Pandavas: The Tech Warriors

By Anil Chawla and Debashis Ghosh

A bomb blast. A booze party. A statistics quiz. Three chance meetings bring together five very different people with only one thing in common: their future friendship. Set against the rise, fall, and resurgence of the IT industry, Pandavas follows the fortunes of these 21st century tech warriors.

Bindaas Kalpu effortlessly straddles East and West, and yet finds something missing. Village boy Goky turns corporate bigwig and global citizen, but leaves behind more than he bargained for. Brilliant Sri finds his true calling, but what about his true love? Pantu's scruples may not be as sparse as they seem, and his easygoing feet are planted more firmly on the ground than anyone expects. Ambitious Sammy scales ever greater heights, until the only way to go is down.

As the Pandavas grapple with right and wrong, love and loss, and the quest for success, happiness and home, they show us that some friendships really do last a lifetime.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 18, 2017
• ISBN: 9789386643902

Anil Chawla

Anil Chawla is Head of Human Resources for TCS-North. His 40-year professional career has imbibed a cocktail of disparate streams. After a master's degree in physics from Banaras Hindu University, he flirted with business for some time but soon got fed up. His next job was at the State Bank group where working with diverse people excited him much more than balance-sheets and ledgers. In 1994, he completed the Fellow Programme in Management at IIM Ahmedabad with a specialization in organizational behaviour. He joined Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) as a management consultant where he advised companies in different industries on strategy, restructuring, HR, BPR, MIS and IT. In his 20+ years with TCS, he moved across functions and domains a few times before finally landing in human resources, where he found his true calling. He has a strong penchant for understanding business landscape, strategy, organizational design, organizational effectiveness, creativity, and innovation. He likes learning and teaching through stories, anecdotes and case studies. He coaches thousands of employees each year using provocative and experiential learning paradigms. His multi-faceted professional experience has helped him come up with many story ideas of which this book is an outcome. His reading interests include fiction and management. He likes to watch tennis, cricket and his favourite movies-sometimes on fast-forward.

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Authors

Acknowledgements

There are many people without whom this book would not have seen the light of day. The first and foremost is my wife Santa who read all my drafts from the start and gave me constructive feedback at every stage. Her attention to detail helped me tie many loose ends of the story together. Being an avid reader in three languages, she gave me insights on how readers might perceive the writing. Her deep understanding of the Mahabharata and its characters helped me contextualize the book and the title which I was obsessed with. I have no words to thank her!

My children don’t know me as the type to write a book. When I first discussed the thought with them, there were contrasting responses. There was disbelief from Bhaskar, who was sceptical as I’d never shown any signs of being an even remotely creative writer. But he did provoke me enough to do better, gave incisive feedback on various aspects, and I soldiered on. Nandini was quick to say that if I felt like writing, I must do it, essentially saying, ‘listen to your heart’. Both were quite ruthless in evaluating my initial proposal document and scored it way below passing marks. This litmus test helped me up the ante, though I’m still not sure if I’ve come up to their expectations! Throughout the process, they motivated me with periodic inputs, criticism, and insightful reviews. Later, Nandini and Bhaskar helped sort out timelines and correct grammatical and other language errors.

Those in the larger family who knew about my ongoing endeavour gave me boosts of support and interest with their periodic questions about the status of the book. I want to express my sincere gratitude to them.

Neha and Aarti from my team at work encouraged me and provided great inputs on the cover design. They were a good sounding board, tolerating my vague questions even without a complete picture of the project. I’m very thankful to them.

Narendra, Girish and Kavita from my team learned about this effort in its last stages, and immediately offered help and motivation. I have no intent to exclude my other terrific team-members; they simply didn’t know about this secret till it was completed.

I am thankful to Sushma and Sanjiva, who helped me grasp the nuances of publishing and the market. There were a number of invisible hands who contributed and still continue to do so. Many thanks to them.

None of this would have been possible but for TCS, the company where I’ve spent more than 20 years of my life and enjoyed every moment. TCS has given me a variety of roles, many learning opportunities, and the freedom to think differently, all of which have contributed to this effort.

Last but not the least, I’d like to thank Bloomsbury for publishing the book, and the editorial and design teams for their contributions.

Anil Chawla

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank my family—my wife Nilanjana and my sons Anubhav and Anurag—who have always stood by me even though my professional life leaves me little time to spend at home.

Debashis Ghosh

Minus One

Suddenly, Mumbai’s Malabar Hill was screaming with the sirens of ambulances approaching from two connecting roads. There was not much traffic on the normally busy road this early in the morning, but a few vehicles with ‘Press’ stickers on their windscreens were seen speeding in the same direction. There was a large crowd in front of a 25-storey apartment building and people were jostling to look inside. The watchman had a baton in his hand and was trying to control the crowd, but without success. As the ambulance neared the building, people started giving way to allow it access.

