Four things you need to know before reading…

Tamal Bandhyopadhyay’s Roller Coaster has a promising start, promising not to be an autobiography, even if it may sound so.

It works well for the reader in me, the heart that the author puts into those first few pages, his foray into Bombay as a journalist, his difficulties settling down, the slumming and slamming and getting stories together.

At 20% in, “Roller Coaster” feels raw and real, a sneak peak into Tamal’s real life, goading me into recommending it already to a group of book crazies on our book club WhatsApp group.

As I progress with the book, it’s as if my third eye opens up, making me swear to said book club I will never recommend books without fully reading them.

Where is half the gender?

Tamal writes and writes, anecdotes and anecdotes, about every male banker who is some male banker in the industry. The women find no mention unless to be trashed upon. More than Chanda Kochchar’s corruption, what takes real estate is how she had a private lift to take her up to her office and she always sat at the head of the table at lunch meetings and townhalls (there are so many male senior executives in the financial services industry who do exactly this, Chanda isn’t unique at all). Shikha is pulled up for how she needed slides for everything. Arundhati Bhattacharya (SBI) doesn’t find a mention in a book that devotes significant real estate to public sector banks. Shanti Ekambaram (Kotak) isn’t even named in a book that waxes eloquent about Uday Kotak and some of his key male team members who were part of the bank’s founding story (Shanti was too, but hey does it matter?).

You know what. I can live with the invisible women part of it. Perhaps, in Tamal’s times as a journalist, it was easier to access male executives, go out for a drink with them, and chat about what’s happening. Perhaps, the women weren’t accessible. Though one might argue that putting the right story out is as much the journalist’s responsibility as the subject of the story’s, I wonder what gold mines Tamal might have unearthed if he had really intentionally customised his access tactics based on people’s comfort levels.

S has a good point. “Women don’t tell their story. They never talk about the glass ceilings and glass cliffs, putting it down to time management rather. What will the journalist do if the interviewees are too close lipped and not open with their stories”, she argues.

My only counter is, Tamal’s book has no such deep insights about the men either. It’s about their preferences for dosa and whiskey, and chillies and hand towels to wipe their heads. Even objectively, if he had bothered to meet / understand some of these women, he might have had a paragraph or two to write about them, without having to scratch the surface.

The stereotyped gender

And that brings me to the next part. It is one thing to not talk about the women stalwarts but it is the absolute pits to reference women liberally across the book ONLY as spouses who organize Bhajans or play the perfect hostesses or swoon over Raghuram Rajan’s charm or have a passion for gardening (this about a female IAS officer who happens to be the wife of a senior banking / RBI executive – don’t even reference her if you have nothing to say about her?).

Oh hey. Amrita Patel of the National Dairy Development Board is referenced out-of-nowhere as being able to access the ladies toilet that RBI’s chief engineer created in record time.

Randomly hanging statements

Ok, that nicely segues into my next rant, unlike Tamal’s book where nothing seems to segue nicely into anything else.

There are disjointed facts everywhere, exactly like the book’s blurb, which perhaps was the warning I needed but never heeded.

Tamal’s objective with the book seems to be to let the readers know that he knows a lot of things about a lot of people. If I were him, I too will want to show off. But, maybe, I will pause and wonder how I can put it within a story rather than just type whatever fact I remember after dinner or before lunch.

The overindexing on simplicity

Like one of the smarter members of the book club said, after avoiding reading the book, “the blurb made me think it’s more like a gossip column and so I didn’t pick the book up”. You are right, SR. It is. Unfortunately, it isn’t even “interesting” gossip.

There are only two kinds of people in Tamal’s world. Ones who are very simple and work long hours and drive around in Marutis or take auto rickshaws and become superbly successful while still preferring to eat at local dhabas. Others who are the opposite of all that eventually get to their own downfall.

Paragons of virtue are ones who crave idli and sambar in China (I cannot even imagine the stress those people’s teams would have scurrying around in faraway China looking for idli and sambar so their bosses can feel simple and happy).

In such a world, there is no space for any other style of leadership or personality, even though the book claims to talk about various personalities of various bankers.

Tamal’s Roller Coaster is a simple affair, that has no form, very little content, and is a book by a man about men for men.

Muchly avoidable, especially by women who may run the risk of bursting an artery or two.