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| Edited By: Kaushal Shroff |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 05, 2017, 01:54 PM IST
In September last year, the Supreme Court (SC) shot down industrialist Ravi Ruia's plea to travel abroad. Ruia is the vice president of Essar Group – a formidable conglomerate now in the cloud for being responsible for a large chunk of the non-performing assets (NPAs) of Indian banks. Junking Ruia's plea, the SC judges offered that it was a case of 'once bitten, twice shy', having mistakenly allowed a person who wasn't coming back to travel abroad, and that it wasn't willing to go down that path again. The reference was to the now disgraced billionaire Vijay Mallya who left India sometime in March last year, even as a consortium of banks to whom he owed over Rs 9,000 crore appealed to the court to stop him from doing so. Of all the criticism that has come Mallya's way, this bit, I imagine, must have been a sharp cut – but not one from which, I wager, the liquor baron would have taken long to recover. Kingfizzer by senior journalist Kingshuk Nag describes Mallya as a thick-skinned, opportunistic businessman, who did not shy away from exploiting every situation, fairly or unfairly.
Mallya, for instance, was a member of the consultative committee of parliamentarians for the civil aviation ministry from mid-2010 onwards, right from the time financial troubles started brewing within Kingfisher Airlines. Obviously he benefitted from being a part of these policy-making circles, used his privileged position to get an insider's view into the future plans for the airlines domain. As a senior Air India official also suggests in the book, Mallya influenced the government on matters concerning Kingfisher Airlines. And yet his airline sank. Mallya's spendthrift management of the airlines, his insistence on producing a high-end airline in a country where less than three per cent of the population can afford a plane ticket, and the inclement global economic headwinds starting 2008, all contributed in varying measures to the downfall of the airline.
Credit is due to Nag for the depth of research evident in Kingfizzer. Nag's approach is not chronological, as in a biography, but thematic as he captures the ups and downs of Mallya's very charmed life, doing a fair job of sourcing, simplifying and contextualising a lot of the information already in the public domain on the subject and the man.
Where the book fails is in humanising the man. Yes, it is sprinkled with instances of his business acumen (or lack thereof), but the reader is never really clued into Mallya's essential character. Perhaps Nag could have tapped into more people in his inner circle because whatever glimpses the book offers of Mallya as a husband, a father, a son or as a family man are those he himself has let on. Also, it offers nothing really revelatory. Chances are many aviation, alcohol or banking professionals could share a great deal more about Mallya than what the book reveals. Hovever general readers looking for a quick read about the man's businesses, smooth-talking, high-flying and risk-taking ways can safely pick up the book. They won't be disappointed.
