I had just started covering Cognizant. Until then, I knew Kumar Mahadeva only by his name. This meeting was the first time I heard him speak. His voice was self-assured and his answers were so precise and structured, he could well have been reading them out from a sheet of paper.

What convinced me though that he wasn’t reading the answers out was the occasional  bursts of spontaneity. Whenever he got impatient, it showed. At one point, he said something to this effect: “We don’t want to benchmark ourselves against a tier three company like….” It would have been alright, except that the company he was referring was one of the top five in India then, and Cognizant half its size. In fact, Cognizant wasn’t on anybody’s radar then. Sitting in a corner, I tried to put a face to that voice. I imagined the face of a man with ‘a frown, and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command.’

A day later, Cognizant sent me a photograph of Mahadeva by email. I realised my PB Shelley-induced imagination wasn’t so accurate after all. He wasn’t wearing a frown, his lips weren’t wrinkled, and his smile wasn’t mocking. He seemed to be an agreeable person, perhaps a bit stern.

Yet, over the next few years, as I heard people talk of Mahadeva, I realised my first impressions weren’t too off the mark. Whenever people at Cognizant spoke of him, it was with a sense of reverence. When they said he went to Harvard, it was as if Harvard was Hogwarts, and Mahadeva not just another student there, but Albus Dumbledore. When they spoke about his stint in McKinsey they could have been talking about Marvin Bower – such was their reverence.

Even in stories that tried to highlight his human side, there was a sense of mystique. Once Mahadeva wanted his home network to be fixed, and requested the help of a couple of Cognizant engineers who happened to be in New York. They landed at his Manhattan apartment, not far from Times Square, and got down to do their work. While they were on it, they continued their banter in Tamil, safe in the knowledge that someone with a name like Wijeyaraj Kumar Mahadeva, the son of a top civil servant from Sri Lanka and a Cambridge alumnus, who’d spent most of his time abroad wouldn’t know the language. Mahadeva was hovering around – seemingly deaf to their conversations. When it was time for them to take leave, at the door, Mahadeva thanked them – in Tamil. The story became the stuff of legend because until then, nobody, not even senior managers who moved closely with Mahadeva had a clue he knew Tamil. A bachelor then, Mahadeva’s personal life was, well, intensely private.

The aura that surrounded Mahadeva helped drive Cognizant. He was precise. A one hour conference call meant just that. It would start on the dot of the appointed hour and wouldn’t last a second more than what he’d specified. He kept people on their toes.

During its early days, Cognizant engaged a management guru to conduct a workshop for its top 10-15 of its top executives. The man asked everybody to write their vision for Cognizant’s future. Mahadeva’s was the shortest, clearest, and most authoritative. It simply read: Make Cognizant a 10 billion company in shareholder value in XX years.

When I asked a top manager to help me understand Mahadeva’s approach, he laughed and said it was simple. “He gave the orders, and we were expected to execute them.”

His exit from Cognizant was typical of him. One day, by some accounts, he stormed out of the boardroom, and that was it. A senior official would only give this as the reason: He is a different type of person. He suddenly decided ‘this is not the thing for me’, and he decided to go.

Lakshmi and the art of people management

Cognizant couldn’t have found a more different personality to succeed Mahadeva. Lakshmi Narayanan. Lakshmi’s education did not span multiple continents. He went to the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) at Bangalore, after which he joined Tata Consultancy Services (TCS). By all indicators, he would have stuck to TCS all his life, if Kumar hadn’t shown extraordinary persistence to pull him into Cognizant – and, if Kumar hadn’t told him he could move to his favourite city – Chennai. So, while Mahadeva reigned over Cognizant from Teaneck, New Jersey, Lakshmi stayed put in Chennai during his three years as CEO.

By the time I met Lakshmi, Cognizant had constructed a sprawling facility on Old Mahabalipuram Road. It was a brief meeting that started and ended with introductions. Yet, I remember it because his smile was warm and friendly. For a moment, I almost thought he’d mistaken me for somebody else he knew well.

Lakshmi is a ‘people person’. If Mahadeva’s review calls ended on schedule, the calls Lakshmi presided would go on for hours. He always had time for people and was delightfully unaware of hierarchy. Once, during an in-house cricket match – Cognizant takes its cricket seriously bringing in professional commentators etc – when a batsman wanted water, Lakshmi ran half way to the pitch to give him the bottle. At home, his favourite pastime is building toy trains. After building, he gives them away.

