India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (3 page)

Gopi, in contrast, doesn’t really do sponsorship. Creating jobs in a country that lacks them: that, in his mind, summarises his main social contribution as an entrepreneur. Nor does he go in for brash branding. Plastered on the fuselage of Deccan planes rode an image of The Common Man. Forever dressed in a dhoti and checked coat, the well-loved, homespun creation of
Times of India
cartoonist R. K. Laxman represents the very antithesis of excess and frivolity. The Common Man champions the poor and lampoons the powerful. He abhors corruption and espouses good sense. For Gopinath, Laxman’s comic creation points to the ‘true wealth’ of India, to ‘those who till the land, make the bread, turn the lathe’. No, the two neighbours were never destined to get along. They inhabit different orbits.

The serial entrepreneur breaks off for a second or two. He looks up at the night sky. The moonlight blinks between the clouds, rebounding off the black-blue surface of the swimming pool. It’s close to midnight and his thoughts, at last, turn upon himself.

If he had to define his career, he says reflectively, then it would be that of a ‘first-generation entrepreneur’. The term is fundamental to his self-perception. In a country of business dynasties, his rookie status sets him apart. He started with nothing, only his wits and a willingness to work hard. There was no one to bankroll his early ventures or pick up the bill after his mistakes. Not that this was a total disadvantage. In the long run, he credits his lack of resources for making him ‘hungrier and faster and more innovative’.

The connection between necessity and invention is irrefutable,
he insists. Personal experience has taught him that. The belief explains one of his stranger-sounding business maxims: ‘Your business will succeed only when you can’t pay your rent, you can’t pay salaries, you can’t buy your wife a sari.’ Of course, the wealth and contacts that come with inherited affluence have their advantages. Yet equally they can act as a drag, turning the lean fat and the agile lazy. As he sees things, it’s a ‘rise and fall of the Roman Empire kind of scenario’. Sat indoors on Gopi’s study shelf, Gibbon would be pleased.

Hunger, as well. Starting with zero, constantly playing catch-up, standing alone, just you and the world. First-generation entrepreneurs know this well. And it gives them an appetite and energy for success. ‘There was no exhaustion in me,’ he says about his sale of his low-cost airline. ‘I didn’t say, “Oh my God, I’ve finished Air Deccan and now I’ll do nothing, just sit back and have lunch.”’

He credits his fellow countrymen with the same hunger. ‘If you go to any road junction in India, people come and sell you things – flowers, mobile-phone cases, books, goggles.’ I smile in assent, recognising the scene only too well. He is right. India has no need for out-of-town shopping centres. Most items are laid out, ready for purchase, on the country’s roadsides. ‘No one is begging for alms.’

The point is exaggerated, but the underlying message clear: Indians are industrious. He rams home the point. ‘I get a million letters a day asking me to give their father a job or their sister a job or their son a job. Whatever, it could be a job as an office boy, or as a clerk, or as a pilot. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that everybody wants to work.’ Again, the observation proves hard to dispute. Rarely do you see idle hands in India. There are too many mouths to feed, for one thing. And too little help to call upon, for another.

Optimism, as well. Of all the aspects of his story and facets of his character, for Gopi, this is the characteristic of his New India that overrides all others. The former farmer talks of ‘plunging headlong into new ventures’. He is forever ‘throwing himself
unthinking into things’. He likes to boast of never having commissioned a business plan. Self-belief and gut instinct convince him of success. ‘You don’t need a McKinsey report to tell you.’ His optimism has a naive, almost foolhardy edge to it. A driving force of his thinking, he admits, is ‘an innate reluctance to analyse the negatives’. That’s how it was when he left the army to set up a farm on land he’d never seen and with soil he’d never tested. So, too, when he applied for a commercial license to fly a helicopter that he had no money to buy, or when he started an airline service for people unaccustomed to flying, travelling to places without airports. ‘It’s sometimes like jumping off a cliff and then trying to figure out a way of landing.’

Not that he is repentant. Far from it. He even confesses how his ‘blind, inextinguishable optimism’ has landed him in trouble. The hurt from overstretching himself at Air Deccan and being forced to sell stings to this day. He refuses to dwell on it, though. ‘In fact, it’s also what’s got me where I am,’ he counteracts.

