Biryani and Mischief

You would always hear him before you would see him.

His booming voice, his mischievous laugh, would echo down the stairs of their building and out onto the street to greet you even as you were parking the car. And then we would follow our ears and our noses and we would run up the stairs to their apartment and bound through their always-open door to hugs and love and a big steel drum of spicy, delicious, steaming mutton biryani. And Santosh Dada was always conductor, front and center. Larger than life, at the heart of the action, bringing people together, bursting with expression, full of stories, singing for us all – just like the biryani he served us so merrily.

Santosh Gulwadi – our beloved Santosh Dada – passed away today. July 26^th, 2021. He was one of my favourite people. I want to explain why.

I remember what he and the Gulwadis did for me both as a young boy and as a young man. My family would visit India every year when we were living abroad – usually at Christmas – between 1995 and 2004. Our time in Bombay would be split between my dad’s family in the Bandra suburbs and mum’s side in Town. Bandra was home to my Ajoba and my Dadima and the pace of life was slow, sultry, almost dreamlike. The food was mostly vegetarian. You were lulled into a beautiful trance, an endless loop of afternoon naps and evening chai. The exception to this stupor was our traditional biryani night with the Gulwadis.

We would get into auto-rickshaws and buzz frantically through the streets for 30 mins till we got uptown to Vile Parle. And as we got out of the rickshaws, I would hear that unmistakable voice echoing from the Gulwadis’ 1^st floor apartment. Sometimes he would greet us on the foyer itself, because he would be made to stand outside their house to smoke, which made him seem even more charismatic and made me even more curious. He would smoke outside the door as we’d enter their house and he would pace back and forth, desperately trying to participate in the conversation through the open window.

Santosh Dada was this maverick, this dashing, talented, gregarious rascal. If he was in Star Wars, he would be Han Solo. He would always be joking, serving people food and drinks and repeating the same stories again and again. I liked listening to them anyway, because they seemed to get grander every time. The number of puran polis he and my dad ate as young men would magically increase with each retelling of “the puran poli story”. We indulged him. An evening at the Gulwadis was about indulgence.

I love the Gulwadis so dearly. Theirs is a family with the biggest of hearts. I adored Mhavu, the gentle wisdom amidst all the joyous tumult. I loved Santosh Dada for his swagger and Shital Didi for her tenderness. I loved how they would argue like children about what channel to put on or what speed to run the fan. I idolized their three kids – my impossibly cool cousins. I wanted to grow up to be just like them. Whether I was 5 or 15, I hung on their every word when Shambhavi and I would go to their place for sleepovers. There was just nowhere else like it. If our Bandra home was where we could be children for a week, the Gulwadi home was where we were treated like young adults for a day.

And it was as a young adult that I got closest to Santosh Dada. When I moved back to India from the UK in 2012, age 21, it was a very difficult time in my life. I suddenly found myself in Bombay, without many friends. Those years, between 2012 and 2013 especially, were when Santosh Dada and the Gulwadis – especially Shital Didi and Gopika – would watch over me and guide me. I would take every chance to get in an auto to go to Vile Parle, to have coffee with Santosh Dada and let him tell me about his snooker-playing days or the latest drama at the gymkhana. He would always ask me to do my accents and laugh thunderously every time I’d do a particularly offensive one. He would enter music contests at the gymkhana and we would all go and cheer for him. He had many fans.

I will always be a fan.

I left India for the US in 2015 and so I didn’t spend much time with him towards the end, in these last few years when his illness made things really difficult. I can’t imagine how difficult today must have been for my dear Gulwadis and all of Santosh Dada’s fans. I am still in shock and I dare not face the present. I do not want to be 30 years old, sitting thousands of miles away, saying goodbye to him. I want to be 13, bounding up those stairs to say hello.

Name Tag Mathematics

Are the bland, rehashed, overcooked scrambled eggs they serve at breakfast buffets a metaphor for the monotony of the American corporate conference? I’ll let you decide. 

But the answer is yes.

