by Karan Bajaj
Ironically, the one exception I knew to this pattern was the king of all Benares wholesalers, the biggest and richest of them all, Raja Bhaiya. He had diversified early in his career after striking it rich as a wholesaler and now ran several other businesses, mostly illegal. On hearing that a new team leader for Shivam Chemicals had come from the US, Raja Bhaiya invited me to meet him for a drink. Much was said about his colourful personal life. A man who lived by his own rules, Raja Bhaiya had a pet white tiger in his backyard, kept several wives and mistresses who lived with him in his vast, sprawling haveli in Old Benares, and had an eye for the arts—every artist who came to Benares had a private showing for Raja Bhaiya before any public performance.
His reason for courting me was simple. Like a modern-day Gatsby, Raja Bhaiya prided himself on his diverse social gatherings, and a US-born B-school graduate working for a big multinational was an interesting specimen to add to his collection. He was always at his most polite with me, and constantly probed me for information about the US.
‘What to do, Samrat sir? I had a lot of desire to go to the US, but my visa got rejected. Kaafi jack lagaya, but these things are not in the hands of Indian officials. Maybe you can help me?’ Raja Bhaiya also turned out to be my informal mentor in the Indian sales world, imparting valuable, unsolicited lessons. ‘Samrat sir, the problem with your company is that they have no consistent standards. In sales, if you bend once we will make you bend again. If you are flexible once, we will break your back for even more flexibility. So your salespeople made an exception once by routing display money to us—we now push them to do so every time. Look at P&G. They stick to the principles. We may bitch all the time because they don’t give as much money, but we know what we see is what we get. Fair and square. Over the long term that wins, you know. Chalo sir, enough of this. Let’s see Tony the tiger.’
He was very proud of his white tiger, a rare, majestic animal whose roars could be heard through the house. ‘It’s a fine animal, Samrat sir. The only white tiger owned privately in India. Me and the tiger, we are like one another. We both rule the jungle—we have everybody under our power yet we roam alone.’ Loneliness and death were his greatest fears and he kept bringing these up in our time together. Several times, he made an overt offer to procure drugs or women for me. ‘Samrat sir, why do you live alone? I run other businesses besides soaps and shampoos. You give me a chance—I deal in high-quality stuff only.’ But I kept our relationship purely professional.
Thanks to Raja Bhaiya’s able mentorship though, I was able to make an immediate impact in Shivam’s business as I created several sales-driving incentive schemes which changed the dynamics of the stagnant market. This led to more consumers trying our shampoo—many of them for the first time—since surveys showed that almost 50 per cent of women in India had never used a shampoo. I found it gave me a bizarre sense of satisfaction that a woman somewhere in rural India, who defined her life only by her husband and children, had an intimate personal experience when she used the fragrant, international-quality shampoo our company made. It wasn’t like Edison inventing the light bulb, but it was infinitely more satisfying than my banking job where all I did was acquire money for rich people, whose troubled lives were made even more troubled by the money I made them. Combined with the incredible experience of getting stoned every day at work, it made me enjoy my job so much that there was never a dull moment in those two months.
Soon enough, my sales team started grudgingly respecting my business ideas though my personal life remained a puzzle for them. They had heard unconfirmed rumours of my running in the streets like a madman every night, of smoking up at the ghats and of alliances with Raja Bhaiya, but I never responded to their inquisitiveness, keeping details of my personal life very much to myself.
Finally, one evening it dawned on me that there was only a week left for the summer internships to end. I felt a pang of despair. I had created the illusion of a life here and I felt miserable at it being snatched away from me. I didn’t want money, fame, power or any other transient glory. I just wanted a simple, trivial life like the one I was leading right now, enjoying the little pleasures that life sent my way, drifting on rudderless without ambition and staking my own small claim to happiness. I was happy now, and I could hardly say that so absolutely for any other time in my life. Desperately, I tried to hang on to the sense of perfect, complete solitude in my last week there. I planned for solitary jogs in the mornings, elaborate lonely meals, stoned aartis on the ghats and midnight jaunts on my bike.
