Stop listening to business leaders

It’s amazing how we worship people for no reason other than their ability to profit off the lives of others

India’s business leaders are vastly overrated. This shouldn’t come as a surprise to most of us, given their obvious lack of interest in anyone but themselves, but it still ought to be mentioned now and again, given how so many of us choose to ignore this glaring fact. It’s why we still fawn over them in public, getting out of the way when one of them walks into a room, or asking them for selfies as if they have done anything other than enrich themselves. Managing a company does not make a person special, and it’s time we got rid of that ridiculous notion.

Many of India’s business leaders happen to occupy the roles they do simply because their parents shoved them into it. Their children will do the same, which is why we won’t be rid of a few names in the corporate space for the foreseeable future. Of the ones who haven’t been recipients of ancestral largesse, many have elbowed their way to the top not by displaying overwhelming proof of their intelligence or integrity, but by making sure the right political horses have been backed. This also explains why so many of our public assets have exchanged hands lately, while the rest of us have been busy vilifying teenagers for consuming drugs at parties.

I always switch channels whenever a business leader appears on television, because I have yet to come across one who has anything sensible to say. That they are relentlessly called upon to discuss everything from the history of India to the possibility of an alien invasion says less about their expertise and more about our collective gullibility. This is also what makes it so hard to avoid their annoying presence, given how frequently they are thrust upon the rest of us by admiring friends and colleagues. I was recently force-fed nuggets of wisdom from devotees of one such manager, who had written a book about how she moved from South India to the United States, eventually managing one of the world’s most awful companies.

The idea of praising someone for making products that push children into obesity would never occur to people who had their priorities right. This is India though, so, naturally there was much made about the leader’s business acumen. The fact that she had done nothing to address the damage wreaked by her company upon our planet was conveniently ignored. To be fair, her predecessors had done nothing either, but we should have been able to call her out if only because we rushed to claim her as one of our own.

Business leaders don’t care about the countries they belong to. Take a look at names in the recently published Pandora Papers for proof. The list of politicians and heads of government is huge, obviously, but there are more than enough business folk from India who would deserve close questioning, if we were the kind of country interested in accountability. Not one of them has had to come up with answers, because there have been no questions raised.

These are the names that increasingly dot entrances to airports and coal mines, along with those that have managed to dip a finger into every possible pie for decades. They have wilfully set up offshore companies and accounts because of how this enables them to hide details about their financial transactions. Despite what they may tell us on Twitter, these aren’t the actions of people who care about the well-being of the countries they call home. The taxes they withhold make us all poorer.

We should take a look at what our business leaders really are, and think about whether they ever do anything worthy of respect. Their humanitarian acts are all part of corporate social responsibility plans created by marketing managers, done only to burnish their credentials, and it’s time we saw through their charades. The hate and bigotry currently tearing India apart can all be traced to the doorsteps of business folk who claim to be patriotic Indians, but tacitly fund political parties bent on our country’s destruction. Not listening to them is the least we can do.

Sadly, this obsession isn’t an India-specific phenomenon. Much of the world outside, too, suffers from the same affliction. Why else would so many people applaud breathlessly when the two richest men on the planet choose to spend their money not by sharing their wealth with employees who made them rich, but by fighting to prove they can each build a bigger rocket?

When he isn’t ranting about all things Mumbai, Lindsay Pereira can be almost sweet. He tweets @lindsaypereira
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The views expressed in this column are the individual’s and don’t represent those of the paper.

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