Do you even remember what conferences were like? Remember collecting your name tag at a rickety reception desk and getting the all-important Wi-Fi password at 8:30 a.m., in a windowless hotel basement? The $325 billion corporate events industry has been hit hard by Covid and 2020 saw essentially all conferences go virtual. Though covering conferences as a reporter was a real chore, month after month of Corona-Zoom drudgery has reminded me that I somehow actually miss them. I miss horsing down those dry scrambled eggs in the mezzanine of some characterless Hilton that looks like a hollowed-out casino, commiserating with Bob from Tallahassee about the pungency of the air at Penn Station on a July afternoon. The bumbling routine of the corporate conference punctuated the urban work-lives we’ve since forfeited – lives we had taken for granted. Let’s remember those mundane constants that Covid stole from us.

 

Up until recently, I covered the energy sector for a financial trade journal in New York City, so I ended up going to an industry event every couple of months. In my first job, as a writer for Forbes Magazine in Mumbai, I’d be invited to one every couple weeks. I went to over 50 conferences in my reporting days and the experiences across the US and India were not so different: there are the bustling subterranean convention centers, the manic event producers scrambling around making sure the seat covers have the right sponsors’ logos, the service staff that usually come from two rungs below the attendees in their respective country’s ethno-racial hierarchy, and of course the ‘Plenary, Panel, Break’ program format. Whether it’s the glitzy Association of Indian Merchant Shippers Annual Summit or the more stoic 7^th North America Power and Gas Infrastructure Finance Forum, the attendees were mostly men knee-deep in their 40s. The women and millennials in the room were mostly either event organizers or reporters like me. For some reason, you’d have to wear a suit, whether it's 38°C outside the Oberoi Hotel in South Bombay or 38°F inside the Crowne Plaza in midtown Manhattan.

I wonder what it would be like to attend as a guest – to actually be excited about going to a conference? I know a lot of business gets done at conferences since they’re the only time everyone in the industry is in one place. My friends in academia, for instance, tell me they quite enjoy traveling to these things. For me, conferences are where I had to be at my sharpest because it’s where I could talk to sources without their PR and/or corporate communications chaperones censoring my questions. They were a chance to meet executives face to face, to show them you’re a real human and that you won’t screw them over by quoting them out of context. Conferences are a gold mine of market-moving information, if you know how to work the room – how to matter-of-factly glide your way over to a Merlot’d CFO before your rival at another publication can get him a refill.

 

My conferences would usually start with collecting my name tag from someone on the conference production team. It was always nice when they would spell my name right and always funny when they would put an extra sticker on my name tag that said “PRESS”, so people knew to steer clear of me. The receptionists would wave me off quickly, eager to welcome the paying attendees who’d flown in from Topeka or Tokyo and to serenade the revered Platinum-level sponsors who had brought along a litter of junior analysts.

The opening remarks of the conference are usually from a head of a trade association saying how great things are for the industry, followed up a “fireside chat” with the highest profile CEO in the room. For events in big cities, it is important that speakers start strong and come out all guns blazing, because they know their audience can get up and leave any time they want. Everyone is listening; many are taking notes. If there’s a particularly good slide, everyone lifts up their phones to take pictures as a sacred mark of respect to the PowerPoint Gods.

10:30 a.m. is the first coffee break and it’s where the great reporters stand out from the rest. It’s that 30-minute slot between sessions where attendees are restless enough to talk to strangers—even the press. Now, I must waltz with them. You’ll never see people do mental math faster than you will at a conference coffee break. There’s a silent dance that everyone does, where they decide who to talk to. Attendees walk slowly through the crowd looking for a conversation and as soon as we make eye contact with each other, we each quickly glance down at each other’s name tags and decide whether to stop in our tracks and reach out for a handshake or keep walking. You have a split second to decide if someone else is worth your time. You have to calculate whether this is someone who can help you or not. It’s primal; it’s instinctive. I can see the decision-making process in their eyes: “Do I really want to talk to a goddamn reporter?” Many attendees look at my name tag and turn away. Sometimes I’d say hello and they’d pretend not to have heard me. The awkward air is so heavy you can drink it through a straw. You see other journalists getting ghosted in real time. It’s theater.

But rejection is a constant for journalists and if you don’t have a thick skin, you’re in the wrong business. By the time I’m five feet from someone, my algorithms are whirring away: Don’t I already have a good source at their company? Avoid. Is this lady simply another reporter? Keeping walking. Oh, this is the guy who never answers my call? Attack mode. I wonder if he’s a vendor or a spender?

