Coffee King: Book on CCD weaves cautionary tale for investors, regulators

In uncovering how CCD was run as a one-man show, this book weaves a cautionary tale for investors, regulators, consumers, and even fellow journalists

Coffee King: The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Cafe Coffee Day Founder V G Siddhartha

by Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta

Published by Pan

Macmillan India 224 pages ₹699

 

“If you were a teenager in Bengaluru in the late 1990s, CCD was your go-to adda. All the cool kids hung out at CCD,” writes journalist Rukmini Rao in her introduction to the book Coffee King: The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Café Coffee Day Founder V G Siddhartha, which she has co-authored with Delhi-based journalist and editor Prosenjit Datta. Ms Rao, who lives in the so-called Silicon Valley of India, and has reported extensively on businesses in Karnataka, speaks for numerous teenagers of her generation, scattered across India’s major urban centres.

 

No wonder then that Siddhartha’s suicide in 2019 sent shockwaves throughout the country instead of affecting only his family, employees, business associates, and fellow entrepreneurs. As Bidisha Nagaraj, whom Siddhartha hired as the president of marketing, reveals in the book, “He wanted to build a brand where people felt comfortable in their chappals.” However, he did not want it to be “considered downmarket” because he wanted to attract “coffee connoisseurs”.

 

Being able to achieve these seemingly opposite goals must have been a tall order but Siddhartha had his way. The fact that Ms Rao and Mr Datta are able to bring out what the protagonist of their book was good at is worthy of applause. They approach Siddhartha as a whole person, with complexities and inconsistencies rather than only as a businessman buried under the weight of debt or as a man who used his political connections to amass wealth and bypass scrutiny.

 

On the one hand, they highlight his generous efforts to provide vocational training to “economically underprivileged youth from around the Malnad region”. On the other hand, they throw light on his practice of hiring youngsters from Chikkamagaluru, some of whom were distant relatives, without knowing “what work to give them”. Yet they were on the payroll.

 

In keeping with the professional ethics of journalism, the authors’ claims are grounded in sources and facts. This is not a sensational book, peddling theories about what led Siddhartha to put an end to his life. It is based on “reams of financial results, annual reports, news clippings and court cases in which Siddhartha’s name appeared”, as Mr Datta points out in his introductory note.

 

The kind of integrity that is required to pull off a book like this also involves coming to terms with the frustrating realisation that crucial informants are unwilling to trust you and share freely. The authors failed, for instance, to get Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani and Mindtree co-founder Subroto Bagchi to open up about Siddhartha, though they were close to him.

 

Mr Datta remarks, “Writing a biography in India, unless it is a commissioned hagiography, is very difficult. People do not want to speak on the record. If they do, they offer you the barest and most politically correct version.” Ms Rao was lucky to get an interview with Siddhartha’s mother, Vasanthi, but Siddhartha’s widow, Malavika, refused to speak, which is understandable.

 

This book also makes one reflect on the sense of entitlement that journalists might carry about their right to access the truth at the cost of a family’s right to privacy at such a sensitive time. That said, it is evident that, while researching this book, the authors were only doing their job, which is to bring the truth to light, especially in such a significant matter of public interest.

 

As they note, “On 5 October 2019, Coffee Day Enterprises Ltd (CDEL) filed details with the stock exchanges showing the amounts it owed to various banks and lenders, with shares of group companies pledged as security. It owed nearly ₹155 crore to IndusInd Bank,  ₹199.46 crore to RBL,  ₹130 crore to Axis Bank,  ₹192 crore to Standard Chartered and  ₹91.5 crore to HSBC.”

 

The authors juxtapose these numbers against Siddhartha’s reputation as an affable person with friends across the political spectrum, and a landowner who helped smaller coffee planters. But they also expose him as the builder of an empire with “no formal processes in place, no approval chains, no record-keeping systems, no software to track activities or explain decisions”.

 

In uncovering how this one-man show ran, they have woven a cautionary tale for investors, regulators, consumers and also fellow journalists. Calling out “the media’s tendency to applaud businessmen without looking too deeply into the reality of their operations”, they hold up a mirror to their own profession. Their book would have been even more comprehensive had they quoted mental health professionals, and included information on suicide prevention helplines, in keeping with the World Health Organization’s guidelines on suicide reporting by mediapersons.

                 

The reviewer is a journalist, educator and literary critic. Instagram/X:

 

 @chintanwriting