35053668-Empire-of-the-Soul-Paul-William-Roberts

324
EMPIRE OF THE SOUL
novelist. He had been, I learned, and still was, the president and
managing director of Procter & Gamble India Ltd.
Gurcharan Das was not the mystery I initially thought him to
be, though. He had a Harvard degree in philosophy and politics,
and had written three plays, which had won prizes and been
performed in New York and several other major international cities.
I wondered how all this got along with business. After all, you
couldn’t call being president of an entire international division of
one of the biggest corporations on earth exactly ‘supporting your
writing habit.’
‘One balances the other,’ he said simply. ‘Together they help keep
me me.’ It was succinctly put, and he was a succinct man, formidably
intelligent, eclectically well-informed, intense, sincere – but
disconcertingly balanced, just as he’d said. He could shift the gears of
a conversation like someone going through the Alps in a Ferrari,
too, as comfortable discussing the current state of literary criticism
around the globe as he was examining the repercussions of the latest
changes in Indian foreign-investment policy.
He felt as positive about his country’s future as I did, which was
a change. Rahul, who’d recently returned from Indonesia, was
depressed by India’s lack of progress compared to what he’d seen of
Indonesian leaps into the future. Both nations, he felt, had started
out with the same handicaps. The fact that no one had ever cast a
vote against the president of Indonesia, whose family owned
virtually ninety per cent of everything worth owning in it, didn’t
shake his gloom. India should have achieved more. It was the general
feeling shared by those who, like Rahul, were capable of making a
success of their lives anywhere in the world, but had chosen to stay
in their homeland because they loved it. India is a harsh mistress.
She seems to appreciate individual sacrifice so little. Yet she has never
wanted for lovers . . .
Gurcharan Das was so much more upbeat, perhaps, because
progress was definitely being made in at least half of his professional
domain. After decades of operating in India with a forty per cent
ownership of their company, Procter & Gamble had just been
permitted by Narasimha Rao’s government to boost that stake to a
controlling fifty-one per cent. This shift in policy had foreign