Around students, he used ideas to create a zone of discomfort. He would throw random factoids: "You do know that the Romans were not as bad as history has made them out to be?" and then act stunned when they, expectedly, blinked in confusion. He was childless, so maybe that had something to do with this intensely competitive need to establish his supremacy in a room full of young people.
He was good at ingratiating himself, and that played a part in people giving him the ear. He showed a magnanimity to my homosexuality that was ideas-driven and stable. It never dithered, and since this was the time I was still coming out, that sort of muscular acceptance was much appreciated. But it was also, finally, lifeless. He quoted Hegel and Horace to justify his broad-mindedness but the crux was always an open chasm that would be incapable of offering comfort.
In interviews, he would rip students apart, tearing into their CVs and questioning them on matters not of action but being. "Oh, so you are from Patna? How must that feel?" He justified this with that tired plea that students must be prepared for everything. In time, I saw that this act of helping in the guise of rudeness was a facade - he was not up to genuine mentoring, only a version of shock and awe that relied on his considerable informational prowess.
He enjoyed his drinks and his smokes. When I accompanied him for a training session to another city, I saw the desperation that sat in his eyes. He hankered for breaks to indulge himself and canvassed for booze from all and sundry. For someone who openly disparaged acquisitive ideologies (he called himself an "un-lapsed Marxist"), this dependence demeaned him - but not to himself. If you brought it up, he would doubtless offer some intellectual mumbo-jumbo to justify it.
He let a director go because of a drinking problem. A young man who was in awe of him, started and worked on the company with him for three years, who was invited to and encouraged to drink at elaborate boozing sessions - was made to go because he once came to the centre drunk. Rohan entreated and pleaded before the boss to take him back, but to no avail. Everyone saw the rank hypocrisy but no one said a word.
He had little control on the operations. He was running a business but pretended that he was above its degrading instincts. He liked to believe he lived a life of the mind but in reality, from one day to the next, he did not. He was very attuned to gossip and to disparaging those that fell out with him. If he was open to defending anything, it was a received idea derived from what he had been politically trained to believe. Business bad, socialism good. On the personal front, however, it was open season.
He knew he was losing good people but failed to look beyond the reflected glory of his past. He still believed, without reason, that it was he who sent scores of students to IIMs every year. In his view, everyone who did well had some link to him. If someone cracked McKinsey, he would find a way to claim credit. If a student asked him about a rival, he would boast he taught and trained his competitors. He even narrated an, in my view, apocryphal account where an XLRI interviewer, mighty impressed by the candidate, asked him who he had been trained by. When the candidate took the boss's name, the interviewer replied: "I thought as much."
His intro lectures were rehearsed to a T. Even the jokes and the pauses. I wondered if he had read or heard or felt anything new in a long time. He once narrated to me his back story, which was made up of absent parents, an exploitative uncle, no education... That was the only time I felt a glimmer of sympathy for him. But as I got to know him better, I began doubting the truth, or the entire truth, of his sob story.
He was a proponent of women's emancipation but could be unnervingly lecherous. He once told me he had stopped inviting girl candidates at home for interviews because they were in awe of him and he did not want them to "cross the line". The way he said it reeked of testosterone, not professorial concern. He described some students as "seriously sexy", which was so inappropriate that even laughing it off left a bad taste in the mouth.
In the end, I was glad to be rid of him. I could see how he might have been the perfect mentor in a parallel universe, but in this one, his human-ness combined ironically with his studied disavowal of it, was too much for me to bear.
The author has switched too many jobs in the past and hopes he can hold down this one