NEWSLINKS
US EDITION
COLUMNISTS
DIARY
SPECIALS
INTERVIEWS
CAPITAL BUZZ
REDIFF POLL
DEAR REDIFF
THE STATES
YEH HAI INDIA!
ELECTION 99
ELECTIONS
ARCHIVES

Search Rediff

Give Bachchan a chance

There are three kinds of businessmen in India. There are those who succeed. People like N R Narayanamurthy or Azim Premji who are admired not only for their achievements but also for the way they do business. They have set themselves high standards and refuse to take short cuts. They are the obvious heroes of our time for they have put India on the map of the world.

Then we have those who tried but failed. People who took all the right steps, showed the right amount of dedication, who tried very hard but did not succeed in what they set out to do. Business is, after all, not just hard work and dedication. There is a factor of luck and uncertainty, of circumstances conspiring to fail the finest among us.

Finally, you have the rogues and rascals who enter business with the sole purpose of using the loopholes of the law to cheat others. There are many promoters who have set up dud companies, picked up lots of cash and vanished. NBFCs, chit funds, plantation companies. You know the story.

There are others also. Rich and famous businessmen who take over perfectly good companies and castrate the management, strip the assets and enhance their own wealth, leaving the companies terminally sick.

We all admire the first kind of businessman, respect the second and abhor the third. However, if you watch the way business works here, you will find that the ones who get the thick end of the stick are never the rogues and rascals but the guys who try and fail. The rogues and rascals strut about proudly but the guys who fail, usually professionals, technocrats and talented individuals not exactly well versed in how business works in India, get hammered. That is why Desh Deshpande, arguably the most successful Indian businessman in the world today, said in a recent interview that we in India do not know how to handle failure.

That is why our finest entrepreneurial talents, scarred by their first failure, never go back to the drawing board to create a new enterprise. They are simply too frightened by the backlash. We forget that failure is intrinsic to entrepreneurship. Have you ever heard of a businessman who has never failed? The skill lies in learning from failure how to press ahead and succeed. But in India, failure scars you. It scars you by the badnaami it causes. Even though there are many examples where, Deshpande points out, the entrepreneur did nothing wrong. The model was imperfect or the idea was that wee bit ahead of its time.

ABCL is one such case. It was not a failure. It was an idea somewhat premature and Amitabh Bachchan did not have the nerves to hang in there. It was not his fault. The media was, as always, mean to him and had written the company's obit long before the shutters were actually downed. In fact, Bachchan was prescient in my view. He saw the future of showbiz long before many others did and the fact that today Mukta Arts and Padmalaya Films have been able to tap the IPO market owes a great deal to his genius and foresight. For he saw, ahead of his time, that media and entertainment companies would one day drive the bourses of the world.

Of course, he failed and ABCL went sick. But what did he do wrong? He wrote a perfectly credible script that the investors bought. He hired the best professionals and picked up a few neat properties on Doordarshan, launched a couple of movies, bought a few music rights, entered talent management, acquired the Miss World pageant, and suddenly, right in the midst of all this, found the company short of cash.

Any other company would have possibly survived and come back from the edge. But ABCL was too much in the limelight. Its every move was being reported in the headlines. No wonder the investors got nervous, creditors started filing cases, the bankers pulled the plug.

Of course there must have been other reasons as well. The pace of growth may have been too eager. Cash planning was possibly poor. Implementation, flawed. But these are not unusual in a new company. We all live and learn. ABCL could have easily survived with a little more understanding. But the problem was that everyone wanted it to do a Titanic. It made for good copy and Bachchan lost his nerve. This was not the first time. It had happened in politics earlier, when Fairfax and Bofors stumped him. He quit then. He did the same with ABCL. But this time he refused to run away. Instead, he bided his time, made a stunning comeback on television and is now using his earnings from KBC to pay off his old ABCL debts.

He did not have to do that. The law allows a promoter, once he has docked his sick company in BIFR, to continue living his life as if nothing had happened. The debts of the company are not his personal liability. They remain with the company. Most businessmen use this pretext to forget their past failures and live happily ever after. But Bachchan has had the decency to try and sort out a mess he feels responsible for. Even when there is no compulsion to do so.

Maybe we should give him a hand for this. Instead of the jibes and brickbats I read in the papers everyday. At least he has showed that he does not walk away from a failure, however ignominious it may be. He is ready to acknowledge it, pay for it and start afresh with a clean slate. How many businessmen can you say that for?

Pritish Nandy

Tell us what you think of this column