When he brought down the retirement age at Cognizant to 55 – he says he did that to send a message to youngsters in the company there’s enough room at the top for them – he also introduced a provision that allowed retired employees to have an office at Cognizant, and be around as consultants. Sometime back I met a person, well past 55. But he was still around, helping Cognizant deal with the government and talk to universities. He seemed happy, and felt very much part of the firm. That was a typical Lakshmi touch to what was a tough policy. Incidentally, after this policy was introduced, Lakshmi was the first to turn 55 and he promptly stepped down from the job.

But behind this easy going affability and old world charm, Lakshmi had a competitive streak. Soon after he took over as CEO, a newspaper published a report quoting a top manager from a rival company, who suggested Lakshmi might not be as good as Mahadeva. The day the report appeared, a message went to Cognizant’s sales team: “Go after his clients. Make sure he never wins a deal competing against Cognizant; if there are common customers, grab more businesses”. In short make him regret he ever made the statement.

It’s impossible to survive at Cognizant without having a competitive streak.

Hacker of business models

It’s tempting to see Francisco D’Souza (Cognizant’s CEO since January 2007) in contrast to Lakshmi or Mahadeva, or to say he has in him a mix of both. But, Frank, from whatever we heard, is in a different mould. He took charge when he was only 38. (To know why that matters a lot read this post by my colleague Mitu Jayashankar).

But, equally importantly, he is more global than even Mahadeva, and more inclined to experimentation than either of them.

When Mitu and I did our first big story on Francisco, we started our narrative with a meeting in Mumbai to which Frank had rushed straight out of a flight from London. It was not only to highlight the importance of the deal for Cognizant at that point, but also to give a sense of how Frank works – of how he  keeps his energy levels high, focus sharp, and empathy firmly in the direction of customers even while working across time zones.

His colleagues describe Frank as hands on. For the CEO of an IT company, it means endless flights around the globe. It would seem Frank was being prepared for exactly this all his life. His father Placido D’Souza, an art loving diplomat with the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), put him at local schools wherever he was posted, unlike other IFS officers who preferred international schools. By the time he went to Carnegie Mellon, he had attended seven different schools in seven different countries. He was also steeped in different cultures. By one account, he wanted to get into Dun & Bradstreet because they had operations in over 60 countries – and that would help him see more of the world.

The other striking feature of Frank is his love for experimentation. Mahadeva’s focus was on ploughing the single furrow he was sure would give the high returns to shareholders. Srini Raju, CEO of the joint venture which eventually became Cognizant, said he tried to convince Mahadeva to get into ERP, in vain. From Mahadeva’s perspective, it was a diversion – and his will, of course, prevailed. Yet, Mahadeva’s god-like stature and his razor sharp focus was exactly what Cognizant needed most in the early stages. He didn’t want Cognizant to stray from its path, and lose its way among hundreds of other IT companies competing for the market then.

Lakshmi’s focus was on building where Mahadeva left from. His ‘friendly guy – fierce competitor’ image helped the company scale up fast between 2003 and 2006 without losing its entrepreneurial culture.

Frank is different. He taught himself programming while still at high school, and one constant in his changing world was a deep interest in new technology. R Chandrasekharan, a Cognizant veteran and now its group chief executive (technology and operations), recalls the time when he first met Frank. He was carrying a Palm Pilot, a device just a few days old and still had to take the world by storm. Frank’s current obsession, Lakshmi says, is with universal remote.

He is also a big fan of the Maker Movement in USA (An extension of the Do-It-Yourself movement, it’s about people who ‘invent, create, remix, tinker, craft, and simply make’ and about camps where people spend making stuff, and encourage children to learn to make). Gordon Coburn, Cognizant’s President remembers attending the inauguration of a camp with Frank. He learnt later that Frank took his kids to the camp over the weekend, and spent the entire day tinkering with technology.

Inside Cognizant, though, this desire to tinker with devices manifests as a tendency to question the status quo. Frank tends to challenge everything you take to him, says Lakshmi. If you ever take a proposal to Frank, warns Mark Livingston, who heads Cognizant’s consulting business, better be prepared.

Makers, Cory Doctrow said about his book that has now become a must-read in Makers Movement literature, is about people “who hack hardware, business-models, and living arrangements to discover ways of staying alive and happy even when the economy is falling down the toilet.” Frank would easily fit in that description.

Two years ago, Frank tinkered with Cognizant’s well-oiled business model – Mitu and I captured those changes in our story Fixing it before it’s broke. And in the last few months, Frank raised the bar even further, and made more fundamental – and more far reaching changes. And that’s what we have tried to capture in our latest story.

