The impact a Tata Sky or Carvaan has on people's lives is great joy: Mehra

The happy impact that Tata Sky or Carvaan has on people's lives is the biggest joy, Mehra tells Vanita Kohli-Khandekar

Vikram Mehra is one of the most good-natured people I have met in two decades of media reporting. The 49-year old managing director of Saregama India is his usual self — cheery, relaxed and dapper in a jacket — when I log in on a Friday morning from Delhi to chat with him.
 

Unlike my black tea, he is sipping a regular chai in a cosy looking room. Turns out, it’s the breakout room at Saregama’s head office in Mumbai. We exchange pandemic stories and talk about food. Mehra’s wife, Neeti, runs a cloud kitchen company and he keeps posting pictures of the most luscious Lucknowi dishes on Facebook. “My life is good. I see films and hear music in the day, and sample some great food in the evening,” he laughs.
 

That is oversimplification to a fault. In a career spanning over 25 years, Mehra has launched some of the biggest brands in India and helped create categories where there were none: from Indica, India’s first indigenous car (1998) to Tata Sky, one of the first DTH operators (2006) and the somewhat indescribable Carvaan (2017).
 

The last one, with 5,000 old songs loaded onto it, makes music easily accessible to people who can’t deal with the gimmickry around downloading and streaming. It has been a runaway success, selling over 2 million units so far and rejuvenating India’s oldest music company. Saregama’s legendary 120,000-song library spanning 23 languages is being leveraged as never before.

Think of all the music in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Bengali… from the first 60-70 years of the Indian music industry. That’s what Saregama, a part of the RP-Sanjiv Goenka Group, boasts. From Rs 231 crore in FY2017, revenues went to Rs 532 crore in March 2020.
 

Numbers aside, Carvaan is a boxful of musical memories several generations of Indians have grown up with. Mehra gets hundreds of messages of gratitude. One user, for instance, called it a time machine that transported him and his father to the years his mother was alive. And once, a woman in a Bhubaneswar slum touched his feet in gratitude for the confidence that (Tata Sky’s) Active English (at Rs 30 per month then) had given her. “That what I do has such an impact on someone’s life somewhere gives me great joy,” says Mehra, putting his teacup back on the saucer.
 

The beginning, however, wasn’t simple. Growing up in Jaipur (Rajasthan) and later Lucknow (Uttar Pradesh) in a middle-income home, “my journey was governed by what was expected of me. So I did engineering from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) Roorkee, joined TCS (Tata Consultancy Services) and realised I was bored to death,” he says. “Then, I did an MBA in finance because ‘marketing is for people who are not good at anything."
 

Mehra joined the Tata Administrative Service in 1997. The training allowed him to dabble in different areas of the Tata system before becoming product manager for the Indica in 1998. That’s when he realised he loved marketing. The epiphany prepared him for the opportunity that came soon after.
 

In early 2000, he met Raj Nayak, then the head of ad sales at Star. “We started talking, and I had an idea: Combine TV and dotcom properties and sell them. Raj liked it and introduced me to Peter (Mukerjea, then CEO of Star).” And on August 1, 2000, Mehra joined Star.
 

Within three months, News Corporation (Star’s parent then) decided “no more digital investments”. In the same year, the government lifted the ban on the KU band used for direct-to-home (DTH) transmission. That is how Mehra became the first employee of the DTH project.
 

But it took five long years before Star got a licence. “It was tough waiting for permission. All my friends were going ahead in life and here I was believing that any day now the launch will happen,” says Mehra.
 

He used the time to travel the world, studying the Fox system in Latin America, the UK, Italy and Australia. That is where I first met him in 2005, soon after the licence for Space TV (as Tata Sky was called) had come through. Star had taken a few journalists to have a look at Foxtel, News Corp Australia’s DTH service. Within a year, in August 2006, Tata Sky had a hugely successful launch. It is now among India’s 10 largest media companies.
 

Mehra and I are now on our second cup of tea and I am wondering how to ask him the next question. I take a sip, and the plunge. After almost 10 years with the company and the superb work he did setting up operations, why did he not get the top job when CEO Vikram Kaushik left? “In 2010, when Harit (Nagpal, Tata Sky CEO) came in, I don’t think I was ready.” But soon after he hit 40, Mehra had his second epiphany — a sense that he needed to move on and break the shackles that held him back.
 

“I had an open conversation with Harit saying that, now I am ready for the number one job. But he was not going anywhere. It was reaching a point where if anyone walked in with a new idea, I’d say, ‘Ya, we did this earlier.’ That is not good. In that moment, this (Saregama) opening came up and my first reaction was like everyone else’s — it is an old, dated company,” says Mehra. “But I was intrigued. Then I met Sanjiv (Goenka, chairman of the Group) and liked his vision.” So he joined Saregama in 2014.
 

Was it anticlimactic going from a roughly Rs 2,600 crore firm (then) to a Rs 173 crore one (then)? “Nobody was giving this (Saregama) a second chance. The biggest shock was that Harit (at Tata Sky) used to walk out to get his coffee so he could interact with people. Here (at Saregama), people were ringing a bell for someone to bring their tea or coffee. When I stopped this practice, there was a lot of resistance, but Goenka backed me,” says Mehra. The small step signified a big cultural shift.

Then came the fun part — figuring out what to do. “There are two parts to the strategy: How do I monetise better through Facebook, Gaana etcetera; and how do I prepare this company for the future.”
 

So Saregama started buying rights to film music all over again.
 

Then in 2017 came Yoodlee Films, Saregama’s film division, its name inspired by one of Mehra’s favourite singers, Kishore Kumar.  The success of Carvaan has created a virtuous circle. It milks the library, generating lots of cash, which is invested in Yoodlee Films and to buy more music. This, in turn, makes the licensing business even more profitable.

Life, as Mehra says, is good.