He was one of a kind

The last time I saw Dharmam would have been about fifty years ago. I don’t think we ever exchanged a single word in conversation. And yet, the memory of who he was, and his professional contribution, have remained fresh in my mind.

In the late 1960s, Dharmam worked on Prospect, one of the four estates of the Estates and Agency Company (E&A, a company with its head office in London). It was one of the most prestigious estates in the Nilgiri District, its tea among the highest priced at the auctions. Thirty years later, when I visited Prospect to show my family the beautiful home I had lived in as a child, it was in a state of utter decline. I felt bemused by the changes, but gratified to learn that people still remembered my father, Bob Savur. Hoping to find one of the old-timers still around, scouring my memory for names, I asked after Dharmam. Sadly, nobody knew where he had moved to.

In 2019, I began working with M Ravindran, a former colleague of my dad’s at Prospect, on a book about the good old days, An Elephant Kissed My Window. Memories began to surface, and prominent among them was Dharmam.

What was the reason for my vivid recall? Why did his name and persona stand out so sharply, unobscured by the many eventful years since then? I soon began to realise that Dharmam’s work was essential not just to production but also to quality of life, since, along with being in charge of maintaining the factory machinery, he was also responsible for the estate vehicles, the civil and electrical upkeep of estate properties, and the estate’s water supply. And, Dharmam was not someone who restricted himself to maintenance. He embraced his work with the joy of inventive genius, and those I interviewed spoke with respect of his creative recycling. He is still remembered for the winch system at High Forest Estate, Mudis, which sent bags of leaf using a wire rope-pulley system to the factory. At Prospect, he created a pond on a hill and laid pipes that conveyed water around the estate. When the estate hired a bulldozer from outside the Nilgiris to construct India’s first green tea factory, Dharmam, always one to optimise the use of resources, persuaded my dad that they could use it convert the meadow near the staff club into a football ground, which they did. Dharmam’s contribution extended far beyond estate functionalities: he had crafted baking trays, piggybanks, even barstools, from scrap. My brother Ravi and I had a car he had assembled from tin sheets and bicycle pedals which we could actually ride in. It had an axle connected to a real steering wheel and a loud honking horn which once belonged to a lorry.

View of the High Forest Factory from his home
photo taken by Dharmam and provided by his son Rajappa

These memories and insights filled me with determination to somehow locate Dharmam’s children and send them copies of The Elephant Kissed My Window. No one at the Prospect office knew where he was, but continuous phone follow-ups resulted in a few leads. When my disgracefully inadequate Tamil became an obstacle, a kind classmate made the calls and eventually came back with the full names of Dharmam’s sons. This gave me hope, as the names are unusual, and it was a moment of delight to find Rajappa Charles on LinkedIn: he was Chief Engineer at St Stephen’s Hospital in Delhi. It took only a few eager phone calls to the hospital to get Rajappa’s number. And to learn from him that he had left Delhi and retired to Nagercoil – and that his father lived with him.

The book was not yet in print, and I was able to check and update some facts from Dharmam who, at 89, was as sharp of mind as ever. In fact, he and Rajappa both had fond memories of the time they bought their first car, a second-hand 1956 Fiat, when Rajappa was a little boy of seven: it was my father who drove them to Coimbatore to inspect it and make sure they were getting a good deal, and drove himself back to the estate while they inaugurated their new acquisition. In the 1960s, tea estate life still followed a somewhat colonial pattern. There was afternoon tea with hot buttered scones and jam, and an apartheid-like social divide. Hearing about this incident told me something about the deep affection and regard my father and Dharmam had for each other. No wonder he was one of the people I still remembered clearly, even half a century later.

Dharmam grew up in Nagercoil, and studied at the Scott Christian High School (a college now). After his matriculation, he did a diploma in mechanical engineering and joined Pioneer Transports, the first company to start a bus service in South India. He was sent to Chennai for diesel engine training and was in the first batch of the prestigious Perkins Diesel Engine institute.

PA Charles (left) with a colleague

After a break when he suffered a debilitating attack of typhoid, Dharmam joined E&A’s High Forest, where his father PA Charles was Tea Maker, as Mechanic. There he completed an electrical supervisory course, and was promoted to Electrical Supervisor. When my father, manager of High Forest at the time, was transferred to Prospect, he made sure that Dharmam was transferred there too. Dharmam’s wife, Helen, was a much-loved teacher on the estate schools. Their last posting was at Seaforth Estate, O Valley, during which Dharmam retired and stayed on for the few years she continued working.

Connecting with Dharmam and his family was one of my greatest joys of An Elephant Kissed My Window. In December 2019, I met his son Bimal and grandson Dharun in Chennai. Bimal, who has a Masters’ in Public Health from London School of Economics, was CEO of Christian Medical Association of India. After 35 years of non-stop travel all over India and many other countries, he retired in 2020.

Sadly, I would never make it to visit Dharmam in Nagercoil, as he passed away just three weeks short of his ninety-second birthday.