It wasn’t meant to be. Shine Sarkar decided to grace me with an unannounced trip to Benares before we headed back to Bangalore. ‘How could I not come, man? Your letters made me want to drop my internship and come here immediately. And then, the way we parted at the IIM. I wanted to clarify things.’ He had completed his internship with Deutsche Bank in London a week earlier than scheduled. Even the workaholic, ball-busting investment bankers had run out of excuses to keep him any longer as he consistently exceeded expectations on everything they threw at him. So he had decided to drop in on me and, with the uniquely Indian sense of entitlement, had given me no notice whatsoever.
As expected, his presence caused a whirlwind of activity, and my last few days in Benares passed in a haze. On my last evening there, I found myself enjoying my last aarti on the banks of the Ganga with Sarkar. Earlier in the day I had been given a satisfyingly tearful farewell by my sales team—‘Sir, you were the best. Please stay here with us, we will fuck everybody and always be the top territory in the country.’
I was trying to explain to Sarkar how much the internship had meant to me: ‘Somehow my experiences here moved me. You know, last week I even managed to convince the company to increase the salaries of my sales team by a few thousand rupees. Paltry I know, but it means the world to them. These folks sweat all day running from shop to shop, going well beyond their call of duty despite earning less than what I make as a lowly summer intern. Each of them has their own unique version of the great Indian story—old parents toiling away in drought-stricken villages, sisters to marry, big aspirations for their children with no means to achieve them—you know all that better than I do. Don’t get me wrong, they aren’t saints, they squander away their meagre earnings on porn, gambling and alcohol, but still we live such a privileged life compared to them. It made me feel genuinely good to make some difference to their lives. Plus the work. I never knew selling shampoo sachets could be meaningful.’ I paused. I sounded like a pot-smoking Mother Teresa, which I knew I wasn’t. I was a heartless bastard. Despite the squalor and abject poverty I had seen in India over the last year, my concerns had hardly risen above my crippling obsession with myself.
‘You do seem different,’ he said. ‘More settled, perhaps. I think I need to start peddling shampoo too.’
‘I’m just stoned right now,’ I said. ‘How was London?’
Sarkar seemed tormented by his usual demons. ‘Brain dead just like everywhere else. Crappy work, pubs, theatre, tea and scones. Felt thoroughly fucked like a… like a cucumber in a woman’s prison, as your rednecks say.’
I burst out laughing despite the apparent seriousness of his troubles.
‘But I did manage to do some thinking of my own,’ said Sarkar shyly.
‘Go on,’ I said interested.
‘Vinod will crow like a rooster in labour when I tell him this, but I think he was right. I’m planning to join my Dad after graduation.’
‘Really?’
He nodded. ‘The more I think about it, I didn’t really want to get into the IIT or the IIM. It was just to prove a point to I don’t know who. I don’t even hate India that much; I just wanted to run away from here. But I am interested in his business, I think I can expand it, take it places. Anyway, it’s better than being fucked everyday in the head in a bank.’
‘Plus you’ll get to know him,’ I said. ‘He may not be the ogre you think he is. He seems quite nice from the photographs I have seen in magazines.’
Sarkar shrugged as if to say ‘I don’t care about him, it’s just the business I’m interested in’.
Balls, I thought, like hell you care about growing any business.
‘Will he lend us some of his arm candy?’ I said.
‘Hey, look!’ Sarkar exclaimed suddenly. At three corners of the banks of the Ganga, three activities were occurring simultaneously, each oblivious of the other. A small child’s hair was being shaved for the first time in a mundan, signifying his liberation from the burden of his past lives; a young couple was getting married around a holy fire, sacred vows celebrating their entry into a new life; and last rites were being performed on a corpse, its cremation signifying escape from the current life. Birth, marriage, death. It was as if an unknown, powerful force was playing out the whole cycle of life in front of us. ‘Look,’ the force seemed to be mocking us, ‘this is all there is to it.’ The scene lodged itself in my mind and as I replayed it in my head, I realized the futility of striving for any more. Everything will be just fine, I think, I had lived a life in that moment.
