A breathless range of people will have a favourite Prakash Tandon story to tell, going from doormen and his chauffeur to at least a brace of Prime Ministers, such is the measure of the man who left us last week. Strangely, for a person of his eminence in so many public fields, with the number of trails he blazed, the stories would be of Prakash Tandon, the man — not about the first Indian chairman of Hindustan Lever (what does that mean, anyway?) or Chairman, State Trading Corporation (none bestrode the gulf between private and public sectors with his flourish and success), or chairman of the Punjab National Bank. There’s more. He was Director of the National Council of Applied Economic Research, head of numerous commissions, notably the one on Working Capital Norms, and, almost as a side effect of his chemistry, helped to conceive and found the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, and wrote a unique trilogy of contemporary social history, Punjabi Century, After Punjab and Beyond Punjab. To top this sort of life performance, the human being needs to have been of substantial scale. ‘‘PLT’’ was. He shone his own shoes and washed his own linen, certainly on tour. I remember the shoes glaring up at me in the Hindustan Lever lift, PLT going up to the fifth floor and I to Lintas on the sixth. On the way up, there was always some gimlet query about the business. The questions, we were all convinced, were PLT’s way of relaxing during the working day, rather as a Roman Emperor did when thumbing down a gladiator’s efforts in the arena. He insisted on lunching in the cafeteria, with the rest of us. As he came in at the door, a chill would quiver across the room. On which table was the Chairman going to bestow his presence and his questions, may be on the comparative cost of Sunlight Soap packed in wood boxes as against cardboard? Yet here was a man of great warmth and grace, with a courtesy rooted in an earlier world. It went with ceaseless effort to care for his company’s young resources and to make recent entrants feel valued. He would have liked, who knows, to express his feelings more warmly. But there was a shyness here which he never quite got over, an echo of a core of austerity that balanced his undoubted Punjabi-ness. He entered and left Hindustan Lever House pointedly without the attache cases of office, or escort of messengers. It was a simplicity he took with him to the STC. His room in the rambling STC Bhavan had no work table, no files. There were only two comfortable sofas, with raw silk covers, a coffee table, chattai on the floor. On one of the sofas sat the Chairman, with a telephone by him which he often answered himself, without waiting for two PAs and a secretary to pick up before him. Brahm Vasudeva, once a young Area Sales Manager, Assam (now chairman of an established firm of household appliances), has his own tale to tell of PLT and some lessons he learned. ‘‘On a trip, I was a few steps behind him, with a high rock wall on our left and some unruly elephants on our right. PLT may have hesitated for a second. Then he walked calmly down the path past the tuskers. I had no option but to follow’’. Says Vasudeva. ‘‘He taught me courage, the pursuit of excellence and to see things in perspective.’’ My friend, the late Ramesh Khanna, once a management trainee supervised by Prakash Tandon, reinforced the second point. He had to make changes in a draft 24 times before it was approved. There were other things PLT took from HLL to STC: a daily (it may have been weekly) red-and-black statement. ‘‘I know my profits at any given time and how we are controlling costs.’’ It was an approach that shocked our premier trading corporation into making money. It was never crass. It was a sense of responsibility to others beyond the raw silk and chattai, an integrity about how resources were to be used. Perhaps his greatest impact was on the government-industry links of his time. There was much wariness, if not distrust, at the interface. Prakash Tandon arrived and was trusted at once because his mindset and loyalties were never in question, even as chairman of a major transnational. He dealt with government on terms of parity and subscribed to the same austere way of life that was rife in government circles of the time (in the bargain, displeasing his own managers who considered themselves meanly recompensed). He was a practitioner of corporate social responsibility before the term was coined and certainly nurtured a flowering of the concept. That, and his championing of management as a profession, are contributions for which Prakash Tandon will be honoured in public life. But it may be in the private world of countless individuals for whom he set an example that the lamp of remembrance will burn brightest. (The author worked in Lintas India and Hindustan Lever between 1955 and 1980, the last 10 years of which he was head of Lintas)