You see, there are two types of people at conferences: vendors and spenders. The vendors have paid good money to be here; they want to sell their products to spenders and their brand to reporters. The spenders have paid even better money to be here and they want their logo to be the biggest on the stage and the first in the news report. The spenders hold the upper hand over the vendors in this power dynamic, but there are sales to be made and everyone knows it.

Sometimes, as a journalist, you chance upon a freshly minted Senior Vice President, eager to show off his industry insight. Delicious. But mostly, it’s a media-trained Managing Director, who is counting down the seconds till he can leave the conversation and find someone he can speak with freely. He’s looking at other people as I’m trying desperately to say something interesting. They can sense the power imbalance a mile away and it disgusts them. Once in a while, I’ll strike up a truly equal conversation with someone, who has absolutely nothing to gain from me and vice versa. You just talk because it feels normal. There’s a subtle art to knowing how to exit those conversations with grace and tact, because that’s not who your editor is waiting to hear about. The reluctant time bell rings, signaling the end of networking and the finale of the ballet, where business cards are exchanged or lies are told how about they just gave their last card to someone else. 

The first full panel discussion is next, where each speaker takes four minutes to introduce themselves before using each question as a segue into how their company is the best in the business. Sometimes you get a rogue CEO who actually says what’s on his/her mind and you can feel people’s eyes looking momentarily up from their iPads. Maybe you’re even lucky enough to see panelists disagree. Not all panels are boring, only the overwhelming majority. The volume and quality of the audience Q&A is always a good barometer for how engaged the room is. I wonder if audiences were more ‘present’ before the electronic era?

The lunch buffet line is the conference’s great leveler. Vendors and spenders fly out of the main room and line up for scalloped potatoes like hungry schoolboys. The smell of beef bourguignon quickly masks the hierarchy in the air. As a twentysomething reporter, I was generally near the bottom of the food chain but I could win the heart of a grizzled executive behind me by passing up that last piece of duck. Maybe I could even waltz my way into his lunch table and talk about sports. I think conference buffet lunch food is generally great, by the way—it’s hotels doing what they do best. It’s those giant, circular conference lunch tables I cannot stand.

The event organizers seat you ten to a table, so you can talk comfortably to your immediate neighbors for a few precious minutes before everyone is reaching over everyone else, their ugly ties dipping in each other’s clam chowders as they exchange cards. The conversation is chaos. You can sense a newcomer to the circular table is waiting eagerly to join in and you have to find a way to let them enter the discussion. I find the best strategy is to plonk myself down next to someone senior that I respect and talk about anything other than the topic of the conference. I miss the pageantry of the conference lunch—it’s fashionable to complain about food even though everyone secretly loves it.

The post-lunch panels are the graveyard shift. Reporters with full bellies are busy filing articles for their hungry editors while the real decision-makers at the event have found high tables on the sidelines to quietly hammer out term-sheets. Conference afternoons for a journalist on a deadline are literally a write-off. In the main room, eyes are mostly on phones and laptops now. There are emails to be answered. Desperate panelists do their best to provoke weary listeners. If the speakers are lucky, they’re presenting in break-out sessions in smaller rooms with industrial-sized espresso machines. If everyone in that 300-seater main room could curl up under those tables and take a nap, they’d be asleep before the panelists were mic’d up.

The 3 p.m. networking interval arrives like the Berlin Airlift. The audience surfaces, staggering out of the auditorium, gasping for caffeine. For the journalist, it’s another chance to tango with the reluctant. But if you’ve filed enough good copy for the day, you can skip the schmoozing and head straight for the hors d'oeuvres.

We’re in the home stretch. People will hang around for the final talk of the day because there’s that sweet, spender-sponsored sangria on the other side. It’s when the conference producers can finally sit down and chug a cold one. It’s when jackets and ties come off and XM Satellite Radio jazz comes on. For a reporter looking to get a scoop, it’s the golden hour. It’s when even the media-trained Managing Directors will start bad-mouthing their competitors—all off the record, of course. Sure enough at 5 o’clock, the men leave the conference hall for the day. Some go to the airport, some to their rooms but many stay to chat to the dainty blonde reporter they’ve been stealing glances at all afternoon. The group has made it through the day and there’s a sense of camaraderie. Name tags don’t matter so much. Everyone’s a vendor now.

I hope Coronavirus goes away soon so we can go back to our bland conferences, to petty complaints about delicious food, to stalking new spenders and avoiding old journalists.