Who doesn't believe that Indian industrialists are a class apart? How many countries have produced men like Ghanshyam Das Birla, JRD Tata, SL Kirloskar and Dhirubhai Ambani, not to speak of people like Narayanamurthy of Infosys and LN Mittal of Mittal Steel?
But the world at large has barely taken notice. The man in the street outside India hardly knows them, apart from perhaps those who watch the stock market and read the Wall Street Journal or Financial Times. To them, Tata and Birla are just names who occasionally make news and disappear from sight.
But take American tycoons like Henry Ford and Rockfellar. Even school-going children all over the world, not just in America, know who they are or rather who they were. There are also others like Lee Iacocca, one time president of Ford Motors, who was fired unceremoniously by his boss, Henry Ford II, because as he put it, “I just don't like you”. His autobiography has sold in millions and is still selling in maybe a dozen languages and in places as far a field as Alaska and Zanzibar.
Ghanshyam Das Birla also wrote an autobiography with the strange title of “I follow the Mahatma”. Why should a businessman follow a political leader? To which Birla's reply was that he was not a businessman. “I did what I was supposed to do. It was my karma, nothing more, nothing less,” he said and refused to say more.
I had been after Tatas to get their man (JRD) to write something about himself before it was too late. All he did was to put together some of his old articles on things like civil aviation, management, leadership etc, as if they were a substitute for a proper autobiography. He said he was too busy to do anything more.
So, I suggested, he should write a long introduction which could be more about himself than about others, along with a long interview. He managed the introduction but not the interview and called it “keynote”. The pieces of management and civil aviation read more like newspaper and probably did appear there first.
Indians are always a little diffident when talking about themselves. It is part of our nature. But in the modern world, you have to shout to make yourself heard, if you indeed want to be heard. Iacocca, a loud-mouthed Italo-American, was shouting so loud in his book that he could be heard all over the world including the office of Henry Ford II, who fired him. A country's image is the image of men and women it produces. What should America be without Henry Ford, Clark Gable and John F Kennedy? And England without Winston Churchill or France without Napoleon and Charles de Gaule? India, of course, is Buddha and Gandhi but surely modern India is something much more, or something different?
Things are warming up in India. Soon we shall be sitting atop a trillion dollar economy. It will be managed by at least a hundred Tatas and Birlas and maybe as many Ambanis, and each business empire will be worth 20 to 50 billion dollars, run by an Indian Iacocca at the top. But where are these men? The world should know, because it will be dealing with them in the coming years.
For a start, I shall ask Ratan Tata to spare some time and dictate his autobiography. He is of course busy buying up steel plants, but surely a book could also be worth a million tonnes of steel.
This article was originally published on March 21, 2007.
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