adherence to what their owner said and believed.
Arindam, in our first meeting, had explained to me in a monologue that lasted five hours that his business was built around the ‘brand’ of Planman Consulting, the group that includes the business school and numerous other ventures from media and motion pictures to a charitable foundation. To an outsider, however, the brand is Arindam. Even if his role is disguised under the description of ‘honorary dean’ of IIPM, the image of the business school and Planman is in most ways the image of Arindam Chaudhuri. With his quirky combination of energy, flamboyance, ambition, canniness – and even vulnerability – he is the promise of the age, his traits gathering force from their expression at a time in India when everything seems combustible, everyone is volatile and all that is solid melts into air.
3
One evening, after receiving a text-message invitation from one of Arindam’s many minions, I showed up at the Park Royal Hotel in south Delhi. The auto-rickshaw I had flagged down took me past Select Citywalk, a new shopping mall in its final stages of construction, a pharaonic dream of glass and granite rising amid broken sidewalks where daily-wage labourers huddled under dwarfish tents made from sheets of plastic. The road to the Chirag Delhi crossing was jammed, the traffic squeezed into narrow lanes by a wide aisle in the centre where the government was trying to build a high-speed bus corridor. It remained crowded all the way on to the Ring Road, with buses, cars
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