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2009-year of the slump. America is in the grip of severe economic hardship and unemployment. The only numbers that are on the rise is the suicide rate. Arun Gupta, entrepreneur, lothario, Aramis cologne user, evangelist of new India's new dreams, sees a glimmer of a business plan form out of the American crisis. He wants to save lives. And he wants to do it sitting in his baroque Navi Mumbai office. His idea is simple. If everything can be outsourced to India, why not the saving of American lives? Part rant, part satire, 1888 Dial India documents, through the politically incorrect words of its anti-hero, the dreams of corporate India.

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Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	01 octobre 2011
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184002393
Langue	English

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RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
Published by Random House India in 2011
Copyright Anuvab Pal
Random House Publishers India Private Limited
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Random House Group Limited
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EPUB ISBN 9788184002393
To my Dad,
For teaching me that pursuing an impossible dream is the only life worth living.
And for being the cleverest man I know.
1888 Dial India premiered as a stage play on July 5, 2009 at St. Andrews Auditorium in Mumbai, presented by Raell Padamsee s Ace Productions.
The original cast featured:
Kunaal Roy Kapur, Siddharth Kumar, Sophie Chaudhary, Prerna Chawla, Ashwin Mushran, Pallavi Sharda, Ratnabali Bhattacharjee, Hazel Keech, and Faezeh Jalili, Anand Tiwari
At the time of this publication, the play had finished twenty shows and continues to be staged across India.
Since 1991, after the country s economic freedom a new Indian businessman has emerged. Confident, ambitious, relentless, free of class, caste and hierarchy. Their huge dreams are building what is being called The New India .
IMF/World Bank Report, 2006
Contents
Why am I writing a memoir?
Not so humble beginnings
There are things more important in life than start-up capital. Wrong.
Employees (machines of the twenty-first century)
Home life
How to speak American
Every minute spent breathing is lost business
Notes from battle
Chillax time
Social not working
A date
Managing crisis. When Rome burnt, we did not.
Performance review
Changes in personal life
Notes from battle. Part deux (That s Roman).
Tenzig Chooha
People who fuck with your success are jealous
Not behind, sideways, or under, looking ahead
A brief encounter
Acknowledgements
Why am I writing a memoir?