The scene was not for the faint-hearted. A man in his late forties was lying in a pool of blood on the ground in the building’s compound. It looked as if he had fallen from the top floor. Next to him, a woman, possibly the man’s wife, sat sobbing. As the ambulance stopped, paramedics and a doctor rushed out to examine the body.

‘He’s dead,’ the doctor confirmed grimly.

The woman’s cries turned louder. The press arrived soon after, and the air was rent with the flashing lights of cameras and feverish queries from reporters. A van sent by the Police Control Room had also reached the spot and a sub-inspector leapt out, shouting at everyone to stay clear of the body.

Within the next half an hour, there were blaring headlines on most TV channels: ‘Paul Samuel, COO of STM, commits suicide’. The news spread like wildfire all over the media. The IT industry was shocked. Offices of STM across the country and overseas were abuzz with rumours. Some of the company’s clients called the head office and even Samuel’s family, offering condolences.

Samuel’s death generated endless discussions on social media. There were theories galore about his suicide. Even people who had not known him beyond an occasional ‘hello’ had opinions: ‘He had a disturbed childhood and grew into an introvert. As COO, he was under continuous and high levels of stress. When it became unbearable, he decided to end his life.’ Others were left wondering, because Sammy’s meteoric rise in the IT industry, which had largely contributed to STM’s prominence, had symbolized the growth of IT itself. The story of his professional success read more like fiction than real life.

The Pandavas

School and college friendships start on the sparks of chance. If they last beyond those times and for years to come, that surely has something to do with destiny.

Goky, as Gopal Kishan was fondly called, peeped out of his window in the three-tier compartment of the Suryanagari Express as it entered Surat station. Hurriedly, he picked up his suitcase, bedding, and tote bag, and pushed his luggage towards the door. As passengers poured out, the noise on the platform rose palpably. He jostled through the crowd to reach the exit, where a TTE with a mouth full of paan was stopping exiting passengers at random to check their tickets. Just as Goky got to him, the official aimed a long, red jet into the spittoon to his right, some of it splattering the wall behind, as well as the front of his uniform. Goky’s ticket, held out in his hand, was ignored. When his hand lay stretched for a few more seconds, the TTE yelled, ‘B***c***, are you giving me a gift or what?’

Goky was taken aback by the expletive. It was not the best welcome to a new city, but he decided to walk on without protest. As the crowd thinned, he stopped to adjust his luggage, hanging his bedding roll over a shoulder, the strap of the tote bag over the other, and gripping the handle of the suitcase in his hand. It was then, just as he was approaching the road in front of the railway station, that a deafening noise almost threw him off balance. As he looked in the direction of the sound, he saw a fountain of smoke emerge from a handcart. His heart seemed to stop for a second as he saw a person lying in a pool of blood. Another man was trying to run, holding a hand to a bleeding shoulder.

Then all hell broke loose. People ran helter-skelter, almost causing a stampede. Goky, too, ran for his life, somehow dragging his heavy luggage with him. He could not later remember how he found the courage to hail an auto rickshaw and request the driver to take him to LEC. The auto guy asked for a hefty fifty rupees but given the situation, Goky didn’t even need to think about it. As he was trying to put his luggage in the space behind the seat, another boy, almost the same age, barged into the auto from the other side. Just behind him was a girl, agitatedly trying to talk to the driver. She was telling the driver how there had been a bomb blast at the station and several people had been injured. Scared, all three of them insisted that they were the first to stop the auto, but the argument stopped when they realized they were all headed towards LEC. It was best to leave together as they were hardly fifty metres from the scene of the blast.

A few short minutes later, the auto was off, loaded with three scared humans and seven pieces of luggage. Goky and the other boy were sitting on either side of the driver, hanging on for dear life by the three-wheeler’s central rod. On the back seat, the girl was perched on what looked like a mini Kanchenjunga of luggage.

It was 7 July 1984, a day before the commencement of the new session at Leading Engineering College, Surat, known to all as LEC. Goky had calmed down enough to guess that his fellow passengers were likely his fellow students as well. He shouted over the driver’s head and the din of the traffic to ask the other boy his name.

‘Puneet,’ came the reply. In the panic outside the station, Goky had barely glanced at the boy. Now, as a he got a good look, he saw that Puneet was a round mound of flesh taking up almost half the driver’s seat. Most of the rest was taken up by the autowallah, leaving just about enough space for one third of Goky’s left butt cheek. The rest of him was in the air. Reluctant to let go of the rod in this precarious position, Goky decided against a handshake and ventured a strictly verbal introduction. ‘My name is Gopal Kishan. I belong to Sojat, in Rajasthan. I have got admission in electronics and communications engineering.’

