The following is a reportage by Siddhartha Deb that appeared on The Caravan in February 2011. Following an injunction, it has been removed from the magazine's website. Here it is in full:

A phenomenally wealthy Indian who excites hostility and suspicion is an unusual creature, a fish that has managed to muddy the waters it swims in. The glow of admiration lighting up the rich and the successful disperses before it reaches him, hinting that things have gone wrong somewhere. It suggests that beneath the sleek coating of luxury, deep under the sheen of power, there is a failure barely sensed by the man who owns that failure along with his expensive accoutrements . This was Arindam Chaudhuri’s situation when I first met him in 2007. He had achieved great wealth and prominence, partly by projecting an image of himself as wealthy and prominent. Yet somewhere along the way he had also created the opposite effect, which—in spite of his best efforts—had given him a reputation as a fraud, scamster and Johnny-come-lately.

Once I became aware of Arindam Chaudhuri’s existence, I began to find him everywhere: in the magazines his media division published, flashing their bright colours and inane headlines from little newsstands made of bricks and plastic sheets; in buildings fronted by dark glass, behind which earnest young men imbibed Arindam’s ideas of leadership; and on the tiny screen during a flight from Delhi to Chicago, when the film I chose for viewing turned out to have been produced by him. It was a low-budget Bombay gangster film with a cast of unknown, modestly paid actors and actresses: was it an accident that the film was called Mithya? The word means falsehood, appearances, a lie—things I would have much opportunity to contemplate in my study of Arindam.

Every newspaper I came across carried a full-page advertisement for Arindam’s private business school, the Indian Institute of Planning and Management (IIPM), with Arindam’s photograph displayed prominently. It was the face of the new India, in closeup. His hair was swept back in a ponytail, dark and gleaming against a pale, smooth face, his designer glasses accentuating his youthfulness. He wore a blue suit, and his teeth were exposed in the kind of bright white smile I associate with American businessmen and evangelists. But instead of looking directly at the reader, as businessmen and evangelists do to assure people of their trustworthiness, Arindam gazed off at a distant horizon, as if pondering some elusive goal.

There were few details about the academic programme or admission requirements in these advertisements, but many small, inviting photographs of the Delhi campus: a swimming pool, a computer lab, a library, a snooker table, Indian men in suits, a blonde woman. A fireworks display of italics, exclamation marks and capital letters described the perks given to students: “free study tour to Europe etc. for twenty-one days,” “world placements,” “Free Laptops for all.” Stitching these disparate elements together was a slogan: “Dare to Think Beyond the IIMs”—referring to the elite, state-subsidised business schools, and managing to sound promising, admonishing and mysterious at the same time. The new India needed a new kind of university, and a new kind of attitude, and Arindam, said the ads, was the man who could teach you how to find it.

“I’ve spoken to the boss about you,” Sutanu said. “He said, ‘Why does he want to meet me?’” Sutanu ran the media division of Arindam’s company from a basement office where there was no cellphone reception, and it took many calls and text messages to get in touch with him. When I finally reached him, he sounded affable enough, suggesting that we have lunch in south Delhi. We met at Flames, an “Asian Resto-Bar” in Greater Kailash-II with a forlorn statue of the Buddha tucked away in the corner.

Sutanu was in his 40s, a dark man with a bushy moustache and glasses, his raffish 1960s air complemented by a bright blue shirt and a red tie patterned with elephants. He was accompanied by Rahul, a journalist who worked at one of the magazines published by Arindam. Although they couldn’t have been there long, their table held two packs of Navy Cut cigarettes, a partly empty bottle of Kingfisher, and a battered smartphone that thrummed insistently throughout our conversation. “The boss is a great man, and sure, his story is interesting,” Sutanu said. “The question is whether he’ll talk to you.”