RIP Charles Dharma Sundara Raj (30 April 1929 – 9 April 2021)

This tribute was written for Planters' Chronicle April 2021 issue

A tribute to a truly extraordinary person

Dr Nandlal Tolani would have been 94 years old today if he had not breathed his last on 14 August 2017. He was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met and I consider myself very fortunate to have had the chance to work with him.

Pribhdas 'Kaka' Tolani (1893-1988) and his sons, Bombay, c1970s
Gopaldas, Pribhdas, Nandlal, Chandru

Nandlal was born in Sindh in 1924 into a family of wealth and social position. Through the hard work and intelligence of the previous generation, the family’s orchards had grown into an extensive landholding covering hundreds of thousands of acres. A princeling with a large estate he would inherit, Nandlal was also a brilliant student. He graduated from Agriculture College in Sakrand, and pursued his further education at Cornell University, USA. He was on his way home with a Master of Science degree in Agricultural Engineering, equipped to take his place on the family lands, when the impact of Partition started making itself felt. By the time his ship docked in Bombay in early 1948, it was clear that things were changing radically and Sindh would never be the same again.
Nandlal’s father had stayed behind in his home in Larkana – there was no reason for him to leave. However, he was jailed on suspicion of being an Indian spy. After several weeks, he was granted reprieve on condition that he leave Pakistan immediately. So Pribhdas ‘Kaka’ Tolani, a wealthy, prestigious and powerful landlord of Sindh arrived in Bombay as a refugee along with other hundreds of thousands who had been forced out of their homeland.
Members of the family went to work immediately to support themselves. As per the First Five Year Plan of the new Government of India, the focus was on agriculture and Nandlal Tolani, with his Master of Science in Agricultural Engineering, took up a project to build an earthen dam in Kachch. When that was successfully completed, he went on to do a second and, over the years, several more across Gujarat and Maharashtra.
In Bombay, Kaka constructed a building for himself and his family and gradually built more to house other refugees from Sindh who needed comfortable homes. As the years passed, Nandlal’s involvement in the Bombay business grew.
Finding absurd government policies and corrupt government officials difficult to tolerate, Nandlal returned to Cornell to work towards a PhD. This time he had his family, his wife Papu and their young children Rohet and Sujata with him. It was a pleasant interlude, and he wrote his thesis in less than two years, on the subject of how to develop an operational model to choose between a fertilizer plant and an irrigation project in underdeveloped countries. There were strong messages in this thesis for the Government of India, but sadly none were heeded.
Dr Tolani enjoyed life at Cornell and would in later years say that he considered himself more fit for a life in academia than one in business. He would have stayed on to study and teach at Cornell but Kaka wanted him back at home and,  the ever loving and dutiful son, he returned to Bombay.
However, Dr Tolani was determined to move away from construction. After considering many options in which business would be cleaner, he decided on shipping, which in the late 1960s was the Indian industry with the least corruption.
Starting with two ships – bought with savings rather than loans – Tolani Shipping grew gradually and systematically. Dr Tolani had no interest in becoming a great shipping tycoon and competing with other companies for the maximum number of ships. His aim was to create wealth and a comfortable life for himself, his family and his employees. While he achieved this, his company also grew to be highly regarded across the shipping world.
During this time, Dr Tolani systematically divided his time and energy between his work, his philanthropic activities, his leisure pursuits and his family. He started a college of commerce in Andheri East, and grew it into a centre where neighbourhood children, at an impressionable age, would receive a high quality well-rounded education with a strong academic component, the best extra-curricular opportunities and a wholesome moral base. He endowed a chair at his alma mater Cornell University – the Nandlal P Tolani Senior Professorship in International Trade Policy. His lifetime dream was to found an institute in India which provided a quality of education comparable to the education he had received at Cornell, and to do this he developed the Tolani Maritime Institute entirely with his own personal funds: a college of maritime education set in a large and beautiful campus with extensive workshops, library and a campus ship for practical lessons. As he said:

I never wanted to profit from my educational institutes. What I did want was to run professionally-managed organizations. I wanted to do good business and have a healthy bottom line, but always within the ambit of the law. While doing so, I wanted others around me to benefit too. Working with my team, we built a reputation for being decent, principled, and reliable. Today my biggest satisfaction comes from the respect that every member of Tolani Shipping, of Tolani College of Commerce and of Tolani Maritime Institute command, on the basis of this reputation.

Dr Tolani was never interested in wealth and power for the sake of wealth and power. The young Nandlal, a child who loved his grandmother dearly, had promised her that one day he would earn so much that she would have enough money to even fill up the toilet. When the time came that Dr Tolani could have fitted gold taps in his bathrooms, he chose instead the vision and the discipline to use his wealth to truly live life to the fullest. He built a beautiful home, indulged his passion for luxury cars – not with a fleet, but one which he would drive himself and another for his family – and surrounded himself with good friends. In his words:

To me, wealth has given security and some freedom of choice. I have been careful with my spending, and almost always chosen comfort over luxury.
I did use my wealth to indulge my love for bridge and sailing, and to try and attract others to these sports. These are sports that test our mettle, one mentally and the other physically. As such, they help us to engage and develop the faculties we are blessed with as human beings, and thus live life to the fullest.
If there is one lesson of life that I would like to leave my grandchildren, it is the fact that money has little value. Personal satisfaction is far more important than money. For my grandchildren, and for those who come after them, I leave a wish that they may always understand the true priorities of their own lives, and that they may always have the discernment to judge right from wrong. I believe these are the things, rather than money, by which a life may be deemed successful. 

