Why are Indian businessman so reluctant to pen their memoirs?
Ramkrishna Dalmia had an eventful life. At one time, his business empire was the third-largest in the country after the Tata and Birla families. After Independence, his fall from grace was swift. He even served a jail sentence in 1956 for financial impropriety. Little was heard of him after that, till he died in 1978.
Apart from his riches, he had other claims to fame. Dalmia took no less than six wives, and dabbled in politics. He saw himself as a statesman at large, and his contempt for Jawaharlal Nehru made him a public enemy. Nehru once called him an ugly man with an ugly mind and an ugly heart. He was the owner of Bennett, Coleman & Company, the country’s largest publisher of newspapers, but sold it for a song to his son-in-law, Shanti Prasad Jain, when he was strapped for cash. He was an industrialist but was ruined by astrologers.
Better than fiction? You bet. The events can all be found in Father Dearest: The Life and Times of RK Dalmia (Roli Books, 2003) written by Neelima Dalmia Adhar, Dalmia’s daughter from his last marriage. Dalmia, it was said, could have stopped Partition. He was friends with Mohammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan. All hell broke lose once Jinnah discovered that Dalmia was having an affair on the sly with his sister. Maybe that he could have stopped Partition is far-fetched. Nobody’s left to endorse the story or trash it. What is certain is that the book is a good read. And there aren’t many such books around.
Why are Indian businessmen so reluctant to tell their stories? Not that they are reluctant writers. Ghanshyam Das Birla, for instance, wrote two books: In the Shadow of the Mahatma in 1968 just before the Monopolies & Restrictive Trade Practices Act came into force, and Bapu, A Unique Association in 1978 when the Hazari Commission reported the misuse of industrial licences. The answer lies in the fact that business was a real murky world till a few years ago. Before the economy was liberalized in 1991, the only competence that mattered was the ability to get a licence, and the ability to deny a licence to rivals. So, what could one write about? An honest account would bring all the skeletons out of the closet. Let sleeping dogs lie, the argument went.
There is a long list of great stories that were never told. One exception was Har Prasad Nanda of Escorts. In 1992, after he had handed over the business to his son, Rajan, he wrote The Days of My Years (Penguin). Nanda drove to Delhi from Lahore after Partition. Lest people think he had lost all, which was not far from the truth, he checked into the most expensive hotel in town, The Imperial. The trick worked. Slowly, he set up a large manufacturing base at Faridabad near Delhi, an industrial estate developed specially for Partition refugees.
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Nanda’s real test took place in the mid-1980s when Swraj Paul launched a raid on Escorts and DCM (it was called Delhi Cloth Mills at that time). It was the first attempt at a hostile takeover in India. Nanda had a small stake, and was comfortable in the thought that government-run financial institutions will always support him. But he was in for a rude shock.
Still, in true pugnacious Punjabi spirit, he fought Paul tooth and nail in the corridors of power. He recounted the twists and turns of the fight in great detail in his book. But it was the Shrirams of DCM who moved government opinion (Rajiv Gandhi was a schoolmate of Vivek Bharat Ram) and the Reserve Bank of India (Manmohan Singh was the governor) against the raid. Of course, none of the Shrirams ever spoke about it, leave aside putting it in black and white.
So, it was a delightful surprise when GR Gopinath (of Air Deccan fame) recently came out with his autobiography. Though lucid and racy, it could have done with some more details. Hopefully, this will make more businessmen come out and write about their careers, warts, grease and all. n