While reporting for the story a couple of weeks ago, sitting in front of a huge screen at a Cognizant facility in Bangalore, waiting for Francisco’s image to come up, I couldn’t help but remember my first impressions of Mahadeva in another dreary conference room nearly ten years back. I was then reminded of steely face of Shelley’s Ozymandias, something that I guess no one will ever associate with Frank. Yet, the broader theme of the poem kept playing out throughout our reporting – that the mighty will one day fall, and there is a good chance that nothing will remain – even if everything seems to be going well.

A few minutes later, Frank came on the screen, and for some reason I felt, it’s the awareness of that possibility that keeps Frank going.

Reading Tamarind City – I finished it in two sittings over the weekend — was like going around an old city with a new friend — going to places he fancies, and meeting people in his circle. It’s the same city, all right, but the places you go are different; the people seem familiar, but in someways, they are strangers. The tour is defined by his interests and his access.

Ghosh’s interests don’t seem to be so much in the mainstream as in the sidelines; not so much in the front runners as in the people just behind them. So, there is a good deal of the history of places that might not be on the top of your mind; there is more about the rivalry between Iyers and Iyengars, and the Vadkalai and Thenkalai Iyengars than about the rivalry between Jayalalitha and Karunanidhi. He takes you to his favorite places and lets you sit next to him as quizzes people who interest him. There are railways stations, yoga teachers, sexologists and musicians. And, he also has a typical reporter’s instinct for a scandal. In a crowded room, he is invariably drawn to those whom he can gossip about later.

Ghosh’s fondness for the city is evident. But at no point you mistake him for an insider. His Tamil, he says, is not good, and at one point you are surprised that he can’t identify MS Subbalakshmi singing Hanuman Chalisa; and when he says Karunanidhi and MGR are the only two people who have ruled Tamil Nadu since 1969, you wonder what happened to Janaki, Panneerselvam or even PC Alexander, who was the governer when the state was under emergency. But it’s forgivable, perhaps, because he is not drawing any big conclusions from this.

Actually, he doesn’t draw any big conclusions at all.

He is first and foremost an observer, a listener. He knows when to step back, when to let the characters take centre-stage, and simply tell their stories. There’s a chapter on Carnatic music, where he introduces TM Krishna to us, and then fades into background, letting Krishna take on. That’s the strength of the book.

It also has a weakness that’s expected of this genre. There’s nothing about cricket — and I can’t imagine a Chennai without people talking endlessly about the game. Politics is there, but it’s as if it got stuck to the ladle he using to serve the main dish. There’s nothing on the literary scene, except when an activist has also written a book or a poem.

Perhaps all these lie outside Ghosh’s circle of interest. And perhaps, then, it’s a good thing that he didn’t include them just for the sake of it. This realisation I came to when I read the chapter on business, where he talks about hospitals and drags us to a Nokia factory. This chapter had none of the elements — no interesting characters, no striking observation, no humour, no ambles into the past — that made the other chapters so readable. It’s as if he included that chapter only to say ‘This is what happens if you ask me to take to places I am not interested in.’

But there are other places that you feel Ghosh would have been drawn to: say, Central Station or the LIC building. I was half-expecting to meet a maid who has been sweeping the terrace of LIC building all her life, or a porter who has been around in Central Station for the last 50 years. But then a book can only be so long, and on a weekend, someone can take you to only so many places.

Sandel is popular not just at Harvard. “He’s a rock star in Asia”, Thomas Friedman wrote last year, “and people in China, Japan and South Korea scalp tickets to hear him”. His 2007 Justice course was filmed by PBS, and it’s one of the most watched on iTunes University. On Youtube, the first episode*, which lasts about an hour*, has been viewed over 3.57 million times. (In terms of total hours spent, it comes close to the ‘Kolaveri di’ video).

Sandel is touring India right now. A friend who attended his first lecture at Infosys campus in Bangalore tells me the auditorium was jam-packed, and she could get in only by showing her press card. “You should have seen the crowd and the response. He is a rock star,” she says. I wanted to attend his second lecture in Bangalore, scheduled to be at 6:30 p.m. at Nimhans Convention Centre. I decide to play safe, go early and get myself a good seat.

It’s 5:30 p.m. A huge screen on stage has a photograph of Sandel, above the topic of discussion today: “Equality, Affirmative Action and Meritocracy.” There are half a dozen people with Infosys tags scurrying around. (The lecture is organised by Infosys Science Foundation). Otherwise, not a single seat is occupied. “It will get filled up in no time,” I tell myself. I walk to the middle of the auditorium and take a seat by the aisle. I spend a few minutes looking at people setting up the cameras and the mike on the stage. I am bored, I step out to a stand selling Sandel’s book Justice. I buy a copy, find my way back and settle down.