Legacies of Partition

The herbal remedies manuscript

What do people carry with them when they are leaving beloved homes and know them may never return? Ever since I received an invitation to be part of the Remembering Partition event at Godrej Culture Labs, I've been putting stories together asking people I’ve interviewed to contribute to the museum.

A few days ago, I went to visit Madhuri Sheth whom I had interviewed for my book Sindh: Stories from a Vanished Homeland and she gave me a hand-written Sindhi manuscript on herbal remedies which I packed and couriered to the museum. The manuscript was one of the precious belongings of her father, Udharam. Based on what she told me, here is something about it.

Udharam Holaram Gurnani came from a wealthy zamindar family of Old Sukkur, Sindh. To live an independent life, he left home and took up a job with the railways. Posted to different parts of the province, he lived with his wife and children in quarters provided by the railways. Whenever he was transferred to Sukkur, he would be given one of his father’s houses to live in. Udharam had studied only up to the fourth standard, but he had a wide range of interests – from medicine to spirituality and detective stories – and read a lot. He discussed philosophy with his friends, and his children were often included in the discussions.

Hemu Kalani

In August 1947, there were riots in Quetta and trains filled with fleeing women and children passed through Sukkur. Soon, migrants from across the new border started arriving to settle.  The town, once a prosperous place – a major centre of the fight for freedom, where 19-year-old Hemu Kalani had been hanged for his activities during the Quit India movement – changed fast with reports of looting and violence.

Udharam opted for a transfer across the new border. The family arrived in Bombay by ship from Karachi and lived on the docks for one and a half months, waiting for Udharam to be assigned a location.  Other families shared this plight. They cordoned off areas in unused parts of the dock’s warehouses, for themselves and their boxes of belongings. The government was distributing food, but there were no proper sanitary facilities.

When Udharam was issued posting orders for Achnera, a junction between Agra and Mathura, the family moved there but had to live on the platform for another few months, until quarters were allotted.  Even when baby Neelam, the youngest boy of Udharam and Parmeshwari’s nine children, died on the Achnera railway platform, the family continued to take the hardship in its stride, always conscious that there were others who had suffered more.

It was in 1987, when Udharam died, that his daughter Madhuri Sheth (born in June 1935) came across this manuscript, one of the precious belongings carried from Sindh in the boxes that had survived the months on the Bombay docks and the Achnera railway platform along with the family.  Udharam used these remedies along with healthy foods to treat illness in the family.

The secular Sanghi

On this day in 1997, Vishnu Shahani died. His widow, Rita Shahani, would write:

He had not been ill. There was no warning. No intimation. There was no goodbye. When I woke up that morning, he was gone. 

Years later, I worked with Rita to bring out an English translation of the (Sindhi) book she wrote after Vishnu’s death. As we got the book ready for press, Rita died. It was a shock. Her daughter, my dear friend Madhavi Kapur, launched the book a few days later on 23 November 2013, a tribute to both her parents Rita and Vishnu.

Tragically, less than six months ago, we lost Madhavi too. For many of us, the pain of that loss will always remain.  

Madhavi resembled her father Vishnu in many ways, specifically in her strong principles and commitment to social welfare. At the core of Vishnu’s identity was his commitment to Hinduism. Today the Rashtriya Seva Sangh (RSS) is perceived as a fundamentalist organization: inflexible, chauvinistic and with a capacity for violence. Vishnu, a dedicated Sanghi, was open, caring and devoted only to truth and the betterment of humankind. 

While Madhavi’s biggest contribution is in education and she is remembered with love and gratitude by her thousands of pupils, she is also well known for her unwavering stand towards secularism in India. On one occasion, she took a Pune housing society to court because they refused to accept a Muslim neighbour. She won the case, the Muslim family moved in to the building - and very soon they were accepted by their neighbours and integrated.

Thinking about Madhavi today, I wanted to do something that would have made her happy. So I uploaded Rita's book and you can click on Tales from Yerwada Jail to read it if you want. 

