‘So I was living a Jekyll and Hyde existence. Western clothes, quite formal, during the day, and the Film Society in the evening. Occasionally a colleague would become curious about my leisure pursuits. He would come to the Film Society to see a French or German film, but he would be repelled by the smell of sweat on the bodies of my close associates, who’d travelled long distances on buses, trams, or walking, and worked all day in offices that were not air-conditioned, and didn’t have the means to go back home to change their clothes.
‘A very acute illustration of the kind of spiritual disquiet that the Jekyll and Hyde existence caused me came in the shape of something very material. I remember going with my colleagues to the wedding of a British executive of our company with an Indian girl, something that had caused a great deal of consternation in the higher echelons of our management.
‘Perforce I was in a western lounge suit, along with my colleagues. Or perhaps it was a lack of strength of will on my part. I found, on that extremely hot and sultry evening, the place full of Bengalis in their comfortable thin poplin koortahs and dhotis. As I was sweating inside my completely unsuitable clothes I suddenly realized which side I belonged to, and I said to myself in disgust, “What have I done to myself?” This incident crystallized a lot of things inside me. I began to consider leaving the company, giving up the style of existence it imposed on its executives.
‘I would say there was a lot of underemployment of intelligence in those jobs. Many of us, in sales, went out to the bazaars in Calcutta and in small towns all over the country, but their main job there, I found, consisted in picking up random packets of cigarettes to check the code numbers at the back, which told you how fresh or how stale the cigarettes were.
‘So people drifted from breakfast to office to lunch to an outing at the bazaar and then to the club and a late night every night. There was air-conditioning in the office and at home and in the club, so one wouldn’t have to spend more than half an hour or an hour without air-conditioning.
The main virtue of this style of existence was that it prevented you from thinking. If you started thinking it could cause you discomfort. It damaged some of the Indians, permanently affecting their ability to be themselves, and printing on them a kind of pretence. I’ve seen a fair number of people who’ve become incapable of holding their own without this protective umbrella. And I’ve seen people go through an infernal amount of humiliation within the organization.
These jobs were more or less sinecures. So they would humiliate you by taking away certain visible symbols of authority and leaving you without any work. I’ve seen people go day in, day out to the office and just sit there, and then go back home – Oxford and Cambridge graduates who, if they had gone into other jobs, might have used their capacities better. The whole office would know about this humiliation. It was made very visible. But for many people resignation was unthinkable. It would have been like being thrown out of a warm and well-lit room into the middle of a winter in northern Sweden.
‘At that time Indian business had not expanded that much, and opportunities were very limited. In any case, Indian businesses wouldn’t have given the boxwallahs the kind of life-style they had become used to. Nowadays Indian business will give you certain facilities and very expensive life-styles – provided you deliver the goods. They make certain of that: there are no sinecures left in Indian business.
‘By the mid-60s the new movement in business had begun. The realities were closing in on the beleaguered boxwallah regiment. The tobacco company changed. It transformed itself over a short period, 10 years – which is quite short for a change of culture. This transformation was brought about by Indians. The British trained their men, but they didn’t try to run the business themselves. Today ITC has diversified and is coping very well with the slowdown in the tobacco business.’
That transformation was proof of the positive side of the boxwallah culture; that positive side had to be remembered.
‘The work ethic was very high. There was a lot of drive and discipline, though they didn’t always know what they were driving at. They were at heart good Indians, patriotic Indians. In 1962, at the time of the China war, about the time we met, I remember there was a meeting of the finance committee. The finance director said, “Well, gentlemen, do you think the next meeting of the committee will be held in Peking?” I answered, “Sir, not unless our prime minister takes to wearing an umbrella under his arm.” And I will say this for the British, they liked this kind of repartee, and respected you for it.’
Ashok was 25 years younger than Chidananda. Ashok worked for an old British boxwallah company. The company itself had now been bought over by one of the new generation of super-rich Indian financiers and industrialists, much of whose business activity lay outside India.
Ashok hadn’t wanted to go into business for the privileges and position Chidananda had described. He had been more excited by the idea of ‘marketing’ – modern-sounding, active, up-to-the-minute. (I thought that marketing was just another word for selling, and didn’t ask Ashok to define it for me. Many weeks later, in Delhi, it was defined for me by a former advertising man in this precise way: ‘Marketing is the identifying and satisfying of an unmet need.’ Not the creating of needs – that would have been considered devil’s work in a poor country. Just the identifying of unmet needs.)
Ashok’s first story – he told me three stories in all – was of his attempt to get into marketing.
‘I made a number of false starts. The first was when I did commerce at the university. That was what my parents wanted me to do. I knew commerce wasn’t for me, but I gritted my teeth and went ahead with it. I just scraped through the final exams, and that dented my self-confidence. Then I applied to join a management institute. I did that because everybody else was doing it. Inevitably, I didn’t get in.
‘At that stage my father fixed me up with a chamber of commerce in Delhi. I was there for a year and a half. I came into contact with a number of the industry barons for whom the chamber had been set up; but you also had a number of rustic individuals. It gave me a fair idea of the half-and-half way things were in India. I was drawing a pittance, 300 rupees a month, £15, but I was living in the house of an uncle, and didn’t have many expenses.