The circle is repeating itself once more. Express logistics, the undaunted enthusiast believes, is where the future lies. He throws out the numbers. In the US, it is a fifty-five-billion-dollar industry. In Europe, thirty-five billion. In China, seven billion. ‘And in India?’ He waits for a response. ‘A mere six hundred million.’

The Captain, at the helm, embarking on a new voyage, is intoxicated with hope. ‘I see things so clearly. This thing just can’t fail.’

A few weeks later I am heading across town. It is rush-hour in Bengaluru, a phrase of which India’s rapidly expanding cities make an absolute mockery. The traffic does not rush. Ever. It crawls. And it does so interminably, hour after hour, day after day.

Out of the window, angry horns scream. Sweat gathers on the line of my collar. The taxi’s fan, a minute, stick-on contraption robbed from an office desk, whirrs noisily. It provides a steady flow of tepid, unwanted air. I look around at the cars and buses and trucks and bikes, all wedged in beside me on the road, jolting together in a slowed-down staccato. The Great Indian River Dance of Traffic edges forward.

Since my poolside chat a fortnight before, I’ve been pondering on Captain Gopinath the Metaphor. He fits neither of my earlier preconceptions. That is no bad thing. For one, timing is on his side. Entrepreneur Monarchs may still abound, but their star is waning. New India casts itself as an open-opportunity enterprise. Its citizens are not subjects. They are masters of their own fate. Nor is Gopinath Famished as such. Hungry, yes. But India’s aviation pioneer is no Balram Halwai. He takes risks, not retribution. He concentrates on being upbeat, not downtrodden. Hope, not hurt, directs his entrepreneurial energies. New India is the same. He is, I’d settled, the epitome of the Optimistic Entrepreneur. But how characteristic is he of his times?

The previous week, I’d fought the same downtown traffic to make the acquaintance of some of Bengaluru’s other stellar entrepreneurs. My first stop saw me deposited in an industrial zone along the Hosur Road highway at the forecourt of a large hospital. The no-frills healthcare complex does not look like the venue for one of India’s most innovative businessmen, but then Narayana Hrudayalaya is no ordinary hospital. A pioneer in the Walmart-isation of medical treatment – high volumes, low costs, quick turnarounds – its world-class clinicians perform about ten times the number of cardiac surgeries as the average US hospital. And they do so at about half the cost. To ensure equitable access, the hospital’s administrators take the fees of the rich to subsidise the operations of the poor. Couple that with a micro-insurance scheme, which counts over three million low-income members, and this Robin Hood of healthcare is on the way to bringing heart surgery to all – regardless of a person’s ability to pay.

The mastermind behind Narayana Hrudayalaya is Dr Devi Shetty. The former physician to Mother Teresa, he is one of Asia’s top cardiologists. We’d talked in his consulting room. All the while, the heart of his previous patient had been beating methodically on a wide-screen electrocardiogram behind him. Handsome, intelligent and charming, Dr Shetty is the kind of man every mother dreams of for their daughter. He’d talked passionately about his ambition of ‘disassociating healthcare from affluence’, of bringing
heart surgery to the ninety-two per cent of Indians who currently can’t afford it, and of ushering in a generation of medical professionals who could differentiate between ‘need and greed’.

The plan is taking off. The charismatic medical entrepreneur has similar units in Kolkata (formerly Calcutta) and Hyderabad, and new ones going up in Jaipur, Jamshedpur and Ahmedabad. He’s exporting his low-cost model too. The blueprints have already been drawn up for a cardiology facility in the Cayman Islands aimed at low-income Americans.

Another stop in my tour brought me to the gates of 24/7 Customer. The round-the-clock ‘business processing outsourcing’ firm, or BPO, was one of the earliest Indian companies to jump on board the call-centre boom. In the glass-walled atrium of the company’s headquarters, the security staff had divested me of my laptop, phone and voice recorder. For the sake of data protection, they even compounded my memory stick. ‘Your Customer. Our Passion’, read a banner above the reception counter, as large as a sail.

Nagarajan (‘Nags’), the founder and ‘Chief People Officer’, is a fit, smooth-talking man with an American twang and expensive spectacles. By his own confession, he lives and breathes customer service. And he expects his eight and a half thousand employees around the world to do the same.