11
Everything Will Be Just Fine
My fall began with the ‘Reorientation’ session held immediately after we came back from our summer internships. The human resources faculty at the IIM conducted the programme to force students to reflect on their personal, non-academic learning in the first year at the institute and focus on what they could do differently in the second year to get the most out of their time there. Like most people, I thought it would be fluff.
‘Motivational talks and mass reflections won’t change anything. The system is too far gone for that. Plus, no one will be honest. Who wants to openly admit how fucked they really are? It’s gonna be another “Don’t worry, you are all special” sob fest. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want IIM’s help to untap my spiritual potential,’ said Sarkar at the beginning of the session, and proceeded to spend the rest of the week catching up on sleep after our Benares escapades. Vinod had gone a step further and decided to give the session a complete miss, spending his time at home instead. ‘I’m exhausted, need to think things through after my two-month Singapore jaunt,’ he said. I had to confess that I had an inordinate interest in such soul-baring exercises, and I decided to bare it to anyone who cared to listen for the week. Turned out I wasn’t alone.
In the very first programme, they called alumni to reflect on their time at school. While we had our share of hackneyed yawn-inducing speakers giving us the ‘Make the best of your time at IIM—these are the best days of your life, learn and grow’ routine, there were some who were surprisingly insightful. Like the aggressive young investment banker from Mumbai. ‘How many other investment bankers have come to give this talk today?’ he asked. ‘None, right? I will tell you why—they are all busy making money as I should be. Do I love my life? No. I lead a dog’s life, but you know what, every January when I get my bonus, it is all justified. Every time I fly to a session like this in the corporate jet, life seems all right, and I’m motivated to work like a dog once again. I have learnt that it is fine to love these gross, material things if that is what you care about. If I have any advice for you, it’s this: don’t spend your precious time here studying finance or marketing or human resources, none of that will come in use when you start working. Spend your time trying to figure who you are instead—what makes you tick, what you want from life, what makes you happy. The worst off in business school are those who don’t spend enough time reflecting on these things here. Every year a few of these losers are seduced by the glamour of banking. What happens then? They come, they see and they leave with their tails between their legs. They don’t survive because they haven’t figured out that money doesn’t do squat for them. They want to live a balanced life, pursue their hobbies, spend time with their families and other such vague niceties which bankers shouldn’t be wasting their time on. Of course, they are fired. Corporate life is not the place to find yourself, no one cares there. Now is the time to do that, and so many of you are wasting time studying instead.’
He was crude and arrogant but refreshingly straightforward. Quite his opposite was the soft-spoken, bearded advertising agency owner from Bangalore. ‘I wasn’t ever the aggressive sort, and frankly, I didn’t have a good time at the IIM. It was too intense for me, but I guess something worked out right after all. Way back in 1986, there were two girls in our batch. I married one of them and we set up an advertising agency in Bangalore. It’s been fifteen years now. We are not the best or the biggest in the country, but we get by. I’m happy, and really have no advice for you because I guess I define happiness differently from what business school would teach you. If you were really to force me to say something I would just say this—accept who you are and don’t try to be like your next-door neighbour. The only judgement that matters is yours; the only one who needs to respect you is you.’
All of them had some version of the same advice that I intuitively believed in, but was glad to hear it from folks who had lived it. Ten years from now, none of my present concerns would matter. Would I care whether I learnt finance, operations or marketing at the IIM? No. Would I care if I was in the top five per cent or the bottom five per cent of the class? No. The only thing I would care about after graduating from here would be whether I had been happy at school or not. Did I have experiences I would remember? Did I have relationships that would stand the test of time? Did I figure out what I really wanted to do? These would be the only things I would look back at and judge my level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction during my time here.