‘One day, at a middle-class party in Delhi, in Defence Colony, I met a Dr Malhotra. He was a portly man of middle height, in a dark-brown suit. I asked him what he did, and he said in an offhand way that he was the director of Imba. I asked him what Imba was, and he said it was the Institute of Management and Business Administration. It sounded familiar, but that was because many of these places have names that sound like that. Anyway, I was terribly impressed. He was a man in his mid-forties. I was in my early twenties. He looked very prosperous, and talked that way too. He was indifferent to me initially, no doubt seeing me as just another young man working somewhere.
‘But then the conversation led to the fact that my father was an influential businessman in Calcutta, and Dr Malhotra’s attitude to me changed. He became quite interested in what I did, how much I earned, and then he gave his opinion that I was made for much better things. My own gullibility took me along on the wave of his interest. His approval of me was total.
‘It was beyond him why someone of my obvious talent should be wasting his time drawing 300 rupees in a nondescript chamber of commerce, when I could have the world at my feet. I said, “Have you anything better to suggest?” He said, “Boy, do I!” He described his Imba institute. From the way he told it, Imba was set up to propagate the discipline of marketing to as many people as possible in the country. And he now had plans to expand from Delhi to the other metropolitan centres.
‘The way he told it, his own marketing acumen was sought by the large corporations of India, and he had had something to do with the success of quite a few well-known brands. Just listening to him excited me, opening my eyes to the wonderful world of marketing, of which I had heard so much.
‘I thought I wanted to go
into marketing. Partly this was because lots of my friends and colleagues were applying to these institutes of management, in which marketing was an important discipline, or they were joining large corporations as management trainees in the marketing division. I didn’t understand what the thing was about, but it seemed to me the thing to do. It had a certain glamour, a certain aura.
‘I agreed with Dr Malhotra that I was wasting my time where I was. He invited me over to his office the following day, where, as he implied, I might learn something to my advantage. I trotted off the next morning. Before I knew it, Dr Malhotra was offering me a job, at double the salary I was getting at the chamber, and with the enticing prospect of going back and working in Calcutta.
‘When I asked him why an obviously successful marketing man like him was interested in a raw beginner like me, someone who had failed to get into the management institutes, he said the way he saw professional qualifications was like this: B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. – Bullshit, More Shit, and Piled High and Deep. Which again made a deep impression on me. Even in my school reports they used to say: “His marks are not a true indication of his ability.” So I was ready to fall in with what Dr Malhotra said.
‘ “It’s work experience that counts,” he said. And he said he preferred, having the views he had, to pick up raw people like me and make them blossom.
‘He asked me to look after the Calcutta branch or, as he called it, the “Calcutta Bureau” of Imba – I think he liked the modern sound of the word “bureau”. The job, as he described it, would mean setting up courses, and enrolling corporate and individual members at fairly high fees.
‘I had the presence of mind to ask him how this was going to help me learn about marketing. I saw that the job meant selling Imba rather than learning the marketing skills for which Imba was apparently famous. He said this would be only one aspect of my work. Imba itself would be deeply involved in marketing research and counselling for clients. This impressed me. I saw myself developing into a marketing whizz-kid.
‘I overrode my father’s doubts, and I accepted Dr Malhotra’s offer. The day I joined Imba he gave me a box of visiting cards with my name and my grandiose designation as Bureau Executive. I had never had a visiting card before. I was very pleased.
‘I was hoping to spend a week or so in Delhi, learning about the workings of Imba, but it was apparent that Dr Malhotra was in a bit of a hurry to see me off to Calcutta. He wanted me to go there and start enrolling the big corporations as members. He said I was to get the help of my father. This gave me a little pause: I began to feel that he was interested in my father, and that something was amiss.
‘He packed me off to Calcutta. He paid the train fare. He had indicated to me that he had an office in Calcutta, and that a friend was looking after the office. Shortly after I arrived, this friend telephoned and invited me over. The office was in a congested part of North Calcutta, and when I went I found a dingy little place in an old, ill-kept multi-storeyed block.
‘When I asked this gentleman, Dr Malhotra’s friend, where my Imba office would be, he pointed to a broken small table in one corner of the room, and he said I could work from there. He went on to add that while in an absolute emergency he could consider some typing work, he would prefer it if I used a carbon and wrote my own letters and reports by hand. He said I could also use the telephone – the only one in the office that worked. But every time I made a call I should make a note of it, and these costs would be debited to Imba.
‘And from that desk I actually attempted to run my first marketing training course. Dr Malhotra told me I should negotiate with a hotel for a conference hall, and lunch and dinner and so on for the participants. I was to try to get a good price – he was particular about that – and I actually did so.
‘He told me more than once that he was getting a reputed American professor down to Calcutta for the training course. That was the point I had to push. The American idea was important. The management scene in the country was heavily influenced by the management boom that was taking place in America, and Dr Malhotra was certainly sensitive to that.
