Book review: Roller coaster: an affair with banking

Citation

Paul, N. and Gudadinni, M. (2024), "Book review: Roller coaster: an affair with banking", IIM Ranchi Journal of Management Studies, Vol. 3 No. 2, pp. 177-180. https://doi.org/10.1108/IRJMS-07-2024-188

The book “Roller Coaster: An Affair with Banking” is an effort to look at the typical bankers' behavior and the leadership styles they adopt while they head these public and private banks. The author closely observed these bankers for many years and has lucidly alluded to many instances in the book. Despite the non-finance and non-economics background, the well-known author is well connected to India’s banking industry. The book accounts for various encounters with banking stalwarts in a comic yet informative manner.

The book starts with the author’s struggle to open a salary account. Even the chairman of a top public bank confessed that his own account in his bank is pending issuance with a passbook, and it took him two months to get the checkbook. The author visited Mumbai after cracking a rigorous entrance test for the Times of India reporter job. On being asked why he wanted to be a journalist, the author started to recite Grammerian’s funeral poem to convey his thought process – not at all pleased, one of the panelists asked to explain clearly. The author answered with contemporary logic and his inner voice, which fetched him the job. In spite of the fact that his stipend was less than the salary he used to draw in Kolkata, the author resigned and headed toward Mumbai. The book lucidly explains his initial struggle to find a place to stay in Mumbai, coping with Mumbai’s local language and Mumbai English, the access to subsidized food at the office, micromanagement of expenditures and enjoying the World Cup of 1996 on their new television set. The author wrote book reviews to boost his monthly income. All his Sundays went to attending lunches and dinners thrown at him by his married colleagues, and he developed much of his network in these meetings.

The author writes about his meeting with legendary cartoonist R K Laxman and enumerates one of the incidents in which he made R K Laxman laugh. While R K Laxman wanted him to bring the book “Jane Fonda” from the library, the author turned up with the text “Giant Panda.” Due to the author’s father’s meeting with a near-fatal accident, the author was transferred to the office in his home city, Kolkata. He joined The Economic Times (ET) business journal during the fag end of 1988. As the author was not formally trained in business and economics, he was drawn to keep an eye on prepositions and the language in the ET. He wrote about his colleagues and the specialty they carried in their profession. The author was transferred to Ahmedabad, where the ET launched a new edition. He found it fulfilling except for his inability to find non-vegetarian food in Gujarat, as he is a fond Bengali foodie. He immediately switched to the Business Standard newspaper in Mumbai after meeting its head editor upon his offer. His stint in Mumbai involved colleagues from diverse backgrounds like politicians, industrialists, economists and bankers. He wrote a brief writeup about the longest-serving Chief Minister (CM) of Bengal, Jyoti Basu and Uttar Pradesh CM, Kalyan Singh. He wrote about many political developments in West Bengal in short paragraphs, along with union-dominated industry affairs. His connection with Mr Tarakeshwar Chakraborty, Secretary of the All India Bank Employee’s Association, led the way to his network in the area of banking.

The book is a collected story about bankers' behavior. As a professional journalist, the author closely observed bankers for years and wrote about them in detail. During those days, the information flow from the apex bank to their subsidiaries was through floppy discs, which carried highly confidential data. Any breach in dealing with the data was punishable. The author received one such disc from his close contact and published in the newspaper that the loss to Indian banks was Rs 1336.40 crore attributed to the willful defaulters. The author realized that as a journalist, one has to be quick in delivering financial and economic news so that the common Indian may get a sense of it. Any delay may lead to futile efforts, and the news may not reach the target audience. The tricks of the trade involved talking to many bankers on many occasions. The author opined that he would have done better if he had a degree in psychology rather than English literature. The author’s persuasive writing cited many analogies varying from cricket to fishing, cactus liver, cats and dogs. He emphasizes that a person will instantly connect with another one if their interests and vibes match. He wittingly used these fundamental human network connotations to build a network and extract news from corporates and bankers for his writeups and stories.

Bankers are educated and have a scientific and analytical mindset. They are expected to make decisions driven by logic and data. But to the author’s surprise, he found that a banker used to keep a loan file in front of an idol and wait for some cues from the goddess. Based on the lines, he would either sanction or reject the loan application. Another banker was such a pet lover that he introduced a cat to the guests as his daughter-in-law. His son had found the cat on a university campus abroad. A banker even revealed some secrets to the author during random phone conversations. Later, he used to behave as if he had not spilled the beans. A CEO of a new private bank used to sleepwalk and used to sleep during the interviews. A corporate finance professional had at least 60 pairs of shoes in his three-bedroom flat in a posh residential area. He would change his shoes every day and sometimes every few hours. He believed that a man should be judged only by his footwear.

The author had numerous chances to interview many international banking stalwarts. The public sector bankers worked as feudal lords, whereas the private sector bankers were considered demigods. The author highlights several examples to justify the same. One public sector bank chairman vented his anger by suspending his general manager, who went to the airport to receive him. One transferred a senior executive just because he and his family were stranded in the guest house lift. Another banker wanted to buy cardigans, so the officials brought some samples to choose from, and he asked for the whole lot to pack for him. These bankers often wanted special branded items to be gifted to them. They wanted post-retirement benefits but needed more time for the performance-linked bonus. They continued to behave as if they were bosses with their juniors, even after retirement. These bankers always used to stay in touch with bureaucrats so that they could help the bankers bend the rules when required. The bankers misunderstood the term “story” that a journalist refers to. The author created such “stories” from scratch by pulling conversations with his vast network. He used to call CEOs or board members of any organization and throw some baseless stimuli to extract vital information to be carefully knitted to make the next day’s headline. Media houses have the acumen to find hints from any ordinary man’s conversations and pull them to the point for the next day’s “story.”