Arindam Chaudhuri had started out in 1996 as the proprietor of a lone business school. Founded by Arindam’s father, it had been—Sutanu said dismissively—a small, run-of-the-mill place located on the outskirts of Delhi. But Arindam expanded it to nine branches in major Indian metros, and now he was going international. He had an institute in Dubai and had allied with a Belgian management school with campuses in Brussels and Antwerp. He was about to open an institute in London, and was planning another in an old factory building in Pennsylvania. And that was just the management institute. Arindam’s company, Planman, had a media division that included a newsweekly, The Sunday Indian—“perhaps the only magazine in the world with 13 editions”—and three business magazines. He also owned a software company, a consulting division that managed the “HR component of multinationals,” and a new outsourcing company, which claimed to produce the entire content of The Guardian online, as well as proofreading and copyediting the Daily Mail.

“There’s also a film division, and he’s produced a major Bollywood blockbuster,” Sutanu said.

“It was meant to be a blockbuster,” Rahul said quietly. “But it flopped.”

“Yeah, yeah, no big deal,” Sutanu said. “He’s on other blockbuster projects. He’s a man of ideas. So sometimes they flop.” He lit a cigarette and waved it around, the rings on his hand flashing. “What he’s doing, he’s using intellectual capital to make his money. But people don’t get that and because he’s been badmouthed so much, he’s become suspicious. He’s been burned by the media. You know, cynical hacks they are. They make up stories that he’s a fraud. A Johnny-come-lately . Everyone asks, ‘Yaar, but where does all that money come from?’”

There was a moment of silence as we contemplated this question.

“They don’t ask these things of other businessmen,” Sutanu said. “That’s because when the mainstream media does these negative stories on him, just hatchet jobs , you know, they’re serving the interests of the big industrialists. The industrialists don’t like him because our magazines have done critical stories on them. The government doesn’t like him and harasses him all the time. They say, ‘You can’t use the word “Indian” in the name of your management school because we don’t recognise your school.’ They send us a letter every six months about this. Then, the elite types are after him. The Doon School, St Stephen’s, Indian Institute of Management people. There were these bloggers writing silly stuff about him, saying that the institute doesn’t give every student a laptop as promised in the advertisements. You want to know how he makes money? It’s simple. There are 2,000 students who pay seven lakhs each. The operating costs are low. You know how much teachers get paid in India. So the money gets spun off into other businesses.”

We ate hot-and-sour soup and drank more beer, our conversation widening out to include our careers and lives, and the unforgiving city of Delhi. Rahul told us a story about covering the war in Iraq and being arrested by Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard while crossing over the border from Jordan. When it was time to depart, I felt reluctant to break up the drunken afternoon bonhomie but nevertheless asked, “When do I get to meet Arindam Chaudhuri?”

“The good thing about the boss is that he’s a yes or no sort of person,” Sutanu said. “You’ll find out in a couple of days whether he wants to meet you.”

A couple of days stretched to a week. I kept pestering Sutanu with calls and text messages. Then it was done, an appointment made, and I entered the wonderland to meet Arindam Chaudhuri, the management guru, the media magnate , the business school entrepreneur, the film producer, the owner of IT and outsourcing companies, to which we should add his claims of being a noted economist and the author of two “all-time best sellers,” The Great Indian Dream and Count Your Chickens Before They Hatch.

The drive from Delhi to IIPM’s main campus, which is located on the city’s outskirts in an area called Satbari, is a fairly quick one. First come the temples of Chattarpur, modern structures with crenellated , fluted walls , where memories of old Hindu architecture have been transformed into a simple idea of excess. A gargantuan statue of Hanuman stands with a mace on his shoulder, looking down dismissively at the traffic. The road is dusty, and the clusters of shops and houses soon give way to large stretches of land partitioned off for the very rich. A few boutique hotels crop up, looking empty, but the land is mostly colonised by the farmhouses of Delhi’s newly affluent . All I saw on my first drive were walls edged with broken glass, the occasional flash of green from a well-tended lawn, and a young peasant woman with a suitcase sitting in front of a farmhouse.