‘I did as he said, and was quite successful in enrolling the 25 candidates or so he wanted for the course. I did this primarily because I met a number of senior corporation people who were family friends. That gave me an entry point, and I found that the rest was quite easy. I went to see them, and they were happy to nominate someone in their firm to attend the course for 2000 rupees a head. I should say that a lot of these senior people expressed surprise and dismay that I was associated with such an outfit – of which they hadn’t heard.
‘The course itself passed off without incident – except one. The American professor and his wife did come down. He wasn’t really well known. He came from some obscure university, and in fact he was running a somewhat similar outfit somewhere in the vast North American continent. He was a cartoon American tourist, paunchy, late forties.
‘This professor and his wife were put up in the hotel Dr Malhotra had made me negotiate with, for the conference hall and so on. It wasn’t the best hotel in town. It was a couple of rungs below. The professor and his wife didn’t like what they saw, but Dr Malhotra told them that this was India, a very poor country, that standards were lower, and that service in these less pretentious hotels was often better than in the five-star hotels, which could sometimes be all show.
‘Just when it seemed that the Americans were getting reconciled to their quarters, a rat appeared and scurried across the room. The lady screamed and said, “I can’t stand slithery things.” And, to the chagrin of Dr Malhotra, the Americans insisted on being taken to the very best hotel in Calcutta. This was the Grand Hotel. It was infinitely more expensive. I myself had to make the arrangements.
The course was seen as a feather in my cap. But then, as soon as it was over, Dr Malhotra said I should start preparing for another – going through the whole thing again. And I myself wasn’t happy about the course I had just arranged, because it seemed to me on reflection that it hadn’t done anything for me in the marketing way.
‘I also wasn’t being successful in enrolling members in Imba. Dr Malhotra was greatly interested in this, since each corporate member would bring in some 7000 or 8000 rupees, and an individual member about 1000 rupees. Most people simply didn’t know about Imba. Dr Malhotra thought I should be able to enrol them simply because I belonged to an influential family. But I didn’t feel I had anything to offer the big corporations. It’s hard enough to sell a good product without being pushy. To sell a dud product was well nigh impossible to me at that time, when I was young and shy. And my father’s friends were becoming a little more vocal in their protests about my requests to them for 8000 rupees for corporate membership of Imba.
‘My weekly, carbon-copied, ballpoint-penned Imba reports to Dr Malhotra made less and less impressive reading. And Dr Malhotra was becoming more and more impatient. He also began to feel that there was some danger that I might leave Imba.
‘He flew down to Calcutta and wanted to know why I wasn’t producing results. I put it to him that I had joined Imba to develop knowledge and skills in the discipline of marketing, in the classical sense. And what I had been doing in the last couple of months was selling or marketing Imba itself, which had helped neither my knowledge nor my reputation. I suggested to him that what Imba needed in Calcutta was some indigent retired army officer with organizational ability, and not an idealistic twenty-three-year-old man on the threshold of a career. It came to me to say at that point that I hoped we could part amicably.
‘We didn’t part amicably. He became angry. He said he had invested a lot of money and time in me. I ignored that: I thought he was going to ask for some kind of money back. He became very angry, and said he was going to remove my name from life membership of Imba. It was news to me that I was a life member of Imba, but apparently branch executives or “bureau executives” became that automatically.’
The burnt-out Maoists I had met in Madras had been on
the periphery of a much larger peasant movement. This movement had its centre in Bihar and Bengal, almost 1000 miles to the north-east; and it had been at its most active in the late 60s and early 70s. Communism in Bengal had a long history. It was another colonial import, one of the things that had come after the New Learning of the 19th century, and the mixed culture. Even now, in the dead British-built city, and almost as an aspect of its death, there were frequent, solemn communist marches through the litter and rubble and hopelessness. Even now, while a communist party ruled in the state, people could still be moved by the poetry of red flags and revolution.
Dealing in poetry and passion, never really persecuted, at times even hostile to the idea of Indian independence, fighting its own sometimes remote wars, the communist party had split and split. There had been the Communist Party of India; then there had been the Communist Party of India (Marxist); then there had been the Communist Party of India (Marxist-Leninist). It was this last, Maoist faction that had got the peasant revolt going. The revolt had been crushed. But the movement, while it lasted, had attracted and consumed many thousands of educated people in Bengal and other parts of India.
There were survivors. One of them was Dipanjan. He was now a science professor in a college in central Calcutta. It was a real, working college, but physically it was in a state of decay, Calcutta decay.
The signboard was peeling; the windows of the two-storey building were broken. But there was a gate-man, guarding the double gate. He sent me upstairs to Dipanjan, up a narrow, half-walled concrete staircase at the far end of the main building, to a broken-down room with tables with pieces of simple equipment. The uneven floor was unswept, or swept up to a certain wavering line, where the swept-up dust and the broom that had done the sweeping had both been abandoned, just like that. Dust adhered to all the mouldings or extrusions of the tall dun-coloured doors; the plaster on the wall was broken in many places. The room gave one no sense of applied colour, no sense of surfaces made even or lines made straight.
India: A Million Mutinies Now Page 38