True hero

Whatever the Odds by K.P. Singh with Ramesh Menon & Raman Swamy; HarperCollins; Price: Rs.699; 323 pp

One of the reasons why post-independence India’s nefarious licence-permit-quota regime has flourished for over 60 years and counting, is that businessmen and industry leaders who have experienced its most egregious excesses, don’t write memoirs and autobiographies. If towards the end of their innings they had taken the trouble to tell all and name and shame the architects and prime practitioners of high potential India’s neta-babu kleptocracy, the industry and business regulatory system would have self-corrected instead of being stuck in the rut of the so-called Hindu rate of growth (3.5 percent per annum) for over four decades, during which period the country’s population tripled.

Perhaps the first genuine, tell-all business memoir to emerge from  Indian industry was written by H.P. Nanda (The Days of My Years, 1992), the late promoter-chairman of the Delhi-based Escorts Ltd, who documented the manner in which he had fended off the government-supported hostile takeover of his company in 1983-84 by the London-based NRI Swraj Paul. To write his autobiography — the highlight of which was Paul’s aggressive takeover bid — Nanda roped in professional journalists to style the narrative.

Following this tradition, Delhi-based real estate tycoon K.P. Singh, until recently routinely ranked among India’s wealthiest businessmen for having conceptualised and engineered construction of the new township of Gurgaon on the outskirts of Delhi,  roped in journalists Ramesh Menon and Raman Swamy to pen a lucid and captivating life story. Whatever the Odds narrates the Dick Whittington story of a village boy who started life as a barefoot student in rural Haryana, near the city of Bulandshahr, went to England to study engineering, transformed into a dashing cavalry officer and later a real estate tycoon who was — and is — the driving force behind the metamorphosis of dry and arid Gurgaon, Haryana, into arguably the finest new township of contemporary India.

For youth and the growing number of business management students with dreams of making it big in the business world, there are significant lessons to be learned from this riveting autobiography which hasn’t received the reviews and exposure it deserves. The first insight to be derived from Whatever the Odds is the importance of sports and life skills education, a conspicuous deficiency of contemporary youth.

From a young age, K.P. who confesses to never having been “really interested in classrooms and books” was encouraged to play tennis and hockey, among other games. And from his uncle Raghubir who was a captain in the Indian cavalry and ADC to Lord Wavell, the war-time viceroy of India, he learned (with the active encouragement of the viceroy) to become an expert equestrian. “Sports opened up numerous windows for me as did the social graces I learnt at the clubs. Sports also taught me my first lessons in leadership as well as teamwork, both so essential for a successful career,” writes Singh.

The good sports education he received in his youth impacted his life when after dutifully but unenthusiastically acquiring a bachelors degree from the unruly Meerut College (“huge disappointment”) and later enroling for a chemistry Masters degree in Lucknow University, he was unwittingly selected for a ground engineering course at the Air Service Training facility at Coventry,  England. In Coventry, he began a beautiful courtship with a young heiress who was impressed by his tennis and horse-riding skills,  qualifications which catapulted the young Indian student into high society of the British aristocracy. But as the author recounts with anguish, the relationship didn’t end well. The pull of his native country proved too strong. In 1950, he returned to India and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Deccan Horse.

Throughout the narrative filled with engaging anecdotes, K.P. attributes the beneficial swings of his career to lady luck, modestly omitting to mention that fortune favours the brave. In 1954 while still nursing a wounded heart, he met, wooed and won his wife Sunita whose father Raghuvendra Singh was the promoter-director of DLF Housing and Construction, builders of Delhi’s first residential colonies after independence — Hauz Khas, Greater Kailash I and II, South Extension, Model Town, Rajouri Garden etc, over 5,800 acres and had acquired an excellent reputation in the process.

Young K.P. was enlisted by his father-in-law to help out with the family business. But shortly after he resigned his Indian Army commission in 1959, the socialist Congress government promoted the Delhi Development Authority which “basically ensured that private developers were kept out of urban development in Delhi henceforth,” writes K.P.

The ban on private construction companies in Delhi prompted K.P. to look to rural Haryana where he conceptualised the dream of an entirely new industrial and residential city named Gurgaon. How he realised the dream is recounted step by step and includes a detailed account of the war he was obliged to fight against the authoritarian chief minister of the state, Bansi Lal, who had acquired notoriety as Mrs. Gandhi’s home minister during the Emergency. For the mildly offensive behaviour of an inebriated guest at a dinner party hosted by the author to which Lal had invited himself, he held K.P. responsible and did his best to damage his business. Chapters VII-X of this memoir are particularly recommended to business management students for the valuable insights they provide on how to do business in the hostile anti-business ecosystem engineered by the myopic neta-babu kleptocracy, which has almost completely crushed the native spirit of enterprise of the population, by building networks and utilising life skills. Moreover reformist political science and economics students are also likely to obtain a good idea of the extent to which Central and state governments have invested themselves with excessive powers to hinder business and economic development in post-independence India.