Tales from Yerwada Jail

At bedtime every night, Vishnu Shahani’s two young children refuse to sleep until he tells them a story from his time in jail. Vishnu’s stories embody a spirit of adventure, and the youthful excitement of overcoming a powerful and oppressive enemy. He speaks of personal involvement in the Indian freedom struggle, without a trace of complaint against the hardship he faced.
After Vishnu’s death, his widow, Rita, interviews others to get a fuller picture. She finds that the perception of each participant in the family’s history varies slightly. She pieces the versions together, allowing the differing interpretations to coexist.
Time has moved on, and while Indian democracy has survived, memories of the movement for freedom against Imperial rule have receded. The names of Gandhi, Nehru and just a few others, are remembered. Through the story of the Shahani family, this book honours the struggle and sacrifice of thousands of ordinary families in the 1940s.
Tales from Yerwada Jail also tells of the little-known contribution of the Sindhis to Independence, and their struggle to find livelihood and new homes after Partition.

The Shikarpur boy who built a Rs10K empire

Yesterday, Pune lost one of its stalwarts of industry, PP Chabria. Founder and Chairman of the Finolex Group, Mr Chhabria died at 86 after a brief illness. He was widely known to be gentle, dignified and the personification of humility. He was also a man of extraordinary achievement.
Prahlad Parsram Chhabria was born into a wealthy business family of Karachi, on 12 March 1930. As a child, he spent happy times in his native town of Shikarpur, the love for which he carried to the end of his days. When his father died, he was just twelve years old. Within a short while, the family lost all its money. He was taken out of school and went to work in what turned out to be a series of menial jobs. As a helper in a cloth store, he got used to winding up bales of cloth, sweeping and even washing the shop owner’s lunch utensils. As a cleaner in a truck, he sat next to the Pathan driver and in a few weeks was able to converse with him in fluent Pushtu. After two months working with his brother-in-law in Amritsar, he had picked up Punjabi too. In later years, living in Pune, he invariably chose to address public gatherings in Marathi rather than English or Hindi.
On his way home to Karachi at the end of his stay in Amritsar, travelling alone by train, the young Prahlad woke in the morning to find that a currency note had been stolen from him. Shocked and upset, he had the courage to approach the railway police at the first halt, the tenacity to insist that the co-passenger he suspected be searched, and the remarkable power of memory and observation to prove that the note found was his: to the astonishment of the police constable, this young child knew the number on the note! PP Chhabria was that rare individual whose education ended when he was twelve years old but had the intelligence to learn every aspect of business on the job, and as he became established in business, he was always respected for his prowess in finance, sales, human resources and public relations.
In 1945, at the age of fifteen, PP Chhabria came to live with relatives in Pune working in their home and business to earn his keep. Two years later, the events following Partition caused his mother and brothers to flee from their home in Sindh and join him in Pune. Like many other displaced families, they started a small business of their own. By now he knew the city well and used this knowledge, bringing electrical goods from Bombay and supplying to local shopkeepers. It was this fledgling business that he grew to the Rs10,000 crore Finolex Group, working in close partnership with his younger brother, Kishan, KP Chhabria. In 1954, they established Finolex Cables and in 1981, Finolex Industries.
PP Chhabria was a loving family man, devoted to his wife Mohini and their three children, Aruna, Prakash and Sonali. In August 1981, tragedy struck and they lost Sonali to leukaemia. PP Chhabria had been a talented singer, excelling in the words and melodies of KL Saigal, Pankaj Mullick and others ever since he was a young child. After Sonali died, he stopped singing. His guru, Swami Ram Baba was a great source of strength through the difficult times of his life.
In the years to come, as Finolex grew from strength to strength, and PP Chhabria and his family established the Mukul Madhav Foundation and the Hope Foundation and Research Centre, active in the fields of medical assistance, education and social welfare. He also set up schools and an engineering college in Ratnagiri, always conscious of the lack of education in his own life and committed to providing opportunities to others.
first appeared in Pune Mirror under the heading The Karachi boy who built a Rs10K crore empire on 6 May 2016