In the next few days, I received several such insights into myself. I learnt, for example, that I didn’t have a single entrepreneurial bone in my body as my entrepreneurship scores hovered at rock-bottom in the series of career inventories that we were asked to fill. All my fantasies—opening a restaurant, starting my own film production company—were just that, happy mirages to chase while trying to escape the reality of being a daily wage-earning corporate drone. When the rubber hit the road, I would do no such thing. I wasn’t enough of a risk-taker or, for that matter, engaged enough in life to be bothered about leaving a legacy. I was content to muddle along, dream of glory but not act on it, read books of greatness but never be inspired enough to be the subject of one. But this was me and, as the advertising agency owner from Bangalore had said, the more I learnt to live with myself, the happier I would be.
In all, it had been a good week, I thought as I walked back alone from the common hall to the hostel on the last day of the session. A good year in fact, I thought. Rough, maybe, confusing, definitely, but overall, I was actually quite happy in a general sense. Nothing specific, like happy at buying a new car or getting a salary hike, but broader in a vague though more permanent sense. Every day, I was gradually accepting my station in life and learning to be happy with it. I had never been materially ambitious, and the year-end banking bonuses or the fast-track CEO path had never interested me much. I always had to muster up enthusiasm and put on a show of ambition in order to fit in. I had left all of that to come here for undefined, confused reasons. But over the past year in India, I had sensed the existence of a broader world around me. A world in which Rajasthani banjaaras, who didn’t know where they would be tomorrow, could confidently predict your future, where a businessman spent sixty years in a small ashram in the Himalayas devoted to an important but ultimately elusive quest, where an ash-covered investment banker ate charred toes and fingers for salvation, where the owner of a white tiger, a sprawling haveli and several wives complained of loneliness. In the face of these, my confusion about my identity and about not knowing my calling seemed inconsequential and clichéd, little more than obsessive musings of a self-centred mind. Different strokes for different folks; make mistakes, muddle around, stumble, pick up the pieces, rise again, and ultimately, chart your own course.
It was inevitable, therefore, that I spent most of the second year concentrating on more productive activities than acad
emics and lectures. Activities like playing soccer at midnight under the dim lights of the low-wattage bulbs in the IIM courtyard, drunk and stoned out of my mind, for instance. It was Sarkar’s idea as usual.
‘It’s fun—try it, man. Marijuana makes you reflective, alcohol makes you restless, and soccer will force you to concentrate. It won’t be a game any more, it will be a spiritual awakening.’ There would be days when I would haphazardly try to make sense of the academic curriculum again, but Vinod would convince me otherwise.
‘Just let go this year,’ he would say. ‘Don’t succumb to the Superman Syndrome. Have you ever seen Superman stop to think? No, he is always compelled to act. Running, flying all the time; he spends as much energy saving the world as capturing a newspaper thief. You don’t want to be like that. Don’t study just because you ought to be studying, it isn’t necessary if it isn’t necessary.’
Armed with these words of wisdom, I officially ‘gave up’ in the second year of business school.
Days slipped into months, and the entire second year at the IIM threatened to pass in a haze of marijuana and soccer. Until one day, an encounter in the Reaching Creative Boundaries course set an unexpected chain of events in motion. I had selected the course for much the same reason I had taken all the other electives that year—to expend as little effort as possible and determinedly sleepwalk through classes stoned. As a result, while most of my classmates were studying International Finance and Advanced Corporate Strategy, my course list read like a page from a Kerala meditation spa catalogue, with courses like Discovering Your Inner Leader and Philosophy in Management. On that particular day, the Reaching Creative Boundaries professor had invited a local Kannada author to class for a guest lecture. As with most of his classes, his intent was to push left-brained B-school spreadsheet wizards beyond their comfort zone by exposing them to creativity in flesh and blood.