Look at the past.
What were we to the West? Beggars. City of Joy, fucking rikshaw-pulling untouchables? They loved Satyajit Ray showing cute orphans fighting over a handful of rice. In Indiana Jones, we re getting excited eating monkey brains. Plague. That s what they thought of India. Burning widows. Sewage. Famine. Rats. And when we were not living in a drain, we were waiting for IMF aid. Worse than the blacks because at least the whites or pop stars could sing We are the World and send money to Africa. We were just a piece of shit on the world map, sitting in our ambassador cars staring at a leper begging for a devaluing rupee. See, back then I couldn t say much because of two things I was small and foreigners were right.
But today, look at what we re doing. Just look outside. The Mumbai skyline is a sea of cranes building glass towers and glass malls, trying to make New York look like my asshole. That was a joke. Yes, we re still poor and our roads are shit but we have fucking confidence. When I land in London, I m not some Bangladeshi immigrant stirring a pot of Makhni, I m Arun fucking Gupta, self-made millionaire, with a three-star hotel reservation on Gloucester Road, breakfast included-about to hire four of your whites for sales. I have confidence to stand in front here, wearing this Italian clothing, genuine 73 percent leather, and say, Madam, if I start a new business, a billion people are my market.
And a billion people are thinking like that. IPL, Airtel, Reliance, Infosys, TATA, PVR thousands of thinkers, not as smart as me but still building only on confidence that we want a bigger, better fucking country. A place where we can wipe off that piece of shit and stand up to say to the world, we are Indians, and you will say, pay attention, these Indians now matter. That s the real City of Joy. The rickshaw puller is sitting in the rickshaw now.
People say, Arun, how did you get such big balls to take so many chances? How are you such a visionary for the new India? And I say, it came this way. My balls were always like this. Ever since I saw my government family dying when the government pensions couldn t pay for government hospitals because they didn t know how to make some noise. I decided, I will make noise. The new India will make some noise. No apologies. No hello, sir, I ll wipe your ass, sir, make me a member of your Gymkhana Club, sir , none of that homo British shit. Just big dreams. Just big cash. No saying love all Indians. When I m old, my government, my children will take care of me. Fuck that, only I love me. And everyone who is out there looking for gold, are only looking out for themselves. It s the Wild West. In the East. That s the new India.
You may ask, what is the story of 1888 Dial India ? How did it all happen and how did you become what you became? Yes, most of the stuff is now legendary and all over the left-hand column of the last page of the Economic Times , June 23, 2008, but that s only media hype. There s a bigger story. I will tell it. Like the rise of Facebook, Coca Cola, Twitter, Microsoft, and the Reserve Bank of India, there are humble beginnings, heroic acts, jealous rivals, epic battles. Ending with me still here so you can guess who won.
Today I drive a Skoda whose installments are no longer overdue. Aparna from the Economic Times doesn t use the word criminal and me in the same article anymore. I live in an India where I can drink Costa. A British multinational is grovelling for market share of India s seven hundred million urban middle class. I predicted this in 2003. The architects who will build my new office for my new business idea are among the best in the USA, but I will make them wait with my Bengali secretary. I have always wanted to hire a Bengali secretary with an MA. Ideally in English Literature. I won t go into why. It has something to do with Aparna Sen getting wet.
For all these reasons, I need to write a memoir.
Arun Gupta
May, 2010
Not so humble beginnings
Like all great things in history, it was an accident.
I remember it was the monsoons, because another Air India flight had just flown into a tree in the south somewhere and a different Congress MP was in a different jail for a different corruption scandal.
My last business venture, a call centre, was wrapping up. No, not folding, taking a break, like they do in cricket after every ball.
See, the thing is, it s very easy for people to say that the business venture was failing. That s what people do- say- See he failed . People are like that. Dictionaries define people as a group of persons but that s not how Arun Gupta defines them. He sees people as a group of assholes who don t have the balls to give up being servants for Marwaris and live in their company flat having their life sucked out of them just like their monthly TDS. And to those people , I say, I passed . No, I didn t pass in ICSE or ISC or BCom (passing those don t matter. If you re studying for those and reading this, stop studying right now and finish this first).
I m not going to get into why I wasn t allowed to finish my ISC for that alu bomb I threw at Reverend Suarez or why my BCom final centre entry pass said Thane instead of Pune (fuck you typists of India. Thank God, you re finished by Lenovo).
Those things are not the point in this kind of passing. This passing is far more important. No, I m not going to say the classroom of life or some such shit you read in US self-help books. Hate those things. They are business obstacles for my new business venture. You ll find out why soon. No, I mean passing from one business to another. Upward mobility. Advancing. In this case, I was shifting from one room to the next, so sideways mobility. Whatever. Mobility, that s the main thing. Moving. That s how economies grow, when people pass from business to business. Things start in garages, end up in skyscrapers. Hong Kong wasn t built by a bunch of Chinese billionaires sitting in one place. That s the journey I was on. In most cases, people start a business, leave it thriving to their children and move to the next. In my case, I was closing a business and then starting a new one. Some cynical young MBA fuckers reading this will say, Oh but that s not upward mobility. That s just tax evading . You know what I say to you, come check my Form 16. Every exit does not have to leave something behind just because you ve exited it. A famous person once said, every exit can be an entrance to somewhere else. That s me.
It was a call centre to repair American home appliances on the phone. Mostly toasters, phones, TVs, air conditioners. I have trademarked the idea so if any fucker reading this tries to copy it, just know, it is a brilliant idea and I will get back to it someday and if I see you competing with me, send me your address for the royalty notice.
Like destiny or George Michael s career, it was heading for a huge success, I thought, but the main problem with these American appliance-user fuckers was that they preferred calling the actual company that sold them the product. And those bastards, like LG, Samsung, Carrier, already had outsourced lines in India.
We got fucked a little bit.
My team, which was Sudhir, my employee, couldn t help anyone and ended up destroying eleven televisions, five microwaves, and setting two GE dishwashers on fire. But it was not all his fault. I should have bought the online training appliance module instead of downloading only half of it from Bit Torrent. But give me a break, deude, as my hero Ricky Martin often said after he became openly homo. I mean, even Bill Gates dropped out of coll