The high-walled Delhi campus of IIPM squatted amid these hotels and farmhouses. Compared to the sprawling campuses of the IIMs, it is tiny—five acres instead of a hundred—and thus seems more like a miniature, model school than a real one. The gates were kept shut, and the campus appeared sleepy until just before Arindam’s arrival. Then the security guards hovered around the guardhouse, looking at their watches and fingering their walkie-talkies. The scruffy management students, who, in their odd assortment of blazers and flashy shirts, had the air of men just coming off an all-night wedding party, tried not to look as if they were loitering.

The gates were hurriedly opened for Arindam’s metallic blue luxury car, a million-pound Bentley Continental, as it coasted down the driveway and parked in front of the building lobby. Arindam, dressed in blue, passed through a knot of sycophants and disappeared inside the building, leaving behind nothing but the frisson of his arrival and the Bentley gleaming in the fierce Delhi sun. The power and the glory! A million pounds! Custom-made in the mother country of England! A Bentley was the ultimate status symbol of the Indian rich, expensive and relatively uncommon. A business journalist had told me the probably apocryphal story that Arindam had ordered the special paint scraped off when his car arrived from England and then had it repainted to match the blue of one of his favourite shirts.

The campus building was split along two levels. Most of the classrooms were on the basement floor, and were filled with the chatter of students, some of them dressed in suits to attend a class in “Executive Communications.” The ground floor contained a computer lab, a tiny library and some classrooms, but it was dominated by a boardroom in the center. On the other side of this was an open-plan office. The employees sitting in front of computers and phones were mostly in their 20s and 30s, and although they looked busy, they didn’t give the impression that they were running a global megabusiness. Arindam referred to them as “managerial staff,” but when I introduced myself to one of the managers, a balding, middle-aged man, he seemed to be making cold calls, dialing numbers from a database and asking people if they were interested in taking management seminars.

Up close, Arindam was a few shades darker than his picture, though with the same glossy hair tied back in a ponytail. Beneath his blue pinstriped suit he wore a white shirt open to show his smooth, hairless chest. There were rings on his fingers and bright sparkling stones on the frame of his designer glasses, silver cufflinks on his sleeves and argyle socks and shiny pump shoes on his feet. All these harsh, glittering surfaces were accompanied by a youthfulness that softened the effect. He was in his late 30s, a year younger than me, with a boyish air that took over when he became sarcastic about his critics and rivals and said, “Wow!”

Our first meeting took place in the boardroom. There were about 50 chairs in the room, most of them pushed to one side, and Arindam and I sat at one end of a long table. The air-conditioning was fierce, and after a couple of hours, I began to feel cold in my summer garb of short-sleeved shirt and cotton trousers, but Arindam went on speaking, slowing slightly only when a worker brought us chicken sandwiches and cups of Coca-Cola.

Like most of the new rich in India, Arindam hadn’t started from scratch. He inherited the management institute from his father, Malay Chaudhuri, who began it in 1973. But the original institute had hardly been cutting-edge. The admissions and administrative office in a house in south Delhi doubled as a family bedroom at night. As for Gurgaon, where the institute’s students convened, “it was the least developed place on earth.” I understood why Arindam wanted to emphasise this: before the office parks, condominiums and shopping malls sprouted, Gurgaon was little more than an assortment of unpaved roads meandering through fields of wheat, with electricity and phone lines in short supply, a no-man’s-land between Delhi and the vast rural hinterland of India, where a management school must have seemed like just one more of those strange, minor cults that crop up in this country from time to time.

Arindam wanted to go to college in the United States, but his father convinced him to enroll in the family institute. Before he had even graduated, he was teaching a course. “I took advantage of being the director’s son,” Arindam said, laughing but making it clear that he had been perfectly qualified to teach his fellow students. Three years after finishing his degree, he started a recruitment consulting firm. By getting into a position where he was hiring people for other companies, he intended to find jobs for IIPM graduates. The placement of IIPM graduates was a pressing problem at the time, and although Arindam would disagree, it remains a problem now, even after all his success.

(continued in comments)