Quintessential entrepreneur

When Satpal Malhotra breathed his last on 23 July 2013, it was the end of a beautiful journey, notable in many ways. His life had spikes of drama and calamity, but it was consistent in certain features: high achievement both materially and spiritually, great love given and received, and the deepest commitment to responsibility.
SP Malhotra, as he was widely known, was born on 22 May 1927 and grew up in Rawalpindi, where his father ran a household goods store and flourishing auction business. When his father died, he was only sixteen years old, and he stepped bravely into his role as head of the family. His entrepreneurial abilities, evident even at this tender age, soon resulted in remarkable business success.
Sadly, fresh tragedy lay in store. The young Satpal lost his beloved mother when he was just nineteen. The following year, Independence and Partition put him and his family on the wrong side of the new border. Fleeing a riot-torn Rawalpindi, he arrived in Delhi, dazed and disbelieving at the turn of events, anonymous in the huge influx of refugees, penniless, and grateful to be alive.
After a few weeks of travelling to various places in India in search of a new home, he stopped looking the day he arrived in a small town which had much that reminded him of his hometown of Pindi. It was 13 November 1947.
Pune in those days was still a small, slow-paced town, well known for its excellent climate and cultured people. Satpal Malhotra, along with his little brothers Bahri and Harish, were among the early settlers who brought new dimensions to it. Most significant of these was the spirit of enterprise. Starting with nothing, SP Malhotra built up his company Weikfield in the dark era of India’s license raj. A landmark on the Nagar Road for decades, it was also a brand that carried sweet memories of family treats of custard and trifle to an entire generation.
SP Malhotra was the quintessential entrepreneur. The most inspiring phrase I heard from him, a man of wealth and position willing to face any trial of life with courage, was: “So what if I lose everything! I can always buy a cart and sell bananas.”
Above and beyond this was his love and commitment to his family. They were his world. His brother Bahri, the face of Weikfield and perhaps better known than SP himself, worked side by side with him with utmost respect and devotion. Through all the years and changes in his life, the memory of his love for his parents remained fresh in his heart. Perhaps it was this which took him back to Rawalpindi, to visit his childhood home. Perhaps it was this which made him a constant crusader for peace between India and Pakistan.
SP Malhotra is survived by his wife Rajinder, his sons Mukesh, Puneet, Ashwini, and his daughters Urvashi and Pooja. As a young bride, Rajinder reared SP’s little brothers as her own children. In his autobiography he writes, “Jinder came into my life with a quiet warmth which has continued to grow. As the years have passed, her magnificent inner beauty has also grown day by day. And she has stood by my side every step of the way, hardworking, self-denying, utterly practical, consolidating all that I have built, growing together from childhood to adulthood, and stepping gracefully and comfortably with me into old age.”
While SP Malhotra’s sons have ably multiplied his business and assets, his two daughters have honoured his legacy by achieving exceptional success in their chosen fields of education and art respectively.

first appeared in Pune Mirror on 6 May 2013

How Shah Rukh Khan made himself

Shah Rukh Khan became famous through masala flicks. But he is also busy making a fortune off luxury branding. What is it about him that appeals across social strata and income groups to let him successfully endorse everything from pens to medium-budget cars to luxury watches? The evolution of this ordinary-looking man, from a middle-class family in Delhi and with no industry network, into the formidable Brand Shah Rukh, is not a happy accident but the result of clear, strategic thinking.
When Shah Rukh Khan’s first film was released in 1992, he was already a married man, and proud to be one. Unlike most other male Bollywood aspirants who suppressed information about their families with a view to projecting an irresistible romantic-hero persona, Shah Rukh Khan flaunted his.
Setting out with this novel approach, he maximised every opportunity that presented itself, and applied his keen business brain not just to advance his career but also to create a sterling public perception of himself that everyone, across socio-economic boundaries, could aspire to.
The first milestone was establishing himself as the embodiment of stability, cast-iron priorities, and traditional Indian family values.
Everyone knows the story of Shah Rukh Khan’s family: the tragic loss of his father to cancer when he was just sixteen, and the family’s financial trauma. He talks freely about how much he cried when his mother died; about the games he plays with his children; about how much he loves his wife. In nearly twenty years, his name was never tarnished with romantic links to any of his heroines – no matter how romantic or sexually explicit their onscreen antics. His super-clean image was reinforced by his prominent secularism: his Hindu wife, his education in a Christian school, and his loyalty and seamless devotion to Islam – each without conflict to the other. Whether he was a hero or a villain or a comedian in his movies; whether his name was Raj or Rizwan; he never hesitated to come out in public as just himself – with his family in tow. No Bollywood hero before him had ever created such a determinedly wholesome image for himself. Even Amitabh Bachhan, who Shah Rukh Khan duelled in public for prime position in the late 1990s, was not free of moral blemish.
Shah Rukh Khan sidled past ‘Big B’ and instated himself as ‘King’ of Bollywood – applying his shrewd understanding of human psychology to have the title brandished so frequently that it soon lost its ludicrous tone and began to ring naturally.
But Shah Rukh Khan never tried to gloss himself with trappings of pretentious royalty. He masked his formidable intelligence, choosing to pitch himself as a personality of mass appeal rather than a darling of the wannabe intelligentsia (like, say, Aamir Khan). And he shamelessly paraded his monetary goals – another tick in the box for the idol of wish fulfilment. It was he who launched the trend of Indian film stars dancing at high-budget weddings for enormous sums of money. When people criticized him for lowering his status by doing so, he coolly shrugged and confessed, tongue-in-cheek, that he was only a performing monkey.
Examples of Shah Rukh Khan’s PR genius abound – in the early 2000s, the front page of Times of India gave extensive details of his surgery in the US! Its most glorious peak was his 2009 tear-jerking film Billu Barber in which he plays a superstar who seeks out the long-lost friend of his impoverished childhood from amidst thronging masses of fans. What a paean to Brand Shah Rukh that was!
Working towards his single-minded goal of legend-status in the Hindi film industry, it was his PR skills that helped him enter and stay in the big league to which most have access only by virtue of family connections. And, having restricted the number of films he acted in, he took another strategic decision – to stay in the limelight by offering himself for product endorsements, a decision that opened a lucrative avenue of employment for other out-of-work stars.
As Shah Rukh Khan’s career progressed, his entrepreneurial side continued to identify new opportunities in his domain. In the early 2000s, he invested in a production house. Within a few years his production business had established itself and his next step was the IPL cricket team. In superb cross-utilization of each platform, his product brands sponsor his movies and cricket team; their sponsors use Brand Shah Rukh to endorse their products. Today, when Shah Rukh Khan looks at Hollywood, it is not by gratefully grasping at bit roles as many other Indian actors have, but rather by partnering with Hollywood studios.
In the new Indian economic scenario, it is the maturity and planning that went into the creation of Brand Shah Rukh that has so many women professionals aspiring to buy Tag Hauer watches for their men without the faintest idea of their price – simply because Shah Rukh Khan wears one.

