and the size of the company, made even more interesting because I discovered that it was under investigation by the Indian tax authorities. Although Arindam’s company had spent 31.6 crore rupees on advertising in 2006, it had paid no income tax that year or the previous year. There was also the company’s social responsibility campaign, directed through its charitable Great Indian Dream Foundation. Arindam claimed that it was building schools in slums and villages, setting up a hospital in a rural area of West Bengal and giving ‘experimental’ seeds to farmers. ‘We will have fifty-two schools in seven metros by the end of the year. Sixty thousand villages will be covered in the future. Eventually, I hope to fulfil my father’s dream of doing something for the downtrodden in Africa.’ Underneath the glittering capitalist, there was a closet radical, someone who admired Che Guevara so much that he had named his only son Che. But I found it impossible to verify any of these claims, and Arindam’s promise to take me to a school for the poor in a Delhi slum never materialized.
There were other things that remained beyond my scrutiny. When I stopped to think about it, I had met Arindam only in hotels and at the main IIPM campus in Satbari, where he had talked, in expansive terms, of expanding to America. ‘Let Harvard fume, “We are twohundred years old,” ’ Arindam had said, lopping a century and a half off Harvard’s past. ‘Eventually they will recognize how good we are.’ It was astonishing, this idea of America, through Harvard, as the old, while the India he represented was the new – younger and more modern by far than America. And perhaps he was right. His institute was a fluid, virtual business school of the future, one that had done away with the arduous task of institution building.
The school’s first campus had been in Gurgaon. Arindam had then moved it to the Qutab Institutional Area, on the southern fringe of Delhi, operating from a leased building that finally fell foul of the city’s zoning laws. Now they were operating from Satbari, somewhere between Gurgaon and Qutab, but even this building, its bright colours and abstract designs done to Arindam’s specifications, its small gym and swimming pool throwing out a challenge to the well-funded IIMs, might not be the final stop. It was a leased space, and Arindam told me that negotiations were already in progress to set the campus up somewhere else.
If the school was mobile, Arindam was even more so. I had wanted to meet him in his office. ‘I don’t really operate from a fixed space,’ he said. ‘I am so much on the move.’ One day in September, he sent me a text message at 7 a.m. ‘Good morning!’ it said. ‘Totally totally forgot that day. However in the airport right now. And free. Can call. Do let me know if you’ve woken up! Sorry about this early morning missive!’
I called him back hurriedly, trying not to sound sleepy. Arindam was attending a film festival in Toronto, where one of his films,
The Last Lear
, was being screened. During the stopover in London, he would be joined on the plane by the stars of his film, the young actress Preity Zinta and the bearded superstar Amitabh Bachchan, who has gone from playing thin angry young men in the seventies to corporate patriarchs in the new millennium. After attending the festival in Toronto, Arindam would stop in at his London office for a couple of days.
I remembered reading an article in the
Financial Times
where he had said that he would be opening his London institute at Chancery Lane, and so I asked him, ‘Where exactly is your London office?’
There was a pause. ‘That’s a good question,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
He sounded boyish and vulnerable, and I found myself wanting to respond kindly, as if speaking to a child I didn’t want to embarrass about an insignificant lie. ‘It’s hard for you to keep track of all the offices you have,’ I
There were other things that remained beyond my scrutiny. When I stopped to think about it, I had met Arindam only in hotels and at the main IIPM campus in Satbari, where he had talked, in expansive terms, of expanding to America. ‘Let Harvard fume, “We are twohundred years old,” ’ Arindam had said, lopping a century and a half off Harvard’s past. ‘Eventually they will recognize how good we are.’ It was astonishing, this idea of America, through Harvard, as the old, while the India he represented was the new – younger and more modern by far than America. And perhaps he was right. His institute was a fluid, virtual business school of the future, one that had done away with the arduous task of institution building.
The school’s first campus had been in Gurgaon. Arindam had then moved it to the Qutab Institutional Area, on the southern fringe of Delhi, operating from a leased building that finally fell foul of the city’s zoning laws. Now they were operating from Satbari, somewhere between Gurgaon and Qutab, but even this building, its bright colours and abstract designs done to Arindam’s specifications, its small gym and swimming pool throwing out a challenge to the well-funded IIMs, might not be the final stop. It was a leased space, and Arindam told me that negotiations were already in progress to set the campus up somewhere else.
If the school was mobile, Arindam was even more so. I had wanted to meet him in his office. ‘I don’t really operate from a fixed space,’ he said. ‘I am so much on the move.’ One day in September, he sent me a text message at 7 a.m. ‘Good morning!’ it said. ‘Totally totally forgot that day. However in the airport right now. And free. Can call. Do let me know if you’ve woken up! Sorry about this early morning missive!’
I called him back hurriedly, trying not to sound sleepy. Arindam was attending a film festival in Toronto, where one of his films,
The Last Lear
, was being screened. During the stopover in London, he would be joined on the plane by the stars of his film, the young actress Preity Zinta and the bearded superstar Amitabh Bachchan, who has gone from playing thin angry young men in the seventies to corporate patriarchs in the new millennium. After attending the festival in Toronto, Arindam would stop in at his London office for a couple of days.
I remembered reading an article in the
Financial Times
where he had said that he would be opening his London institute at Chancery Lane, and so I asked him, ‘Where exactly is your London office?’
There was a pause. ‘That’s a good question,’ he said. ‘Where is it?’
He sounded boyish and vulnerable, and I found myself wanting to respond kindly, as if speaking to a child I didn’t want to embarrass about an insignificant lie. ‘It’s hard for you to keep track of all the offices you have,’ I
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