‘I’m Kalpanaben Vinodbhai Kapadia, but you can call me Kalpu,’ they heard from the back seat. Both Goky and Puneet turned to say hello but their heads collided with the driver’s, who mouthed a red-hot expletive in Gujarati.

While both boys were wondering about the girl’s long, three-part name, she explained, as if used to this reaction, ‘Kalpana is my name, Vinod is my father’s name and Kapadia is my surname. In Gujarat, the father’s name, with a "bhai at the end, gets added to a girl’s name till she gets married. After marriage, this is replaced by her husband’s name and surname. Bhai is the constant companion for all men. And ben" is the constant companion for all women.’ And she burst into an earful of laughter.

None of the three realized that this chance encounter would make them best friends for the next four years and thereafter. The chemistry was spontaneous. Thus began Goky’s college years in Surat, where expletives were normal parlance and a sentence without a heavy one sounded out of place. All men were ‘bhais’ of their wives and all women were ‘bens’ of their husbands, leaving outsiders scratching their heads.

After a long and bumpy ride, they finally arrived at LEC. Over the next couple of hours, they filled up various forms to complete the registration and hostel allotment process. Goky and Puneet reported together, and were thus put in the same room. Kalpu was from nearby Vadodara, and had already completed all formalities on a prior visit.

Kalpu came from a rich Gujarati family which owned many oil mills in Gujarat and Maharashtra. She was perhaps the only member of her family (among both men and women) to attend an engineering college. She was one of those rich kids who did many things in life just for kicks. Having topped Mount Carmel School in Ahmedabad in her class 10 and 12 exams, she had an opinion on everything ranging from the state of the Indian economy, the communal situation in Gujarat, education reforms, Bollywood’s hits and misses, to the pathetic state of Gujarati cinema, and a host of other things. She could talk incessantly about anything and everything under the sun, and quite often did.

She was a bright and versatile girl who had excelled not only at academics but also at extracurricular activities. She had been the school badminton champion and took part in debating and dramatics. She also played the guitar. She competed with boys and girls (in that order) in all activities.

As her rank in the entrance exam was quite good, she had a choice between electronics and electrical engineering, which were the more sought-after disciplines, but she preferred mechanical engineering. There were many arenas stereotyped as male bastions, but she would be the first one to jump into them. Her family was rich enough to buy her a car, yet she preferred two-wheelers—motorcycles, to be precise. Back home, she had harried her parents to buy her a Royal Enfield ‘Bullet’. The fact that the Bullet was widely seen as a ‘macho’ symbol for men neither bothered nor deterred her.

Puneet Bhalla (called Pantu by some and Bhalu by others) came from a Sikh family which had a flourishing auto spare parts business in Delhi. His classmates didn’t know he was Sikh until he showed them a photograph of his turbaned father receiving an award from Maruti Udyog Limited for topping their sales target, as Pantu was clean-shaven. He had three siblings; two sisters and an elder brother. LAU (Life As Usual) in the Bhalla family meant that the girls would get married early and the boys would join their father’s business. Pantu’s elder brother had been married for many years and had been attending to the family business with his father. Both his sisters, Ravinder Kaur and Parminder Kaur, struggled at school, then enrolled in a BA Home Science to graduate (strictly for matrimonial purposes). After scraping through somehow, they were married off to handsome Sikh boys, also from business families. Nine prompt months after marriage, Ravinder gave birth to a baby boy. Two years later, Parminder followed her older sister’s lead. Births of boys in the family were celebrated with parties at which scotch flowed like water, and mountains of chicken and paneer tikka, Amritsari fish, and mutton rogan josh were served. The young and the old danced, despite their gravity-defying bellies.

Pantu was a true Punjabi in his eating habits—half a dozen aloo parathas topped with butter for breakfast, a litre of full-cream milk every day, two full butter chickens just for appetizers, Sunday special rajma chawal, and chhole bhature welcome any time. He was a chain Thums Up-drinker. The result of all this was obvious. He was short compared to typical Sikhs, all of 5’5 vertically and only 24 less than that horizontally. He was different in other ways too—he enjoyed his family’s riches, but kept a distance from the business itself. He knew he was expected to join the family business, and dreaded the thought of sitting in a shop and selling auto parts like a salesman. He had learnt early in life that the only way to have the option of a different vocation was to do well academically and get a job.