First appeared in Atelier magazine in February 2012

Tools, mining, materials – and fika

In August 2008, Sandvik Asia commissioned me to write a corporate biography, a wonderful assignment that kept me warm and well-fed right through the nasty recession that waited considerately till the project was well on its way.

 Theirs is a fascinating story. In 1950, the newly-formed Indian government headed by Jawaharlal Nehru was faced with the task of building a nascent nation. Reeling from the after-effects of the Second World War, the withdrawal of the British, and the terrible tragedies of Partition, a large majority of our country continued to live in abject poverty. But the new government of India had great ambitions. While making plans to develop the villages and helping the farmers to prosper, they laid the base to build an industrial nation.
India had no technology and needed partners. Whom could we turn to? The British had left after a long struggle; German technology had been used for inhuman purposes during the war; The USA was too far away. Finally, it was decided to approach another quiet, inconspicuous country which just happened to have its industrial base intact. Nehru began sending trade delegations to Sweden.
Swedish companies, conservative, long-term planners, hesitated to invest in a country on the other side of the globe where tigers and snakes apparently roamed free on the streets, and the average person might hope to live just thirty-two years. So Nehru went along himself, and charmed their reservations away. In 1960, the swashbuckling Lars de Jounge arrived in Poona (as it was called then), Sandvik Asia’s first Managing Director.
Lars, now eighty-two, lives in the USA and came to Pune and spent some days talking to me about his experiences setting up the factory and starting business in India. He also gave me his wonderful collection of photographs, and many were used in the book. Other former Managing Directors of the company were also extremely helpful, providing any number of interesting stories, and continuous support as the manuscript progressed. E Gunnar Svensson took the trouble to scan and send me every internal news bulletin from his four-year tenure. He even did a thorough proofread of the manuscript, spotting any number of howlers before we went into production.
My most important oral source for this book was Dr Sanjay Basu, a former IIT professor who led Sandvik Asia’s research and development efforts for decades and, now retired, continues as consultant to the company. He showed me around the factories any number of times, explaining processes and answering questions patiently.
Sadly, the company had preserved almost no documents from which we could piece together its history. Luckily there was a solution – and one which turned out to be a fulfilling adventure. We visited the parent company’s archives, preserved in the municipality at Sandviken.
I had been told, “If they want to reward you, they send you to Sweden in July. If it’s a punishment, you get to go in winter.” So when I was told to block dates in November, I knew what that meant and humbly got out my winter coat, gloves and woollen cap, and a whole lot of regular stuff that could be worn in layers for that extra warmth.
We flew to Stockholm via Munich. I was busy soaking in atmosphere from my Stieg Larsson book but couldn’t help notice the cabin crew trying to speak to my neighbour in their plastic-cheerful German. He, being Danish, would stare back, slit-eyed, and sneer disdainfully, “Sorry?” An investment bank had sent him to India and he had been mighty impressed with the progress in the nation but I think he changed his mind when I said I was on my way to Sweden and gave me a ‘You can’t be serious, go get a Life!’ look.
“Boring,” is how Swedish people describe their countryside (“nothing but trees!”) Two hours out of the airport, we had arrived at the small industrial town where we would read original documents from the 1950s about how the Indian government wooed the Swedish companies to come and share their technical knowledge and contribute to the economic and social growth of our newly independent nation.
Our hotel faced the town square, with the Town Hall on its right and the Municipality building, where the archives were located, on the left. The air was crisp, the trees stark, the sky grey, and the winter coat handy. At the cemetery, the graves were low but lit with little lamps. Walking around, we saw a few relics of the region’s past: a Bessemer converter that was one of the first to be used for the industrial production of steel from iron, and an enormous forging hammer which would have been powered by steam.
It had been a long time since people treated me like a rare exotic creature and I quite enjoyed it. At the archives a number of city workers stopped by to say hello. One who had just come back from a trip confided that they all knew they lived in the best country in the world – but when they went abroad no one had ever heard of them, so what was the use!
Swedish people are modest to the point of being invisible. It’s such a marked part of their personality that when they write, they hardly ever use the word “I”. When they say, “nothing but trees”, they omit mentioning that those trees, and the lakes between them, are stunningly beautiful. Nobody raves about the delicious food, so my facebook posts showing plates heaped with colourful Swedish meals surprised and intrigued my friends.
Walking down the street, little flakes of snow settled on my shoulder, enabling me to marvel, next morning, at a universe in which a perfectly ordinary person could find herself residing temporarily inside a Christmas card. Bosse, the archivist, took us to see an axe factory – Swedish axes are apparently in great demand in the USA. We were fascinated to see that manual skill could be so important in a country of advanced machine technology.
In May the following year, I found myself back in Sandviken, feeling (and behaving) like an expectant father as the design and production team put the book together. The part of the day I enjoyed most was ‘fika’, a Swedish tradition which is hard to describe – I offer the Hindi word ‘timepass’ as my best approximation. Work stops and people hang out and relax over coffee and delicious Swedish cakes.
All the intense hard work was rewarded with a long weekend in beautiful Stockholm with my brother Ravi and his family, and my friend Amita, who flew in from London. I was reading Desiree by Annemarie Selinko, a fictionalised biography of a Frenchwoman who became Queen of Sweden. This, along with the sunny weather we were lucky to have, added depth and perspective as we explored this picturesque city. Walking through Gamlastan, the historic quarter, we discovered Pippi Longstocking, Astrid Lindgren’s interesting heroine on whom, say some, Stieg Larsson’s Lisbeth Salander is modelled.

