Corporate Carnival (4 page)

As we neared Dubai, he asked, ‘Anna! What are the babes here like? I was told that Dubai is full of beautiful women.’

‘Listen, mate!’ I told him, sounding like a grandfather. ‘The UAE is an Islamic state. Even if you forget everything else, please remember this one thing. Maybe you should have a nice cold shower when you get home, Anand. You resemble strongly a bull in heat.’

He grinned. ‘You can call me Andy,’ he said. ‘Everybody does.’

Probably, I thought, because it rhymes with ‘Randy’.

4

Pickin’ up Steam

K
itch popped a moody peanut into his mouth and took a sip of coffee. Kitch makes his own coffee from this stainless steel double-compartment thing where he puts the blend of coffee and chicory on top and fills it up with hot water. The customized poison gathers, drop by drop, in the lower section. He was sitting at his desk, his tie neatly rolled into a ball and placed on the table. Kitch hates wearing ties and keeps removing his from to time. He claims he feels like he’s being strangled, just knowing it’s around his neck. Halfway to suicide, he calls it.

‘What’s happening, dude?’ I asked.

‘Shit is happening,’ he replied. ‘I don’t know which is worse, machan, Myers York with the recession, liquidity crisis and margin calls – or this place filled with bureaucrats with bloated egos.’

‘We have jumped from the frying pan straight into hell,’ I agreed.

‘Hell is right, Jai. There are demons, evil spirits and monsters all around here.’

‘Especially green-eyed monsters.’ I was referring to the storm that had been whipped up over my acquisition of Sunny’s account.

Satwinder ‘Sunny’ Singh Bali, a Myers client and a well-wisher of mine, had recently moved from Kuwait to Dubai. It took me a whole month to get his account opened, after satisfying everyone concerned that neither Sunny nor his wife was into drugs, money-laundering, arms-dealing or terrorism; that Sunny was a legitimate businessman and further, that the ‘Sunny Singh’ that they had discovered on their electronic name-checker was a thirty-two-year-old, one-eyed pickpocket in Ludhiana and therefore not the same as my forty-seven-year-old, highly successful, two-eyed, Dubai-based businessman. Three days later, Sunny Singh remitted 15 million dollars and all hell broke loose. Someone discovered a dormant 1,400 dollar account of Sunny Singh’s in the erstwhile Abbott bank unit and claimed that the relationship belonged to him. A girl from the NRI team complained to the regional CEO that she had been ‘marketing’ Sunny Singh for the past two years and that a new private banking bully had stolen her account. Her boss sent a nasty email to Peggy with a copy to the head of retail business both in India and in Dubai, the regional CEO, the head of HR and several others. I thought it best to let Sunny know what had happened. He let out a forceful expletive, an anagram of DK Bose. ‘Bloody nonsense! It is
my
hard-earned money and I will decide who handles it. I will go straight to your chairman and tell him that only Jack Patel should handle my account. Nobody can make losses like him.’ He saw the look of alarm on my face and guffawed. ‘Take it easy, yaar, I’m joking. Aaja, lassi peele, drink some lassi and chill kar, bhai.’

As it turned out, a flurry of phone calls were made to Sunny Singh by various employees of the bank, each trying to claim him for his own. He patiently told each one that he could stuff himself. Two weeks later, this issue died a natural death, but the battle lines were now clearly drawn. There had been problems earlier between the retail banking, premier banking, investment services and NRI teams. Now, albeit temporarily, they were united. They had a common enemy: those ‘arrogant sons of bitches’, the new private banking team. It was not just about this account. There was talk in the pantry and around the corridors about the ‘big fat sign-on bonuses’ that Kitch and I were supposed to have received (the estimates of which far exceeded the actual) and the fact that the salaries of some of the new recruits – including us – were a little higher than the others in the bank were used to.

We detested the finance head, a guy called Ramanathan who pronounced his name ‘Ram-
Naythan
’ to make it sound Western and introduced himself to everyone as Naythan). Notwithstanding the fact that I myself am called Jack by some of my colleagues, I have always had a little sneer reserved for Indians who go out of their way to Westernize their names. Besides, Nathan’s nose was so high up in the air that he seemed to be perennially looking at the ceiling. You would often find him lumbering around the office with his secretary or a flunky in tow. He would mumble things which the other would scribble in a notepad. He was also known to be very close to the regional CEO.

