Letter from the Editor: Capture the Drama

A couple of weeks ago, I met up with Sundeep Waslekar, a friend of mine. Sundeep isn’t from the world of business. He’s a strategic affairs expert who has spent time advising some of the most influential leaders in the world — from Denmark to Africa, from Saudi Arabia to Turkey.

Just a few weeks before Forbes India was launched, Sundeep had a serious heart attack. Since he was forced to jettison his globe-trotting lifestyle for the following three months, he decided to focus his energies on a worthwhile pursuit: Writing a book. He says it allowed him to stop thinking about work or his ailment and gave him a new canvas to express himself instead. He would typically write for two hours at a stretch on his laptop and then take a break and get back to writing again. He did this for nearly three months in a disciplined manner. Today, Sundeep’s project is complete. It is a work of fiction and is about the trade-off between power and principles. I’m waiting to read the manuscript myself, but I’m told publishers are mighty keen to publish it.

So what’s the point? Well, I’ve often wondered why more business people and CEOs in India don’t write about their corporate experiences. Most business books tend to be a tiresome read, and seldom throw any new light on a significant period in a company’s history. And yet, in the past two decades, India Inc. has been through an incredible journey of entrepreneurial capitalism. Just how much of that has been chronicled for future generations? Is it because no one’s interested in a candid, no-holds barred story? I doubt that very much.

Wouldn’t you like to read about K.V. Kamath’s inside story of how he tackled the challenges of rebuilding ICICI Bank in the wake of the global economic crisis, right towards the end of his tenure? Wouldn’t you want to know how Deepak Puri ceded space to his son Ratul to take Moser Baer to the next level? Or indeed, imagine Sunil Mittal describing his new African safari in full detail shortly after he hangs up his boots.

At Forbes India, we pride ourselves in being the drama critic of Indian business. Through our stories and our various columns — notably Zen Garden, brilliantly anchored by Mindtree vice chairman, Subroto Bagchi — we attempt to offer you a sneak peek into the life of high-performance entrepreneurs. But as researchers, our biggest challenge often is that beyond hagiographic profiles of business people, our business literature offers very little by way of understanding a corporation and its larger business environment, the motivations of its leadership team and an inside account of the key turning points in its history.

Let’s hope that more Indian CEOs pick up the gauntlet soon. Indian business will be the richer for it.