This made him study harder. His parents and siblings were astounded when, in the eighth standard, he topped his class of nearly 240 kids. He repeated the same feat in the ninth, and in his class 10 Board examinations, he achieved an aggregate of 95 per cent. Two years later, in class 12, it was only a shade lower, at 94.5 per cent. He was a good student and had a very good grasp on physics, but he was not interested in pursuing a career in pure sciences. Thinking that engineering might offer better opportunities to escape the family business, he worked hard and cleared the entrance exam for admission to LEC Surat. For his counselling session at LEC, the entire Bhalla family—the elder Bhalla with his wife, the eldest Bhalla without, Pantu’s older brother and his family, both his sisters and their families, a couple of cousins—travelled to Surat. When a bus full of well-fed men, women, and kids with loud clothes and louder voices entered the LEC premises, onlookers mistook it for a baaraat (wedding party). It didn’t help that the party decided to break into bhangra en route to the academic block. Pantu kept pleading with his family to behave, but to no avail. And that is how he became (in)famous even before a single class was held in his engineering course.

Embarrassed by the tamasha of that visit, Pantu ensured that when he came to stay in the hostel, he had no bhangra party in tow.

Goky was born to schoolteacher Praduman and housewife Yamuna in Sojat, Rajasthan. He was the youngest of three siblings. In his traits, attitudes and demeanour, he was so different from his siblings that it raised doubts if they were even related! He was academically bright and topped his class. He had a sharp memory and phenomenal observation powers. He reflexively identified patterns from happenings and things around him. With all the parental attention focused on Goky, it often surprised him that his older brother and sister were not jealous of him.

Despite the hard work of both parents, making ends meet was a daily struggle. The family’s savings had been exhausted in raising and educating Goky’s older siblings. Then, when Goky was in class 9, his father’s one bad habit—smoking— took his life. Any money the family had left was spent on treatments that ultimately proved futile. After losing her husband, Yamuna rose to the challenge of earning for her family.

Goky did his schooling at Central School, which was rated quite high in the state. Apart from good teaching, the students also got good perspective from their teachers about career choices. By the time Goky entered class 10, he had decided that he wanted to be an engineer. Having set his goal and knowing fully well that the road to success was full of hurdles, and that there was plenty of competition, he set about the task in a systematic manner. Over the three years from class 10 to 12, he expertly balanced his school studies with his preparation for the engineering entrance exams. His planning and hard work paid off, and he finally succeeded in procuring not only admission to LEC Surat, but a partial scholarship as well.

And so three different paths led Kalpu, Pantu, and Goky to the LEC campus, where they met and soon came to be known as the Terrible Troika.

After settling down in their hostel rooms, they met again in the college mess. While Goky and Pantu were anxious to know more about the bomb blast at the station, Kalpu had seen similar things in the past and wasn’t too perturbed. The blast had happened early in the morning when there were not too many people around; luckily, there had been no casualties. The three injured had been admitted to Surat Municipal Hospital.

Some seniors arrived and recognized Pantu as the boy who had tried and failed to stop his family from publicly celebrating his admission. They asked him to do the ‘murga’ (chicken) pose. Now that was tough for Pantu, given his girth. He tried gamely and ended up rolling over and over on the floor. His new friends joined him, but only because they’d fallen off their chairs laughing.

Classes started and the friends’ circle became wider. A couple of weeks later, Kalpu spotted some of the boys huddled together. Never to be left behind, she barged right in and demanded to know what they’d been talking about. The boys were reluctant, but Kalpu shocked them by reading their minds, ‘Remember guys, Gujarat is a dry state.’ There was much disappointment all round till they heard the rest of her sentence: ‘But alcohol is available freely, more so in Surat. Daman is close enough to smuggle booze from. And Mumbai, too, is not far.’

At this, a tall boy called Sammy whispered something in Pantu’s ear and vanished. Towards the evening, he arrived with a dirty-looking rucksack on his back and headed straight to his room. The arrangements for the weekend booze party had been made. Six or seven boys assembled in one of the rooms at ten-thirty that night and opened a bottle. It was almost midnight when they heard a knock on the door. All of them froze.

‘Who is it?’ asked one of them. There was no response. Everybody was holding their breath. The penalties of being found with liquor were severe. There was another knock on the door and they heard a shrill voice ask them to open the door. There was a sigh of relief as they realized it was Kalpu.

A few seconds passed, and Kalpu’s shout cut through the boys’ reluctance. ‘Will you open the door or do I inform the warden? And I know what you guys are up to. So just relax.’ The door was opened, and Kalpu entered a room full of smoke and the smell of liquor. One of them dared Kalpu to take a sip. She refused.

Sammy was quiet in the beginning, but opened up gradually. Kalpu learned his full name, Paul Samuel, and much more. His family had been settled in Mumbai for three generations. His parents, Mary and Abraham, were doctors and worked at a private hospital. He was an only child and grew up in the care of housemaids. He often saw his parents quarrel over trivial issues. When this happened, the maid would take him away to another room. As he grew up, he withdrew into himself. After a particularly unpleasant scene at home when he was fourteen, he slit his wrist with a kitchen knife. Luckily, his mother’s hospital shift had changed and she came home early to find Sammy in bed with his forearm still bleeding. His mother’s timely intervention saved