Donald Duck in Cowboy Gear

Many summers ago, when I first began a corporate career working with TDICI, then India’s premier venture capital fund, I was about as raw as one could possibly get (I find today’s freshers a lot brighter and informed). A couple of months into my job, I was handed over a company, in which we had invested over the years, to ‘look after’. The company’s name was Gum India and it made, very simply, a bubble gum called Big Fun.

The company was in trouble, indeed in every conceivable sort of trouble. It owed money to nearly every pedestrian in Chennai, was a marginal player in most markets and made a product that destroyed kids’ teeth, which didn’t quite put it on a pedestal anywhere. The company was driven by its sales people, who inspite of an alleged business education, understood nothing of finance, collections or profitability. And, if this was not enough, the company founder was (and still is) quite a character: full of bluster, grand ideas (never supported by his own reality, which he perceived to be but an irritant), and an ability to talk the hind legs of the most skeptical donkey you’d meet. In us, he had found not just a donkey, but a herd of them. This chap had a mean streak of arrogance, partly a result of breeding, partly an education from IIM and the rest a CV that was more window-dressed than real. This hauteur meant that he reserved his time for my CEO, consigning me to his beleagured finance manager.

This note then is about Ramkumar, Gum India’s finance manager. He was a short tubby chap, grey haired, with a moustache and a formal smile that hid more than it revealed. His was an unenviable position to be in, as you can well imagine; hounded by creditors, harassed by employees and impaired by a management team that found him to be an impediment in their grandiose plans. This is not to imply that Ramkumar was a suffering, silent saint; on the contrary, he was a skilled manipulator with a number of victims who were guided gently down a primrose path to nowhere, these victims including my CEO, some of my illustrious colleagues and me in particular. I am certain now that he was a most creative accountant, delving into a grey realm of fiction when arranging the company’s financials and there was some speculation that he had his hand in the till as well. Yet there is no doubting the stress he was under, which at some point presented him with a slipped disc.

I used to meet him regularly, generally in his office in Chennai (indeed, I suspect the company did not have the money to send him to Bangalore without excellent reason). I was always instructed to meet him with stern messages on company performance (or the lack of it) and sometimes rehearsed my lines, yet an hour with him would disable my ammunition and have me meekly submit to his extenuations. Our meetings always ended with a set of excuses for non-performance from his side that were to be relayed by me to my senior colleagues in the company’s defence. The next quarter, he would assert, would be spectacular for the company. It was a quarter that never came, yet every time we met, there was astonishing chutzpah on display.

Ramkumar’s room was a drab, grey cabin, with little to please the eye, except for a poster that was stuck on the wall behind him. It had Donald Duck in a cowboy suit, hat, holster, the works, twirling a gun on his forefinger, with a broad grin across his engaging face. The byline said, “Nothing will happen today that I can’t handle!”. Everytime I met him in his room, my eyes would fix on that poster. I kept relating it to the man himself, and realised that it reflected his philosophy, if indeed that is a suitable word to use. There I would sit, paying scant attention to what he was saying while nodding my head, thinking of just what this statement of assertion meant and the more I stared at it, the more it impressed me with its resilient overtone.

As the years have passed by, this visual of Donald Duck has stood me in good stead. When faced with a fire in my family home in the middle of the night, an airline employee who had closed the flight gates or a ticket conductor who asked (recently) for proof of identity that I did not have on me, I have sat back in despair only to see my friend, Donald, in his cowboy suit. Often then, a picture of Ramkumar opens up in my mind, his easy, at times sly, smile reflecting his confidence in making me putty in his hands. I have then composed myself and put on a smile to help build my defence. I cannot remember an instance when this statement has let me down, since I first accepted it.