Corruption is widely spread in the banking industry since it deals with money as its primary raw material. It is challenging to recognize where the loop is. The author takes one of Chanakya’s quotes that it is difficult to point out when a revenue official is taking bribes or performing his duty. This is akin to the difficulty in detecting when a fish is drinking water. The corrupt uses many code words to communicate, like Chinese cuisine, Punjabi food and Gujarati thali, indicating the form and amount of bribe. The NBFCs are used to provide loans through corrupt practices leading to huge NPAs. Many bank officials from top to bottom are involved in corruption, causing considerable losses to the exchequer.

The author narrated the individual characteristics of many private bank officials. He elaborated on the traits and qualities that made them stalwarts and pioneers of invention and innovations in the industry. The author explains their attitudes, belief systems, working style, background influence, driving nature, focus on earning fame and stewardship orientation. Many found the tandem freestyle working comfortable, whereas a few dragged down the bank assets to zero with their reckless attitude. These leaders' uncanny sense and risk-taking abilities shape their companies' actions. Influential leaders are continuously learning, avid readers and partnering and collaborating with fintech companies to provide the best service for their customers. The author invariably notices and mentions the “seven habits of highly effective people.” Earlier experience and evidence show that every minute behavior of the bankers will affect bank performance. In the end, the author explains how boring the banking business is, as too much risk is unrewarding and may lead to the closure of the bank.

The author starts to write about RBI governors, prominent bankers and money controllers. He begins with the history of RBI and its steering hands from post-independence. He emphasizes and stresses the developments and role RBI played during liberalization in 1991. The economy of India could have been smoother and more relaxed than today in the past. There is constant pressure on the apex bank from successive governments to suppress its autonomy and make it dance as per the politicians' demands, whims and fancies. The RBI governor’s role is like walking on a tightrope as he/she has to balance international institutions' needs to tune the economy and increase dividend sharing. The author narrated about the recruitment and selection process, appointments and extension of the RBI governor’s post in detail. There were multiple instances where the institution was made for dancing as per the wish of some stakeholders. The RBI’s fight for independence is a continuous struggle, and how the RBI was freed from unionization and bringing all employees under one umbrella was complex. The book highlights many governors and their backgrounds, working style and coping mechanisms with pressure from the government lobby and market forces. In fact, in the past, the IAS lobby used to dominate the governor position for a post-retirement benefit.

The book gives an account of the pledge of gold in the IMF for running the economy and successive board meetings of RBI to decide the repo rate and the MPC Committee’s decision to increase and decrease the base points. Though the governor was appointed by the government and possibly from a government experience background, it was still difficult for every one of them, including lateral hiring from world-class institutions, economists and academic stalwarts, to run it. The rupee falling against the dollar is, till today, an issue where the stability of the same depends on many international market-driven forces. However, the RBI is blamed for the same development. The author writes about many governors' efforts from behavioral and their network in the government and its influence. He compares many governors' working styles with one another and gives numerous examples of why one was right in one wrong way and the other vice versa when it comes to operating and decision-making. Governors also used to work as apex administration heads of the central bank, in which their opinions and decisions prevailed over any other bureaucrats within the bank. They have an eye for detail in every development that used to happen since it used to affect workforce strength and efficiency. All governors in the past tried their level best to educate employees and made the RBI one of the best places to work with learning facilitation pieces of training and continuous improvements. Fighting with the finance ministry is an inevitable battle that every governor must handle regardless of their past affiliation and personal effervescence. Every board meeting leads to speculation. One of the previous governors used to explain the inflation rate using barber cutting his hair jokes, comparing it with over the ears so that he could express his helplessness and justify his most possible efforts to keep it in control. Another governor became famous in the academia and world of economists by predicting the 2008 crisis and explaining inflation to a pensioner using dosa price increase and availability over the years, which popularly became famous as dosanomics.

The book ends with excerpts from a banker’s diary who dealt with demonetization with a small branch in Mumbai. He elaborated on the service conditions and challenges he and his team faced during those fifty days. He used to sleep in the bank when it became late to reach home by missing local trains in Mumbai. The book also refers to the parliamentary committees constituted to make bankers aware of their duties to the people. The parliament office bearers' responsibility is to keep an eye on how the bank functions and performs to its principle values and interests of the commoner. From the minutes of the pre-meeting of bank officials of a district about to deal with an upcoming committee visit, it was evident from the briefings and discussions of the meeting described how bank officials treat committee members and the unwritten, unofficial rules and hospitality they must keep in mind to make it successful or nondiscriminative to the members. The book also highlights many anecdotal and actual incidents of various branches across the country regarding the behavior of familiar customers of the banks and their rapport building with officials. Bank people are treated as demigods in rural places as they facilitate and liaise between the government and the commoner. It also gives the account of various hilarious incidents that happened in the past, which has gotten the public’s attention and stands for the testament that even bank officials are also human first. They do behave the same as well.