Nilanjana S Roy: The ostrich and the albatross

SPEAKING VOLUMES

I'd seen the man in the next seat on the plane at the Frankfurt airport bookstore. He'd ignored the pulp fiction in favour of an armload of business bestsellers""some about German companies, the new Microsoft book (there's always a new Microsoft book), a couple of the titles mentioned by The Economist in an article on books about leadership.

This, he explained in a burst of frequent flyer camaraderie, was his usual practice. He flew long-haul flights to four continents several times a month. More often than not, his business schedule left him little time to see the cities he visited, let alone browse through their bookshops.

But, he said, most airports had respectable bookshops. So before a flight, he'd pick up as many books as he could find related to the business culture of that country. It was his version of a superior Rough Guide. And he had a question for me.

"Why doesn't India have good business books?" he asked. I started defending the honour of my nation by listing titles: Business Maharajahs, Sandipan Deb's IIT book, the late Sumantra Ghoshal's works, books on marketing and on the experiences of MNCs in India. He kept pace with me, saying each title as I did, and we both came to a halt fairly soon.

Despite the plethora of books on outsourcing in India, stockmarket advice and selfhelp mantras, it was a painfully short list. And most of the names on that list came from Indians who belong to the diaspora.

My Californian fellow traveller had been in Bombay just the week before, he confided, when the first rumours about trouble in the Reliance parivar surfaced. He'd gone to the bookstores to pick up books on the company. Guess what he found?

A few profiles, ranging from the hagiographic to the scurrilous but most lacking depth, of various players in the Ambani family. A lot of management books that mentioned India's best-known group. But there were no insider accounts of the empire, no truly comprehensive histories of the company, no carefully researched analyses""not even the equivalent of an embedded journalist's account. On a clear day, you couldn't see even Reliance.

Ten years ago, these gaps in the bookshelves were more understandable. Journalists, who tend to move naturally into writing on the businesses they cover and analyse for a living, weren't accustomed to the idea that they might expand their stories into a proper book.

The publishing industry had niche marketing segments that covered the obvious, nuts-and-bolts business stuff, the How-To books, the Investor's Guide books, but it wasn't apparent that there would be a market for books on Indian business.

Today, I'd argue the reverse: there is a market, a potentially huge one, but it's not being serviced. The thin trickle of business biographies has become a little stronger, and a little less hagiographic, but that's about all we've seen in terms of real change.

Of the top sellers on Amazon's business books listings, roughly 30 per cent are by the leaders themselves: former or current CEOs, brand-name investors, hotshot marketing gurus.

Inside India, we have at least a hundred people who would qualify as potential authors""but they're not sharing their wisdom. When they do, they're inclined to airbrush their lives to a degree that turns their books into instant insomnia cures.

The only Ambani biography that doesn't read like a PR pamphlet is Hamish McDonald's extremely controversial Polyester Prince, which was banned in India. McDonald's account was highly readable and reasonably well researched, but "sanitised" is not the word that comes to mind. Some of my colleagues tell me that McDonald didn't get all his details right; an Indian journalist might have done better, but an Indian journalist would never have been allowed to write the book in the first place.

Not that Reliance is unusual: none of India's big business houses want anything to appear about their leaders or their business practices that is less than glowing.

The results make for bad reading: most authorised biographies, whether of a person or a corporate empire, straitjacket the writer to the point where the books should be issued wrapped in the kind of paper band you see in hotel restrooms. "This book has been sanitised for your protection," would be a good caveat emptor.

In most Western countries, the next big pool of business book authors is drawn from journalism. But in order to write their epic histories of economic power or the inside stories of innovations and errors at the world's greatest companies, for instance, journalists need support from their own organisations as well as the companies they're writing about.

In the international arena, companies figure that it's better to give a journalist access and hope you can successfully argue your side of the story, than to risk a one-sided, negative investigation conducted into material available in the public sphere.

In India, companies figure that they can get the sanitised version commissioned, published and read anyway""no one's going to rock the boat and risk court cases and potential bans in order to write a more accurate, comprehensive story.

For media groups, the risk is too great to justify the cachet of encouraging their brightest and best writers to produce a truly inside account.

In the long run, this policy is bad for business""often for the very businesses and companies that think every word written about them should glow with the halo of sanctimony. Writing a good business book isn't about reporting scandals or dishing the dirt: with the efficiency of India's social grapevines, everyone knows the dope anyway, even if you won't read it in print.

Writing a good biography""literary, historical, even in the field of business""is about presenting an honest record that might challenge readers to think about their own lives and their own business practices.

It's not just business travellers and ordinary readers who lose out when all that's available on Indian business reads like the Lives of the Saints. The biggest loser is the corporate world: the only view it has of itself is what an ostrich sees when it sticks its neck out, all the way into the sand.

nilanjanasroy@gmail.com