Some more time passes. Now, Sandel walks into the auditorium with a case in his hand, and accompanied by an Infosys Science Foundation official. He positions himself at the centre and surveys the territory. About eight seats are occupied now. The ISF official tells him, “There are three cameras, and there will be one on the stage behind you”. Sandel nods, and turns around to look at the rear end of the arena and then at the balcony. “After this level gets filled up, we will open the balcony,” she says. Sandel seems satisfied. I start leafing through the book.

6:30 p.m. It’s time to start now. But, there is hardly anyone in the hall. I look around, and see just five or six partly-filled rows. I desperately try to reason. Maybe 6:30 p.m. is peak hour, and people are caught up in traffic. Maybe they are just outside, waiting in a queue to register. Or God forbid, they didn’t know Sandel was here and might not even come. Maybe this is the entire audience. 50? 60? 100? 150? Whatever, it seems too small for such a big hall.

I feel bad for Sandel. After all, he’s accustomed to crowds even in a classroom. The kind of person who gets energised by vast numbers of people. And by the way he looked up at the balcony, I thought he imagined it to be Sanders Theatre at Harvard, waiting to be filled in with eager students.

Then I spot NR Narayana Murthy and feel bad for him also. He too probably expected a big turnout.

NRN looks like a strict grandfather, but at the same time a very likable and reasonable one. The kind of person who will buy ice cream to his grandchildren, take them to the park and to the zoo, let them play forever and still make sure they do their homework.

By 6:45, NRN walks to the front and calls out: “Why don’t you all come to the front? It will be more intimate.” I go down to the fourth row, thinking ‘intimate’ is a very good euphemism for ‘small’ and making a mental note to use this soon. Maybe at my first book launch.

People settle down in their new seats. Rohan Murty, NRN’s son, who studied at Harvard and invited Sandel to India, goes up to the stage to give the introduction. He is dressed in jeans and t-shirt, and carries an iPad with him. He speaks with confidence and a good sense of humour. In the course of his introduction, he compares Sandel to Sachin Tendulkar, and heave a mental sigh: everyone seems to want to hitch wagons to that star.

Sandel is now up on the stage. I expect him to begin his talk with no prelude, pretty much the way he starts his classes in the PBS series, and the way most TED Talks begin, as if to say, let’s get down to business. But, he spends some time thanking the Murthy family and telling us how he feels at home in Bangalore, his first visit to this city. He then walks down the stage, and gets closer to the audience.

It now really seems like an intimate gathering now. There are 7 or 8 chirpy school students by my side. Half a dozen grey-haired couples are scattered across the hall. But most people in the audience seem to be in their 20s or 30s. Two rows ahead of me, I spot Rohini Nilekani, and a teenager next to her busy with his iPad. And one row ahead of them, there is NRN with wife Sudha Murthy, Rohan Murty and daughter-in-law Lakshmi Venu. There are a few other important-looking people in the audience, but I am not able to identify any. I turn my attention back to Sandel.

He is now talking about a law that Germany tried to pass soon after 9/11, giving the government the right to shoot down airplanes hijacked by terrorists with the intention of turning them into weapons. Is shooting such a plane down right thing to do, if it means saving many people? Heated arguments follow.

It’s not so much a lecture as it is a discussion. Sandel moves from one side of the hall to another, asking questions, summarising, prodding, provoking. The audience seem to be up to it. I sit amazed, watching some of the kids jumping up to answer, and sharing their views. They seem to have thought deeply about these issues, and are capable of articulating them well.

At one point, a school student sitting next to me gets up to say that he doesn’t agree with an argument made by a girl in the front, because it was similar to Bentham’s own argument, with which, of course, he disagreed. Sandel seems to be impressed and gives him a smile. Until a few years ago, the only thing I knew that was remotely close to Bentham was Botham, the cricketer! (Well, you know, they sound alike to Indian ears.)

Beefy Botham apart, I see now that Rohan Murthy’s Tendulkar comparison was pretty apt: Sandel is a master, a superior artist, sound of technique and ready, and able, to improvise. He gives a kind of immediacy to age-old concepts by drawing on what happened yesterday, events that are clear in our memories, events that we feel strongly about. He probably draws his examples from the same newspapers and magazines that you and I read, but he lifts the veil to reveal the moral problems behind the events and conflicts. He is amazingly quick to not only grasp the core of an argument put forth by a member of audience, but also to show how it’s similar to ones proposed by say Aristotle, or Rawls, or Mill, or Nozick.