On one such ‘visit’ through our office, I casually remarked, ‘Ah! One of your usual trips around the bank.’ It was an innocent, if somewhat uncalled for, off-the-cuff remark. In response, he glared at me with such fury I nearly fell backwards.

‘It may interest you to know, young man,’ he replied pompously, sounding more Brit than the Brits themselves, ‘that Mr Fergusson values my observations. I think I know exactly what to tell him about you.’ Then he turned on his heel and left, throwing another dirty look in my direction.

We couldn’t stand the compliance people either, the whole lot of them from old ‘Dickhead’ down to their secretary. The audit guys were a little better in that they were not nasty or overbearingly stuffy, but they were every bit a pain in the butt; rigid, irritating and hard to please.

There also seemed to be no clear norms or guidelines about internal service quality or even internal pricing. Sometimes the treasury staff took us for a ride by adding on a profit margin even before quoting to us and then adding further for the customer rate. In the process, the client got a bad rate, we were saddled with excessive cost and treasury made a bumper profit that set them up for super bonuses, while doing precious little. Credit, operations, compliance took their own sweet time to deliver. Sometimes they responded to an email only after a week or two, that too with a silly query about something they could easily have deciphered from the given information.

Even Peggy found things frustrating. She had to attend so many meetings with the various heads that she had little time left to plan anything in her own head. It was the accepted practice at the office to stay late, often up to 7.30 or 8 p.m. There was nothing very constructive that was accomplished in the last two or three hours, but the norm was to hang around, usually chatting, cribbing and gossiping. It was also important, if possible, to get noticed staying late by senior people. All this was a far cry from the atmosphere we were used to at Myers. There was no point comparing the two, but we just couldn’t help reminiscing about the freedom, the focus on work, the technology, the clarity of objectives, the abundance of product ideas, the research and the complete absence of daily irritants.

I was glad the World Cup was just round the corner, mainly so I could get away briefly from the negative atmosphere that prevailed in the office. After several emails to justify my trip, I got the required approval from finance. Then compliance sent me an email with a list of forty dos and donts, many of which I found impractical. Mina had been itching to go to Nairobi, where her parents and sister lived, so we decided to go a few days early and hit Kenya first.

It was with some trepidation that I approached Mina’s house. There were many happy moments I associated the house with. It was there that I met Mina for the first time and it was under the trees of the garden behind that house that we shared our first kiss. But it also brought back a rather unpleasant memory: of the time her father had branded me a thief and shown me the door. It seemed a very long time ago, though it was less than two years ago. So much had happened in this time that it appeared distant and hazy, like a nightmare on the morning after. Yet, as with a nightmare, the memory suddenly sharpened and a nameless fear passed through me as I walked past the gate. Luckily for me, Mina’s father was not at home, which helped ease the strain. Even better, Mira, Mina’s elder sister, was there and as we all got chatting, the tension evaporated.

My apprehension was no less when I went to meet my erstwhile client, Dilip Kochar. In the midst of the liquidity crunch, the value of his portfolio, like that of many others, had crashed. At that time, in a fit of drunken fury, he had once called me, cursed me and referred to me as his ‘enemy’.

‘Oho!’ he greeted me now, his left cheek bulging with tobacco. ‘Bloody fellow! You are back! Welcome, welcome!’

He was dressed in a safari suit, his trademark attire. This one was white and it was accompanied by white shoes. Dilip Kochar was the manufacturer of the popular Moto Moto brand of chips. I noticed from the various packets on his table that he had added his own picture to the design on the wrapper, along with a tag line under the name that read: ‘It’s just too good, bwana!’ I rather liked the tag line, though the picture of an elderly, bald, stern-looking man on a packet of chips was rather absurd.

After talking of this and that for a few minutes, the conversation spluttered to a halt. He looked at me. I looked at his safari suit and thought about how ugly it was.

‘So, when will we open the account?’ he asked.

My heart leapt. ‘Will we… will we open the account?’ I said joyfully.

‘Of course, bloody fellow,’ he told me. ‘How else will we recover the past losses? Besides,’ he added, getting slightly mixed up with his phrases, ‘known devil is better than unknown devil.’

He signed the complicated account forms without murmur. In fact, he went a step further. He referred a friend of his in Mombasa, Kanti Shah, who, he said, was also looking for a good bank to shift his account to. I was delighted. There was no devil in Kochar today, as far as I was concerned, known or unknown. In fact, in his white safari suit, he seemed rather like an angel in disguise.

