Letter to BS: Putting out right information in a crisis is not easy to do

This refers to “What not to do in a corporate crisis” (February 1) by Aakar Patel. Mr Patel is grossly unfair to Dewan Housing Finance Corporation (DHFL) and overly favourable to the Zee Group — the two companies he has chosen to compare from the point of view of their response to the recent crisis situations. 

In his eloquent write up, he tries to run down one highly respected (before the crisis) company and, at the same time, is strangely charitable to the other! He is purportedly commenting on the “corporate communication skills”  of large Indian companies in general - “still executed by multi-billion dollar businesses in a crisis as if they were mom and pop shops” — but uses his immense capabilities and flowery word play to just run down one and find good in the other. My respect for him - as an exceptionally good independent columnist — has gone down several notches after reading this article, which smacks of outright partiality.

Without going into the faults of the two companies involved — as I do not have any knowledge about their working —I think DHFL's response is very specific, business like and to the point. Its only mistake perhaps was that it was not signed by their top man and, in contrast, Subhash Chandra, chairman of Zee, seems to have written one, full of irrelevant family history and internal feuds. In another report, he had even alluded to "negative forces sabotaging his outfit" — hardly suitable when defending your company in the face of alleged loan repayment defaults.

Krishan Kalra, Gurugram

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