Suddenly, philosophy seems accessible, and even practical.

It’s over an hour since he began. Sandel invites questions.

Someone asks him about affirmative action. Drawing on Rawls’s philosophy and the idea of morally arbitrary factors, Sandel makes a persuasive case for it (or so it seems to me). There is another question about a Simpsons character, supposedly based on Sandel. In the series, Mr Burns — who has a broad forehead and thin lips like Sandel — is not a very likable person. The questioner suggests that perhaps the character is actually the opposite of Sandel. Sandel smiles and says he hopes so.

The event slowly draws to a close. I have the distinct feeling of having attended a music concert or a play rather than a philosophy lecture.

By the time I switch off the recorder and put it, along with Sandel’s book, inside my bag, about 20 people have gathered around Sandel. Some are talking to him, some are waiting to take an autograph. I look around and realise that the rest had already dispersed. His Harvard class would still be filing out of the auditorium!

As I make my way out, the low turnout continues to bother me. Perhaps this has something to do with my own job as a business journalist, where there is a constant pressure to find answers in numbers and to seek validation in scale.

The thought persists even as I rev up my two-wheeler and ride back home. The road is free of traffic, and the breeze is pleasant. It cools my head, and sets me thinking.

Am I subconsciously stretching the idea of ‘show me the data’ a bit too much? Is my botheration really an indicator of that clever question: ‘If he is so good, how come there were so few people?’

That’s probably the case, and two points strike me as important.

First, it’s easy to forget that metrics have limitations. That they can be manipulated is a risk that we are probably well aware of. But we tend to be blind to our own biases. We might be tracking a certain number just because it’s easy. (That perhaps explains the shortage of value investors. Relative valuation is much easier than discounted cash flow). Or we might be looking at a specific metric just because they can be accurately measured. When I was reporting for a story on Nachiket Mor, I heard that one of his favorite quotations was: ‘It’s far better to inaccurately measure something you care about, than to accurately measure something that you don’t care about.” I am probably guilty on both counts. If I wanted to get a sense of Sandel’s influence, I should have spent some time talking to people to find out what his impact was. A part of my mind was stuck on the number of people, because that was easier to track.

But the second is the more important point. It relates to excluding the morally arbitrary factors in our calculations, and in our thinking. For example, when we think of meritocracy in colleges, we anchor it on the exam scores. Yet, our performances in examinations do not depend on our efforts alone: they are affected by the family we were born in, the natural talent we were blessed with, or at times, as Satyajit Ray has shown us in Jana Aranya, random things like the glasses of an examiner!

In case of Sandel, the low turnout had nothing to do with the merits of the event. And if I had not known anything about Sandel earlier, and if I had decided to walk away, going by the small crowd in auditorium, I would have missed a superb session, and worse, gone away with a bias against him. The mistake here is letting the certainty and the comfort of what we see in front of our eyes and the illusion of analysis replace a more thorough examination.

Perhaps that’s the point of Sandel’s method of teaching. To remind us of what a Greek philosopher said centuries ago: The unexamined life is not worth living.

* Sandel’s lecture, referred to above:

[My colleague, Mitu Jayashankar, attended a far more crowded Sandel lecture. And she also attended a dinner in his honour. Her post is here.]

Suddenly, these nine words flash on the screen – ‘Stuck with the news that puts you to sleep?’ – and the tempo of the music changes. It’s now energetic and cheerful. A stack of newspapers falls down with a thud and a printing press is in full blast in the background. The ad ends with these words: ‘Wake up to the Times of India’. The viewers are left with no doubt what soporific scenes allude to – The Hindu, ToI’s main rival in the city.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Looking at what’s taking place at The Hindu these days, it’s tempting to say ‘Whether the Chennai readers woke up to Times or not, The Hindu certainly did’. After all, that’s what any competition is supposed to do. Shake the incumbent out of slumber and force it to change.

There has been a lot of changes in The Hindu of late. Earlier this month, on 18th, N Ram, stepped down as editor-in-chief of The Hindu, Business Line, Frontline, and Sportstar, and gave the charge of these publications to Siddharth Varadarajan, D. Sampathkumar, R. Vijayasankar, and Nirmal Shekhar, all senior editors in Kasturi & Sons.