He’d made his millions by thirty-five after selling his California-based software start-up in the late 1990s. Deciding that he was ‘too young to retire’, he’d moved back to India and started 24/7. The company kicked off with twenty staff answering customer enquiries for Altavista. Now, it carries out over eight million ‘transactions’ a month and counts the UK’s three largest banks and insurance companies among its lengthy client list. To keep ahead of the pack, Nags is ploughing money into an ‘innovation labs division’ to design apps for iPhones, Twitter and the like. ‘The idea’, he’d explained, ‘was to predict when the customer would call and why.’ It’s a frightening, ground-breaking thought.

Both Nags and Dr Shetty had struck me as inspiring and ambitious. Visionaries in their fields, they had – like Gopi – succeeded
in creating something from nothing. Together, the entrepreneurial trio shared the same drive, the same audacity to go against the tide and, most importantly, the same unassailable conviction that India’s time was
now
. The combination had seen them achieve much in their respective careers. It had also helped them land a ton of cash.

As individuals, they abounded with optimism. And why not? As a triumvirate, they could claim impressive track records. Although none showed signs of slowing, they had each, in their own way, arrived. Students pore over their business models. Management commentators treat their opinions as ‘insights’. Everywhere they go they are ‘somebody’.

What about the nobodies? What about the fledgling entrepreneurs who are starting out at the bottom? Do they show the same qualities, the same ambition, the same optimism?

It is with this question in mind that I am making my way out to the Golf Links Business Park to meet Naveen Tewari.

Founder of InMobi, a technology start-up selling ads for Internet-enabled phones, Tewari belongs to a new, upcoming breed of Indian entrepreneur. In a sense, Gopi, Dr Shetty and Nags tee up the story of New India. They laid its foundations. They wrote the introduction. Now, it falls to the next generation to continue the tale and make it their own.

I arrive forty-five minutes late. Mr Tewari is waiting, his secretary informs me. Accustomed to latecomers perhaps, her voice carries no reproach. I go through to the company boardroom. A sparse, square room, it is decorated with a bachelor’s eye for functional furniture and foreign-made electronics. Pride of place is given to a Polycom teleconference machine. The space-age contraption has a protruding plastic arm, fixed to the end of which is a spherical socket containing a roving eyeball. A wilting fern occupies the corner.

My test case is tapping his fingers.

The gridlock traffic and my subsequent delay have ruffled me. So too has the business park. Arriving via the architectural bedlam of unplanned Indian suburbia – improvised housing, crumbling
storefronts, pavement-less streets, chaotic wiring, endless concrete, overworked sewerage, real life – the business park comes as a shock.

Sectioned away from the cluttered arterial road and shielded from outsiders by uniformed security, the world of Golf Links is neatly boxed. Here, corporations reign. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Dell. Blunt yet powerful acronyms dominate the skyline, writ large in designer script. KPMG, ANZ, LG, IBM. Glass and chrome abound. The buildings are big. The lines straight. The grass cut. The bushes sculpted. The roads empty. The people near-absent. Order, of a very Germanic kind, has been restored. Or, more accurately, imposed. The world shrank and righted itself when we drove in. It could have been the miniature demonstration model back at Mahindra World City that we were driving through.

Thrown off kilter, I kick off by asking the thirty-three-year-old entrepreneur about the photograph by the door. It’s the boardroom’s lone wall-hanging. The scene is a happy one: fifty or so employees in matching polo shirts, standing with their spouses on a golf fairway. A handful of children run amok. Stick-on smiles spread across every face. Palm trees provide the backdrop to an idyllic day out. These are his ‘superstars’, Tewari tells me.

I look out of the window. All the superstars are now busy at their laptops, plugging away at keyboards in narrow cubicles. Each booth is equipped with a small whiteboard splattered with rushed arithmetic, sales targets and holiday dates. Bathed in the pale luminosity of artificial lighting, that happy summer day must feel like a lifetime ago. Mr Tewari insists this isn’t the case. His workforce is charged. They have something to prove. They are young. They have drive, passion, energy. They believe in his industry, in the potential of Internet-enabled mobile-phone advertising. ‘You can do a lot if you get the right energy in place.’ I take a second look out of the window. Perhaps he’s right? Maybe the drab decor and uniform workbenches are camouflaging a hidden ambush of tigers, gnashing at the bit and thrusting at their prey? My senses, I have to concede, are still awry.