Corporate Novels: Mixing Business with Pleasure

Mr R Gopalakrishnan of the Tata Group recently did this story on Corporate Novels for the Economic Times. The article is a great recall of all the "Corporate Novels" that have been written in recent times.  In this story called Mixing Business With Pleasure, they have traced authors from corporate India who have penned their novels with stories that somewhere resonate with their experiences.  While it is fiction, almost all of them have perhaps been triggered off by some incident or character(s) they have encountered for real. This probably is the formula for realistic fiction that the readers have appreciated generously as well as the sales figures of all these novels will vouch for.  I feel honored that Mr Gopalakrishnan is aware of my novels - but I will feel better if I know that he read them as well.Only one correction - in my case the article mentions my previous employer and designation.  I currently work for Wipro Ltd as the group's  Chief Learning Officer. Over to the actual article.

Advertising and cricket come together with a bang in Anuja Chauhan’s novel, with The Zoya Factor launching into a romance with a cricket captain who sounds suspiciously like Dhoni. In the six months since its release, the 500-page book has sold over 20,000 copies and the film rights have been bought by Shah Rukh Khan’s Red Chilli Entertainment.Chauhan, who is from Meerut and graduated from Miranda House, is now working on her next novel, which is about ‘a small town girl who comes to the city.’ “Advertising is very limiting, with its 30 second restrictions. The best thing about writing fiction is that there are no limits,” says Chauhan.The creative side of advertising has always tended to produce novelists, script writers and lyricists. Some hold on to their jobs, like Chauhan, while others move out. “People who join the profession are those who want to express themselves in some way,” says Jaideep Varma, who quit advertising after 12 years to become a full-time writer. “But then they realise that advertising is not going to lead to any kind of self expression. That’s why you find so many ad professionals moving into other creative areas.”In Local, Varma’s debut novel, the hero is a fresher in a Mumbai ad agency who sleeps in local trains after work — an interesting idea which, alas, doesn’t actually work. The parts set in the ad agency, however , work quite well, which proves that it helps to have some experience of what you’re writing about.Abhijit Bhaduri , Human Resources (HR) director of Microsoft India, has chosen to spin his novels around the HR profession rather than any particular industry. A graduate of XLRI, Bhaduri set his first novel, Mediocre But Arrogant, in the ‘Management Institute of Jamshedpur’ , from where his hero graduates to land his first job in HR.His second book, Married But Available is about the protagonist’s early years in Balwanpur Industries, an Indian company that’s been taken over by a multinational. The book is sprinkled with HR gyan and Bhaduri, who has worked with Tata Steel, Colgate and Pepsico, says it gives his characters credibility: “The professional and personal lives of my characters aren’t separate, they’re wholly meshed.”One of the biggest selling Indian novels of all time is Anurag Mathur’s The Inscrutable Americans, written at the fag end of the license raj, when the middle class Indian dream was to immigrate to the USA. Utkarsh Rai, managing director of Infinera India, published a collection of Hindi short stories titled Reteela Safar after returning to the country ten years ago. “It was a theme people could relate to in those days,” he says. “Now the focus has shifted to Indians in India rather than Indians abroad.”The big fans of the corporate novel today are Indians who are not into serious literature. They once had to look to writers like Arthur Hailey for industry-dramas but now have the option of picking up an Indian novel they can relate to. “Middle class Indians define themselves through their careers,” says Amitabha Bagchi, IIT professor and author of the novel Above Average. “They would naturally enjoy reading stories about the pitfalls of professional life.”With liberal doses of romance, action and intrigue , some might say corporate novelists depict their work life to be far more exciting than it actually is. But one industry that always lends itself to juicy fiction is hotels. Four decades ago, Mani Sankar Mukherji wrote the best-selling Bengali novel Chowringhee, about the goings-on in a five star Kolkata hotel as told by a maudlin clerk.Now Advaita Kala’s written the delightful Almost Single, in which her sassy heroine, a guest relations manager in a Delhi hotel, ‘tolerates her job, hates her boss and bonds big-time with her friends.’ The book is replete with hilarious vignettes from hotel work-life and Kala admits she’s drawn heavily on her seven years of experience with the Oberoi group hotels and the Burj Al Arab hotel in Dubai. “My experiences were even more outrageous than what’s in the book. I’ve actually had to tone it down slightly,” she says.Written between-jobs , Almost Single was accepted by every publisher it was sent to, and Kala finally settled on Harper Collins because she “connected with the editor” . The novel has since sold over 50,000 copies and along with The Zoya Factor, it’s set the ‘chick lit’ genre rolling in India. “Men will never admit to reading it,” laughs Kala. “At the Jaipur Literary Festival last month, there were lots of girls who came upto me to get their copy of the book signed, but there was only one guy. And he said it was for his girl friend.”One man the new-gen corporate novelists owe much to is Chetan Bhagat, the author one who opened up the market for this genre. Bhagat’s debut book, Five Point Someone, was set in IIT-Delhi , his own alma mater, but since then, he’s moved to writing novels that are based on research rather than personal experience. “I enjoy the research,” he says. “I learnt so much about call centres while writing One Night and I used google heavily for cricket history in The 3 Mistakes Of My Life.”Does the Deutsche Banker ever plan to write a novel set in the banking world? “Not while I’m still in the profession,” says Bhagat, categorically. Which leaves the field more or less open to HSBC’s Ravi Subramanian, who is currently working on another novel called Devil In Pinstripes, which features bank collection agents who drive customers to suicide. “It’s important that I stick to writing about banking,” he says. “I want to establish my corporate novelist pedigree before I get into other kinds of writing.”And finally, how are the corporates who are the subjects of these novels reacting to the trend? Kala, who now works with Time magazine, says the hotel industry has been hugely supportive of Almost Single, laying out the red carpet wherever she’s had a launch: “The ITC Kakatiya in Hyderabad, ISTA in Bangalore, all hosted my launch events free. The staff there made me feel I’m one of their own.”At HSBC, Malini Thadani, head of public affairs, was the one entrusted with onerous responsibility of going through the manuscript of If God Was A Banker prior to its publication. She wielded the censor’s scissors in six places, cutting out all but one reference to HSBC. “My job was to ensure the book didn’t damage the institution. In the end, we accepted it as an imaginative and entertaining work of fiction,” she says.Once it was published, however, HSBC sportingly backed the novel, with country head Naina Lal Kidwai launching the book at Crossword. After all the coflict and tension, an altogether happy ending.Read the article in Economic Times by Clicking Here