“These changes on the editorial side are significant, indeed milestones in our progress as a newspaper-publishing company,” Ram wrote to his colleagues on the day he stepped down. They are “a vital part of the process of professionalization and contemporization under way in all the company’s operations. I am clear that this is the only way to face the future – the opportunities as well as the challenges.”

Last month, on 29th December, Ram gave a farewell speech to Hindu staff. He said he would continue to be available in the office in his capacity as a wholetime director and that anyone can feel free to drop into his office. However, he wouldn’t discuss editorial issues. Siddharth is fully in charge.

On the business side, Arun Anant, who has worked in Bennet Coleman, the publishers of Times of India, Economic Times etc, before going on to UTV and later starting his own consulting firm, is to join the company as CEO early next month. It never had a CEO before. Till a couple of years back, N Murali, younger brother of Ram was in charge in his capacity of MD, and more recently it was K Balaji, a cousin.

I spoke to a few journalists at The Hindu, and they said they have started feeling the impact. Sometime back when the Delhi edition of The Hindu carried a front page ad featuring a businessman – turned politician swearing his allegiance to Sonia Gandhi, in a rather indignfied way, Siddharth Varadharajan posted a message on his facebook wall : “To all those who messaged me about the atrocious front page ad in The Hindu’s Delhi edition on Jan 1, my view as Editor is that this sort of crass commercialisation compromises the image and reputation of my newspaper. We are putting in place a policy to ensure the front page is not used for this sort of an ad again.”

“I am not too sure if Ram would have responded this way”, a journalist said.

They expect more changes. “From the meetings we have had so far, I get a feeling that there will more photos, sharper content; and definitely fewer events coverage that Hindu is kind of known for”, another journalist told me. And news of local interest will get more prominence. On Tuesday Hindu’s Chennai edition carried a news of a murder as second lead. That space almost always went to news of national and international importance.

Hindu was also known to be a very lenient employer. Journalists there love to rant about colleagues who have spent weeks doing next to nothing; even mistakes are easily forgiven, or punished – at worst – with a transfer. That will change too. “No one really said that in as many words, but that seems to be the message.”

Perhaps the most visible sign of aggression is a set of advertisements that Hindu launched this Wednesday. The ads – I saw two of them on Youtube – are in the form of surveys, where a bunch of young people are asked questions such as where is Tahrir Square, what’s the expansion of UPA, who’s the vice president of India and so on. The answers are all wrong and funny (For example: Who will succeed Ratan Tata?/ His son….. Mukesh Ambani). The respondents – all young and confident – are then asked a trivial question – What’s the pet name of Hritik Roshan, or Whether Aishwarya Rai’s new born baby is a boy or girl? Now, the answers are spot on. The final question: Which paper do these blissfully ignorant people read?

The answers are beeped out, but you don’t need to be an expert lip reader to know what they uniformly say: Times of India.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It was a direct assault on Times. The joke in Chennai is, “the Old Lady of Bori Bunder didn’t just wake up Mount Road Mahavishnu, she literally taunted him to a wrestling match.”
—

Yet, to tie all all these to the power of the marketplace, to the launch of Times of India in its home turf, to competition-induced energy is to ignore the dynamics of family business (which Hindu is, after all) and to ignore the complex character of N Ram (who is among the most influential, and certainly the most visible member of the family).

The dynamics of this particular family business is defined by the fact that there too many of the family, and too little of the business. By one count, there are twelve members in Ram’s generation, and eighteen in the next. And Kasturi & Sons depends primarily on the one big brand – The Hindu. It’s old – it was founded in 1878. And it’s read – the circulation is over 1.5 million. The others haven’t done that well. Business Line has a good reputation as a newspaper of record, but it’s nowhere close to the top two or even three papers in its category – and it’s not profitable (when I last checked the numbers a year back). Sports magazines in general have lost all the lustre it used to have before the cable television days – and Sportstar is no exception. Frontline continues to be a niche magazine – read mostly by the liberals and the left-leaning. Some of its newer ventures haven’t done too well. The group started a regional channel with NDTV, but had to sell it off to Dinathanthi group a while ago. In short, just one business, and too many claimants.

Such a situation often leads to conflicts, and in Hindu it certainly did. N Murali, younger brother of N Ram, and one of the biggest critics of the newspaper in the recent years told Forbes India earlier that many family members felt a sense of entitlement towards to the organisation irrespective of whether they were qualified or not. And that was a source of conflict. That erupted as a board room battle in 2010. My colleagues and I tried to capture some of that drama in a story here

Perhaps no one understood the issues and the problems better than the fifth generation, sons and daughters of Ram, his brothers and his cousins. A couple of years back eight of them came together to draft and send a mail to the shareholders of Kasturi & Sons, outlining the need for professionalisation. The letter spoke about forming an executive board and a family board to separate ownership and management, as well as hiring norms and performance frameworks for the family members.