The Sandvik Asia corporate biography was launched on 8 July 2010, fifty years after the company was registered in India. It was a low-profile event, in keeping with the essentially unobtrusive nature characteristic of the Swedish. I did feel sorry, though, that the people of my city would probably never know much about this wonderful company which established base here in 1960, making it one of the first companies to bring foreign direct investment into independent India. Other Swedish companies soon followed suit, and ‘Sveanagar’ came up on the old Bombay-Pune Road, with Sandvik’s manicured lawns charming passersby.
Fifty years of growth and contribution later, the Swedish companies are a shining example of one of the oldest and most significant corporate symbiotic relationships with India, organizations that helped India to become an industrialized nation.

True confessions of a ghost writer

The awful thing about being in a profession where visibility is a key criterion of success is that regardless of the quality of your work, your friends will always think you’re a loser since you’ve never won the Booker Prize.
No one could possibly be worse affected by this unreasonable benchmark than me since I went to school with Arundhati Roy where – and the admission causes me massive shudders of mortification – she was a famous athlete and I was the one preening insufferably with the radiant glory of my wondrous and unmatched skill with words.
Worse yet is the fact that every book I’ve written to date, and also some I’m labouring over even as we speak, have been ostensibly authored by others.
Trying to feign sophistication is pointless – it’s only dismissed as sour grapes. Even my (actually rather priceless) one-liner, “If they give me cash then why do I need credit!” is no match for the sniggers of uncouth schoolmates who cruelly whisper to each other, “Ya, she’s on page 334! And you’ll need a high-rez magnifying glass if you really want to see her name!”
It’s no use my explaining that the biggest compliment to the ghost writer is when someone reaches the end of the book and only then realizes, with a start, that the voice that was speaking all this while is not that of the face on the cover but has actually been cleverly simulated by another.
It’s no use my explaining that even a book of the stature of The Autobiography of Malcolm X – listed by none other than Time Magazine as one of the ten most important non-fiction books of the Twentieth Century – was written by the high profile Alex Haley.
Yes, we ghost writers are a sadly marginalized tribe – but the truth is, our numbers are growing.
Publishing is easier today than it’s ever been before – and getting even easier. Outsourcing is now established as a mainstream alternative to getting things done, so no one need pretend any more that they actually authored their book themselves. Writing is considered a suitable – though perhaps not particularly favoured – occupation for one’s offspring. And, as the world grows more and more complex, people with fascinating stories to tell but without the skill to tell them are undoubtedly going to give more and more opportunities for highly-paid work to people like me. The prospect delights.
One day, surely, someone will coin the expression ‘self-written autobiography’.
Yet, and even after endless years spent honing the skill of presenting the most negative attribute, the most downmarket episode, the most trivial achievement in hues that colour it as enthralling – or candid, or upright, or touching, or endearing  – I’m sad pressed to portray this facet of my own professional profile in a manner that might possibly invite esteem.
Whooshing out of cupboards and down chimneys in my ghostly manner, I must muse moodily – but wispily, insubstantially alone – on the significant attributes of the sensitive scribe who can listen so carefully to another as to truly comprehend all the intricacies of thought and feeling of the subject, expressed in subtle ways even if unspoken, and convey them in a suitable manner.
Most of us go through life leaving the really important things unsaid. So ingrained is this habit that few of us really know what is important in our lives, and even less know how best to say it to the ones most important to us. And yet, when towards the end of a long and fulfilling life – or phase of achievement – we take up the task of writing our story, we must find the words with which to say these things: words that will cement our bonds with loved ones without gushing, repair our strained relations with others without grovelling, and create in strangers a feeling of warmth and appreciation for our life and times. This, of course, is no ordinary skill – but it is what the ghost writer must strive to excel at.
One of the simplest directives for good-quality journalism holds up hallmark parameters to the ghost biographer equally well: “Put it before them briefly so they will read it, clearly so they will appreciate it, picturesquely so they will remember it and, above all, accurately so they will be guided by its light.” These words come from Joseph Pulitzer, the Hungarian-American publisher who is best known for posthumously establishing the Pulitzer Prizes and for being one of the originators of investigative journalism.
What Pulitzer was never recorded as having said, but we all know, is that journalists learn early to casually project an air of comfortably superior knowledge by using the right key phrases that indicate one is an insider and well versed in areas one may never have encountered till just the previous day. The ghost writer must extend this skill further and delve the depth of her subject’s life experience, making it her own. And the ghost writer must have the discipline to resist the temptation – as every good reporter must – of icing the story with her own interpretations and experience, assuming and conjuring detail or sensation where none existed in fact.
When I write on behalf of someone else, though I am primarily working as a journalist, I also project myself into a range of different roles.
I am the village letter writer who will communicate this person’s message to another.
I am the client-service executive who will investigate my client’s requirements with single-minded commitment, and work to my utmost to fulfil them as best as I can.
I am the PR machinery that will give a context to both the achievements and the failures in this person’s life and, by showcasing them in a favourable perspective, matchlessly enhance his or her reputation.
I am the confidante who will receive a stream of information and it will be my responsibility to judge which shall be published, which relegated to the wayside, and which – for some of these will be secrets never told before to a single soul – shall go with me to my grave.
To the opinionated grandson who scoffs, “Why a book about HIS life, what is so great about HIM that he should write an autobiography!” I am the Victorian school teacher who raps knuckles with the stern admonition that each human being – and in particular grandfathers of overindulged young people – has a fascinating story, and each human being has the right to tell it.
I am the productivity-oriented project manager who must structure the project into clear phases, defining milestones, moving effortlessly from one role to the other as appropriate to each changing phase, anticipating, apprehending and resolving key pressure points – while at the same time monitoring and managing every discernible parameter. And I am the commercially-savvy professional with the relaxed confidence to lay down a payment structure which protects the interests of both parties, while simultaneously nudging the project along a carefully-configured but relentless time-line.
I am the stage artiste whose own character and nature and gender and family and past – and ego – vanish completely as she seamlessly dons the persona of another.
And I am also the unglamorous writer who will never win a Booker for her work, and even if the press in her own little city beams with kind satisfaction at her every achievement, must ultimately content herself with these words that a wise woman once coined: “If they give me cash, then why do I need credit?”
first appeared as I’m not there in Open magazine  on 13 Feb 2010 

