Men Of Steel
Vir Sanghvi

Men Of Steel is about eleven of India’s leading businessmen talking to a top Indian journalist who wants to find out what they are really like. The businessmen profiled are: Ratan Tata, Nandan Nilekani, Kumar Mangalam Birla, Sunil Bharti Mittal, Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Azim Premji, Subhash Chandra, Uday Kotak, Bikki Oberoi, Nusli Wadia and Vijay Mallya. And the journalist is Vir Sanghvi.

Now, why would an average Joe want to read a book about a bunch of super-rich men? There could be any number of motivating factors, including masochism, ‘aspirationalism’, and even a mindless curiosity of the kind that drives celebrity journalism. Presumably, one of the reasons might also be to understand that secret formula, or personality trait that propelled each one of them to the top-most echelons of wealth and success. So that you can convince yourself that you, too, stand a chance of making it big one day. 

The blurb proclaims that the book contains “in-depth profiles” of India’s business barons. But the profiles, all originally published as a series in Hindustan Times, merely skim the surface.

All of them follow a prefabricated script: a seemingly ordinary man overcomes the odds (could be rivals, the market, even their own demons), thanks to some special qualities, and achieves big-time success, which, more often than not, is presented as his destiny. Sanghvi’s task is to unearth these “special qualities” (steel?). The problem with this approach is that it is limited by its assumption — that these men are, in some fundamental way, different from the rest of the also-rans, from the bulk of us sods slaving away in the belly of the bell curve.

And sure enough, Sanghvi runs into problems every time he seeks to unearth this special quality in his interviewees. Airtel chief, Sunil Bharti Mittal, for instance, attributes his success to “divine intervention”. With the others, Sanghvi is either forced to settle for clichés like “passion” (Kumar Mangalam Birla), or some management claptrap (“concentrate on substance not form” — Uday Kotak).

To their credit, some have enough humility not to fall for the bait. Nandan Nilekani, whose personal wealth is above Rs3,000 crore, attributes it to being “in the right place at
the right time”, which is far closer to the truth than might seem at first glance.

Since there really is nothing about the personalities of these men that makes their arrival at the top of the corporate pile inevitable, Sanghvi’s profiles offer little insight into their success. This is only to be expected when you focus too much on the personality without taking into account the socio-economic background.

In Sanghvi’s book, out of the eleven men, six were born into an industrialist’s family (Tata, Birla, Premji, Wadia, Mallya, Oberoi), three were born into upper class business or trading clans (Mittal, Kotak, Chandra), and one married into an industrialist’s family (Rajeev Chandrasekhar of the BPL Mobile fame married the daughter of the founder of BPL). Only one — Nandan Nilekani — has risen from genuinely middle-class backgrounds to the upper extremities of wealth. Since not one in that list is from, say a working class or poor background, the fairy tale narratives Sanghvi seeks to spin around each of his subjects end up sounding hollow.

Seasoned interviewer that he is, Sanghvi does manage to unearth some interesting facts about each of his subjects: Rajeev Chandrasekhar got mugged on his first day in the US; Uday Kotak nearly died when he was hit by a cricket ball during a college cricket match; and Bikki Oberoi did nothing but travel and stay in the world’s most luxurious hotels till he was 32.

But the bottom-line, which rarely comes through in such profiles, is this: these men could create so much wealth because they were already rich to begin with, and were therefore well-positioned to take full advantage of the opportunities that opened up following the liberalisation of the economy from the 1990s onwards. They were the smartest — in their class — and that is why they made it to the top. Basically, it is a rich to richest story.

And the moral of the story: if you want to become as rich as Azim Premji, don’t waste your time reading books like this one. Either marry into a wealthy family — as “Guru” does, in a supremely rational move to access much-needed capital (in Mani Ratnam’s unofficial celluloid tribute to Dhirubhai Ambani). Or, taking a hint from Sunil Mittal, pray for “divine intervention”.