For Whom the Bells Toll 'Bong'

“…and let me tell you something you don’t know,” the short, dark, tubby man said, half rising from his chair, glaring at me with bloodshot eyes and thumping the table with his fist in anger, “when I was at IIT, I once got into a fight and killed a fellow.  I am capable of doing it again.” Now, you might expect me to be alarmed by this, but to those who knew Dhruv Jyoti Das it was as innocuous a statement as expressing an urgent need to use the washroom.  I suppressed a smile with some difficulty, for his face was a comical sight and, of course, this only made him madder.

No one who has met Das can ever forget him.  We had funded  DJ (as the humanoid was affectionately called) a small sum of seed money to develop a technology where he added a product resembling thermocool to concrete and then applied this on the roofs of tobacco-curing barns, saving a whole lot of energy.  The farmer would pay for this and, from then on, save the equivalent money in firewood costs in a single tobacco season; the Tobacco Board was as excited as the farmers were, there was no competition in the market, the pricing was immensely profitable and my company obviously believed that we had a winner. 

…till we got to know Das well (which took about ten minutes on the outside).  He was a dark, balding, paunchy fellow, with a clipped, bushy moustache that enhanced a permanent scowl.  He was as short in height as he was on the basics of finance and, indeed, as he was on temper and, by the time I joined the company, my colleague was searching for a basket to throw his towel in.  On my first day at the venture fund -  in 1992 - I was asked to take over the monitoring of our investment in Jyoti Agrotherm, and SNS, for he was that colleague, promised all support (SNS was never one to miss out on good, clean fun, albiet from a respectful distance).

DJ lost little time in letting me know just who was the boss in the room and meetings with him remain etched in memory.  Cheryl, our irrepressible receptionist, would call on the intercom, when he walked into our office with an authoritative stride.  In her sparkling, formal tone, she’d inform me of his arrival, but would immediately depart into the recesses of the office, coughing as she suppressed her laughter at hearing me groan and complain.  For, at every meeting that DJ had with us, there would be a general increase in the room temperature, owing to his entirely ridiculous demands from us, rather needless aggression and the absence of any progress on the project.  As he got agitated (over everything), he’d begin to talk loudly, even shout, his tummy swaying with animated fervour, hands gesticulating wildly, often pounding each other or the table, and indignance rendering him speechless with anger, while his moustache did a delicate dance of emotion.  He once began drooling out of the corner of his mouth, and I wondered if he was having a heart attack or if there was something behind me – a poster perhaps -  that I should know about, but I dared not ask, just in case he’d throw an excited fist in my direction.

I learnt to take some of this in my stride, yet most of those in office – we had a staff of about thirty then – found the performance supremely entertaining.  Our conference room had a half-glass partition and a lazy afternoon presented everyone a perfect opportunity to walk by and sneak a look at a fuming DJ from the corner of one’s eyes, giving the waiting minions an update leading to a collective doubling up in laughter, which I’d clearly hear.  On his leaving the office, I would be surrounded by colleagues who’d want a detailed Minutes-of-the-Meeting tabled immediately, with stereophonic sound and special effects. 

The only person DJ was scared of was his formidable wife - a nominee on the company board -  whose name I now thankfully cannot recall.  As a little child reading Amar Chitra Katha comics, I had nightmares of Shurpanakha, yet never believed that something like that apparition could approach reality, but it did.  On one occasion when I was stupid enough to agree to a Board Meeting at their home, the husband was joined by his wife in a no-holds-barred verbal assault on my employer.  We were, I was informed, the single biggest reason for the company’s failure by not agreeing to invest more money and asking for ridiculous reports such as a Income Statement or expecting to make profits from such a venture.  As the lady raised her voice, I noticed DJ recede into a hitherto-unseen shell, much as an wolf would on seeing a leopard.  He emerged about half an hour later and spent a few minutes calming her down, making me believe that, with adequate training and possibly a gene transplant, he could become human one day.

Now, all this meant that the company could only go in one direction and indeed it did.  When he owed enough creditors sufficient sums of money, DJ did the disappearing act one morning leaving us to file a winding-up petition, which exercise probably cost more than the investment in the company.  Yet, for everyone in the company, me possibly excluded, the investment had generated an incalculable Return on Investment. 

Many years later, sitting in front of a furious young Mr. Mehta in another office, I wondered if I had signed on for The-Reincarnation-of-DJ-Das or that the Higher Power had singled me out for treatment on account of some past unforgivable sin.  But I shall leave that story for another day…..