Susim Mukul Datta: Fountain of youth who left a lasting imprint on HLL

Precisely five days after his 89th birthday, Susim Mukul Datta returned to his creator with grace and tranquillity, which, incidentally, is what his name means.

 

This piece is not an elegy or an obituary. It is an intimate portrait of one of India’s highly accomplished leaders.

 

As a young trainee in 1967, I was assigned to do a project in Hindustan Lever Limited’s (HLL’s) Bombay factory. Energetic manufacturing engineers assembled in the canteen at lunchtime, seemingly in a rush to get their share of carrom, bridge, or adda. I felt lonely as a 21-year-old, looking for someone of my age group and lowly rank. And I noticed a tranquil Susim Datta, whom I befriended.

 

“Hello, I am a trainee of 1967, which batch are you?” I enquired in my friendly best tone. “Oh, hello, I am 1956,” he replied. “What! How could a person ten years my senior look so young?”

 

That is a mystery I never uncovered over the next sixty years. Susim was a picture of the ever-youthful Dorian Gray — without the excesses of the character in Oscar Wilde’s story!

 

He told me that he was a chemical engineer from Presidency College, and currently the development manager in the factory. Susim spoke of hydrogenation and saponification as though they were his mother tongue.

 

What about Bengali, I ventured. He hummed what seemed to me as soulful Rabindra Sangeet, perhaps the only such recital within the walls of the Mumbai factory managers’ canteen!

 

As the years rolled on, he never came through as a backslapping, but instantly connecting person. I thought of him as a reserved, soft spoken, enviably knowledgeable technical geek. It seemed that he knew everything that was worth knowing, and what he did not know was not worth knowing. He did many clever things in the company and rose meteorically, all of which have been recounted in his obituaries. By 1980, he was rumoured to be a potential chairman.

 

In 1990, he became chairman. During his tenure as chairman of HLL, he acquired a reputation as a mergers and acquisitions magician, and as a leader who pushed for aggressive goals in a seemingly non-aggressive manner through his mantra: quality-innovation-collaboration-acquisitions. He presided over one of the longest company general body meetings when he piloted the HLL meeting for the acquisition of Tata Oil Mills Co. He was a picture of patience.

 

This is an intimate portrait and not an obituary. I close with a reference to the only film in which Susim has acted. It was titled Four Men of India, directed by Caryl Doncaster and produced for Unilever and Hindustan Lever by James Carr. BBC showed this film among many others in a Trade Test for Colour Films. In this film, a Sikh salesman is depicted using his sales van to sell soaps in the Himalayas.

 

A Rajasthani man is shown as a migrant to the city to work in a soap factory (I recognised the Jones Stamping Machine at Bombay factory).

 

A supervisor at the factory is shown to have come from Kerala. Finally, an upcoming young engineer from the east is shown in the Calcutta factory, guiding a production supervisor and his team on a dalda packing line. The young engineer was a 25-year-old Susim!

 

If you watch that film now, you will see that the young Susim greatly resembles the retiring chairman thirty-five years later. That is why, to me, Susim has not passed away, rather he is the ever-youthful leader to all who knew him. He is remembered as one of the top corporate leaders of India who will always occupy an elite spot.