These wide ranging changes will be needed if the group decides to bring in new investors in the future – either to raise capital or to unlock the value of their holding. In fact, in 2007, the family members came close to selling part of their stake to Australia’s Fairfax. The deal did not go through. But, it became clear to everyone that to benefit from any such opportunity in the future, some cleaning up needs to be done.

The pressure to professionalise was slowly building over years, and the Hindu group would have gone for these sooner or later, even without the competitive pressure from Times of India.

The other important factor behind the change is Ram himself. Anyone trying to assess Ram’s impact on Indian journalism will have a tough time arriving at a definite conclusion. He has his share of critics – both outside and inside Hindu. (Inside Hindu, none has been as vocal as his two brothers, Ravi and Murali). Of all the criticisms against Ram, three stand out – that he is pro-China (some critics refer to the paper as Chindu), that he has been blind to human rights violations in Sri Lanka by its government as it fought against LTTE (No wonder he got Sri Lanka Rathna from that government, his critics insinuate) and that he was less than professional in covering 2G scam, giving too much space to A Raja (Hindu was seen as a mouthpiece and apologist for Raja; so much so that when a TV journalist asked him, it was sad to see him say, “For my views please read the day before yesterday’s Hindu”, N Murali told us in an interview last August.

This is in sharp contrast with the courage, integrity and professionalism that Ram has so often exhibited in his long career as a journalist. In the 80s, he published a series of stories on the Bofors scandal. I was still in school then – and couldn’t make anything out of the documents and stories that Hindu published day after day. Yet, some years later when I heard about Woodward and Bernstein, I only remembered Ram and Chitra Subramaniam.

More recently when Hindu published a series of stories based on Wikileaks, I spoke to a few journalists from the Hindu, and found their excitement contagious. That came from Ram’s energetic support. Reporters who worked with Ram rave about his exacting standards and commitment to accuracy and fairness.

When Indian Express broke the story about the boardroom battle at The Hindu two years back, Ram initially threatened to sue the newspaper. When I asked around if he would really do it, the consensus was that he won’t. One senior reporter explained it this way: “He will never do it. All said and done, he is a journalist at heart.”

Guessing what went on in somebody’s mind is probably the lowest form of journalism, but we won’t be off the mark if we guess that what went on in Ram’s mind was what he put in the letter to his staff – that professionalising the operations is the best way to face the future. As a journalist he simply decided to do what he thought was the right thing to do.

Of course, I am not saying the marketplace didn’t play any role in the changes. Market matters, but it helps to remember that market is made up of individuals. Individuals with their own egos, desires, strengths, failings and most important of all, values.

I have no doubt that the additional funds will help oil majors, but will it have an impact on “dieselisation”? In other words, will the additional Rs 80,000 change the customer preference, which in the recent years has been tending towards diesel vehicles?

It would, if this exceeds the benefits that come from driving a diesel.

To find this out, I did a quick, back of the envelope calculation taking Maruti Swift’s diesel and petrol variants as examples, and making some assumptions about usage and fuel price hike to calculate the present value of fuel expenses. And, it looks like Rs 80,000 will hardly make a dent in the dieselisation of the economy.

Here are the numbers:

Vehicle                          - Maruti Swift LDI (diesel)                  - Maruti Suzuki Swift LXi

Price (Bangalore)          – 466895                                             – 419000
Mileage (City)                - 13.8 kmpl                                         – 11.5 kmpl
Fuel price (Bangalore)  - 45.38                                                -  73.72

Assumptions made to calculate PV of fuel expenses are same for both: Fuel inflation 3%, Discount rate 10% and number of years 10. (I kept the resale value and maintenance charges out from the equation.)

And here’s what I found: The total cost of a petrol vehicle (ex-showroom price plus present value of fuel expenses over 10 years) is Rs 9.5 lakhs, and that of diesel vehicle is Rs 7.4 lakhs. A difference of over 2 lakhs. Unless the additional excise duty comes close to this number, it might not make any difference to the bigger trend of customers preferring diesel over petrol.

