Fallen Apart

Kingshuk Nag’s book is a fairly well-researched quicky on Ramalinga Raju’s dubious deeds.

Kingshuk Nag’s book is a fairly well-researched quicky on Ramalinga Raju’s dubious deeds.

Infotech czar Ramalinga Raju’s confession in January this year about cooking the country’s fourth largest infotech firm Satyam’s books shook the corporate world. In a matter of hours, Raju, once a posterboy of the industry and nothing short of an icon in his  home state Andhra Pradesh, turned into a  rapacious white collar fraudster, drawing comparisons with Ravana and Dhritarashtra.

Without doubt, the scam, which raises serious questions about corporate governance, accounting standards and government regulations, is the biggest business story of 2009. And journalist Kingshuk Nag has wasted little time in putting together an account of Raju’s dubious deeds.

As quickies go, Nag’s book is fairly well researched. It’s a racy read that takes you from Raju’s rather modest beginnings as a foreign-educated son of an Andhra grape farmer, to the man who hopped on to the outsourcing gravytrain at the right time, to his final fall from grace. Nag suggests that maybe it was the feudal mindset of the Raju caste that made his appetite for land acquisition insatiable. He ran his software business into the ground to buy thousands of acres of real estate. The book is written in a manner that doesn’t put off ‘non-business’ readers. But if indeed Raju had been systematically looting shareholder and public money for nearly a decade, why was critical journalistic inquiry or commentary on the parlous state of affairs at Satyam virtually non-existent?  Ah, but that’s a different question.

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TR Vivek