As I left, he shouted after me, ‘Tell Kapoor I have stopped drinking now. I am just chewing tobacco.’

Mombasa was a coastal port in Kenya, less than an hour’s flight from Nairobi. I had barely taken a sip of my apple juice when the pilot announced our descent and the red-dressed airhostess of Kenya Airways came back for the empty tetrapacks.

It was an evening flight and the view from the window was beautiful, the plane giving us alternate glimpses of greenery and water. Mr Shah had recommended a hotel for me to stay in. It was close to his house, where I was to meet him the next morning.

It was an interesting hotel, built with substantial amounts of wood. The place seemed rather old, the walls filled with pictures of the British gentleman who had started the hotel decades ago, as if they were worried that someone would cast a doubt over its antiquity. If that didn’t convince you, the bathroom certainly would have, since the wash basin had separate taps for hot and cold water. So if you were among the vast majority of people who like their water somewhere in between scalding hot and icy cold, you had to take a glass and mix water from the two taps.

That night, after carefully drawing the mosquito net on all sides and making sure there were no gaps, we went to bed, the two of us – I and a well-hidden mosquito. The latter, possibly frustrated at being trapped within a net and not being able to leave after having its fill of blood, gave vent to its frustration by feasting some more on the former. When I woke up in the morning after a fitful, painful night, I was a series of mosquito bites in human shape, not to mention the bruises I had acquired as a result of a couple of vicious slaps I had dealt myself in an attempt to eliminate the mosquito. But as advised by Norman Vincent Peale and other proponents of positive thinking, I tried to think positively about not getting malaria and proceeded towards my destination, scratching and fuming.

To reach Kanti Shah’s house, I had to go past the Tiny Toddlers nursery school, which he owned. I saw two boards in front of the school, one beneath the other. The first read: ‘Vision Statement – to uplift the children of Kenya’. The other one read: ‘Mission Statement – to uplift the children of Kenya through quality education’.

The door to his house was half open. As I reached for the bell, a lady pulled open the door, smiling at me. ‘Kanti is stuck up,’ she told me. She was not accusing her husband of being a snob, just letting me know that he was delayed.

He came soon enough. A short, rotund man wearing a panama hat, he looked rather like Elmer Fudd, his round, childish, almost silly face punctuated by a broad, easy smile. He always did his morning rounds, he said, at both his schools, to meet the management team and those parents who insisted on meeting him.

‘I am starting a third,’ he told me. ‘Can you suggest any good names? My existing two schools are called Tiny Toddlers which is a nursery school and Laughing Lilliputs which is a primary school. I want a similar name for the third one, which is for big boys. Both words should start with the same letter, like Delhi Daredevils, not like Mumbai Indians. But it should be a little more serious than the junior school names.’

‘I get you. An alliteration,’ I murmured. ‘How about simply Big Boys? Both words start with B.’

‘No, it will have girls also.’

‘Hmm… What about Smart Scholars?’

He mulled over it, biting his lip.

‘Or Shining Stars?’ I persisted.

He brightened considerably. His eyes lit up, rather like the potential name of his third school. ‘Shining Stars!’ he exclaimed. ‘I like that. Yes! I really like that.’

I looked suitably gratified.

‘Do you have any children?’ he asked suddenly.

‘Er… no, not yet.’

‘When you do, they are welcome to join the Shining Stars school, free of charge. Free! That is my reward to you for your suggestion.’

I thanked him. However remote the possibility of my children studying in Mombasa’s Shining Stars school, I appreciated his spontaneous gesture.

‘Jai bhai, I will open the account now with a small sum,’ he told me with just a touch of guilt. ‘For big money, you know, you have to approach government people. It’s just like India and every other country. Anybody connected with the government will have cash to spare. That’s how the system works. Day in and day out, the official machinery has to be greased. We are businessmen who have to work hard for our money. But don’t worry, next year I will have more money.’

‘Becaujh of the new school?’

‘That is one reason. But I am also planning to raise the fees sharply for the existing ones. I have created a good name, so now I can squeeze the parents. Every government says school fees should be reasonable. I say, let them put their money where their mouth is. I will be happy to retain the same fees if we get a subsidy. Talk is cheap, you know. But this is business like any other business. We also have a real estate business in India. Have you heard of Milk Builders? M-I-L-K?’