Sometime in 2010, a few engineers at Google strongly suspected that Bing, a search engine that Microsoft launched in 2009, was copying some of its results. Bing’s search results were eerily similar to their own. It was not self-delusional suspicions of an early mover. As Amit Singhal explained in Google’s official blog: “we noticed that URLs from Google search results would later appear in Bing with increasing frequency for all kinds of queries: popular queries, rare or unusual queries and misspelled queries.”

What Google did next was a classic stuff you would have read in comics or seen in movies – plant a deliberately false information, and see the mole fall into the trap. (On spotting a couple of thieves near his house, Vijayanagar’s court jester Raman of Thenali tells his wife loud enough to reach the ears of the men hiding in the dark:”Let’s pack all our valuables in a box and throw it into the well.” And he throws a big rock instead. In Singham, a recent box office hit, the lead character uses a similar trick to lure the antagonist’s brother to a hospital)

It’s not just in the realm of fantastic. A very earthy businessman who was into data entry and transcription told me that he deliberately inserts mistakes into a document before it moves from the data entry operators to the checkers to see how thorough the checking is. When I asked him if it didn’t indicate a lack of trust, he said, “may be so, but my clients are happy when I tell them this is what I do”.

Google did something similar. It created ‘synthetic queries’ – nonsense words like “hiybbprqag” and “juegosdeben1ogrande”, and let its search engine throw a top result that had nothing to do with query. If Bing had indeed been copying it would return the same result over the next few weeks. And sure enough Bing did.

Amit Singhal ended his blogpost with a good deal of self-righteousness: “At Google we strongly believe in innovation and are proud of our search quality. We’ve invested thousands of person-years into developing our search algorithms because we want our users to get the right answer every time they search, and that’s not easy. We look forward to competing with genuinely new search algorithms out there—algorithms built on core innovation, and not on recycled search results from a competitor. So to all the users out there looking for the most authentic, relevant search results, we encourage you to come directly to Google. And to those who have asked what we want out of all this, the answer is simple: we’d like for this practice to stop.”

Such is the nature of life that barely a year after exposing Microsoft’s practice, Google finds itself right at the centre of something similar. The nature of the mistake, the act of getting caught, the explanations, the apologies – the parallels are pretty fascinating.

Poor Economics: A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty, by Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo, Random House India, 320 pages, Rs 499
Sometime in 2006, a friend and I went to IFMR, Chennai to listen to a Harvard University professor, Sendhil Mullainathan. We tagged on to him after the event, and listened to him for the next two hours — over the sound of Chennai traffic, over the din of the noisy restaurant we went for lunch. All this while he was talking about Randomised Trials, a refreshingly new approach to economics, that took up a small problem, applied different solutions to a fairly large population and studied the impact of the interventions pretty much like in medicine. Our final question to him was: when are you writing a book on this? He didn’t seem to be too keen; he would rather spend more time on the field. Luckily for us, two of his collaborators, Banerjee and Duflo, did sit down to write a book. Poor Economics takes us through an amazing journey among the poor across several countries: what they do, how they think, what choices they make, and also what works and what doesn’t. Please do check out the companion site as well.

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson, Little Brown, 627 pages, Rs 799
It’s not clear if this biography would have turned out be such a big bestseller if Jobs hadn’t died. But I am sure I would have read it anyway. I have been following the amazing career and life of Steve Jobs ever since I read Odyssey: From Pepsi to Apple, by John Scully, while I was still at school. Magazine articles, particularly from Fortune, filled in bits and pieces of information. The coverage on Jobs of course increased dramatically as he launched one successful product after another. But what I wanted was one complete narrative. Isaacson does that beautifully. I couldn’t help but compare it with another long biography I read last year, David Remnick’s The Bridge. Isaacson’s book is not as beautifully written, the background information is not as deep and wide. But Job’s colourful and complex personality makes up for all that.

Moonwalking with Einstein, by Joshua Foer, Allen Lane, 320 pages , Rs 550
I knew absolutely nothing about the book or the author before I picked it up. I simply liked the title, I guess. The book is about Foer’s short journey from being a regular journalist to US memory champion. Along the way he treats us to amazing insights into the nature of memory itself. I was particularly impressed by the section on the relationship between memory and time.

Boomerang, by Michael Lewis, Norton, 212 pages, Rs 1461
Michael Lewis is an all-time favourite. After reading Big Short last year, I couldn’t wait to read Boomerang. It’s a small book, and I finished it in two sittings. The book’s subtitle, Travels in the New Third World, hints at why it is so appealing. It has elements of a well written travel book and the observations Lewis makes — like the booming noise he hears at a hotel in Iceland — give delightful economic insights.