Curiously — perhaps because of the dominant Indian characteristic of ‘crab mentality’ —  this outstanding autobiography, exceptional for its attention to detail, candour and engaging prose, has not received the public acclaim it deserves and media reviews at best have damned it with faint praise. Yet it narrates the life and times and deserved success of one of the true heroes of post-independence India’s faltering national development effort. It has much to offer to citizens and youth in particular, struggling for business success within an adversarial and unresponsive system fashioned by the unworthy heirs of the Mahatma.

Dilip Thakore

Legend going strong

Rafa: My Story by Rafael Nadal with John Carlin; Hachette India; Price: Rs.595; 304 pp

Hyperboles are wasted on 26-year-old tennis superstar Rafael Nadal. His recent Grand Slam victory at the Roland Garros — his eleventh — has established his status as a true legend of our time. With 50 career titles, including an Olympic singles gold, Nadal has been a tremendous source of inspiration for all sports aficionados.

There is no dearth of champions, but Nadal is special. Driven by a maniacal desire to win every point, and an ability to squeeze the last drop of resistance from his body and mind, Nadal constantly illustrates hunger and intensity in a manner never seen before in tennis. Statistically, he has perhaps the best win-loss record of any tennis player: 156 career wins to 21 losses in Grand Slams, a win percentage of 88.14.

Who is this man? How has he achieved these superhuman feats of endurance and physical ability?
Rafa, his autobiography, answers some of these questions. It is a satisfactory book, at times engaging, and leaves readers feeling that they have been privileged to be allowed to enter his world. Stars like Nadal inhabit a different stratosphere. The glimpses we get of them is through the peephole that media constructs for us.

The book uses a form rarely — if ever — employed in biographical narratives: a combination of autobiography and biography. Nadal, the narrator, alternates with his narrative amaneunsis John Carlin. Surprisingly this literary device works. Although there is a frequent shifting of perspective, it doesn’t jar. In fact, it makes you wonder why this storytelling device isn’t used more often.

The book is a close portrayal of two aspects of this Spanish phenomenon that we wouldn’t know otherwise: his domestic life and what goes on in his head during matches. We often wonder whether celebrities live lives remotely similar to our own: are they close to their families? Do they have intimate friends? How do they spend their free time?

With Nadal especially, given how he shot up like a comet in men’s tennis and blazed a unique path, these questions are fascinating. Certainly there is no visible evidence of the debilitating effects of pressure on his game — does he feel it at all, and how is he able to inspire himself to new highs despite the pressure? How does he manage those whipping strokes at peak intensity through four or five physically draining hours in each round of Grand Slam tournaments?

Nadal traces the roots of his never-say-die brand of tennis to his childhood years when he trained under his uncle Toni. Ab initio the senior Nadal used to drive his young nephew to the limit and the constant haranguing and needling seems to have forged the steel in young Rafa. Writes Carlin: “The family muttered but let Toni do his stuff, respected the sovereignty of his kingdom, a Sparta regime where no whining was allowed, where the young warrior in the making was exposed to all manner of tests and privations and was allowed no excuses…”

There was always the possibility of the teacher-pupil relationship turning sour to force a parting of ways. That it didn’t, and that the two would go on to become one of the best combinations in men’s tennis is a tribute as much to Rafa’s ability to endure his uncle’s harsh training as to Toni’s belief that his nephew would make it to the top of men’s international tennis.

Nevertheless with Rafa who has won eleven Grand Slam titles — including the French Open 2012 — and still going strong, the question arises: is this autobiography premature? Nadal’s biggest advantage over his fellow players is the aura around him, of a superhero who will never flag, never buckle even under severest pressure. Rivals will no doubt pore over the book to unravel his persona, and perhaps it will help them. But for the average reader, the book is a fast-paced, well-narrated account.

Curiously, there is unwarranted dismissal of his top-ranked rivals on court in this unusual memoir. Although readers would have liked to learn what Nadal thinks of his arch-rivals Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, all Nadal offers is an account of their matches. In that sense, this is a uni-dimensional book which must have unfolded between interviewer and subject during conversations in airport lounges or hotel rooms. The Nadal saga deserves more.

Dev Sukumar