The abandoned

One day I came home from work and discovered that my refrigerator had left me. There was a horrible empty space in the kitchen, right where she used to stand, which gaped at me, mocking. Some wrinkled tomatoes sat on the draining board, covered with shiny beads of condensed water, and a few dehydrated chillies lay beside them. But that was the only sign that I had ever had a refrigerator of my own. She had just taken everything – and left.
It was a horrid shock. I know we’d had many disagreements – but then, what man is there who can truly say that he has never quarrelled with his refrigerator? Who has never complained about her constant need to be defrosted and cleaned, about the electricity bills she is responsible for? No, I never expected it would come to this.
After all, hadn’t I given her a good home – pride of place in my kitchen – and filled her with food and drink of every description? The ungrateful thing! I was angry, and hurt.
But before long my anger turned to grief. I remembered sadly the day when I had first taken her to be my refrigerator. It had been a day of rejoicing and happiness. We had been happy then, full of plans for the future. It was a wonderful feeling to have my very own refrigerator, to love and cherish till death did us part, and I was filled with pride. What had gone wrong?
It had begun gradually enough. There was the odd day when I’d come home hot and tired in the evening, longing for nothing so much as a tepid bath and a hot meal. But she would have nothing to offer but the cold congealed remains of previous repasts. I can tell you that made me mad. I slammed in her door good and hard a couple of times! Then of course she’d begin making a noise. Somewhere between a grumble and a whine, she’d start up with a click when I happened by. It was awful and of course I’d have to go out to eat. It made me feel guilty and all but, I ask you, what else is a man to do?
Finally, things got so bad between us that her light wouldn’t go on when I opened her door. I knew she was acting up when I called in the mechanic and he couldn’t find anything wrong.
Perhaps I should have sensed the depth of her hurt and tried to make amends. Now of course it is too late, she has gone. In spite of everything, I can’t help wondering how she is going to manage.  A refrigerator on her own … it’s a tough world out there. The empty space in the kitchen stares up at me accusingly.
As for me – no ice, the milk spoiling, fruit rotting – no, I could never live like that. There’s nothing for it but to go out and get a new refrigerator.
The prospect is quite stimulating, really. I shall have to look far and wide – advertise, perhaps – but at the end of my search, who knows, I may just find a refrigerator of the right shape, the right colour, manufactured by the right people – and one that works well, too.
first appeared in Business & Political Observer on 17 Mar 1991