Book Review
Anonymous. (2011) Scammed - Confessions of a Confused Accountant. Bangalore. Grey Oak Publishers. Pages 175. Price: Rs 175/-
Auditing
and business consulting cannot be combined just as oil and water do not
mix. The reasons for this are simple. Auditing is retrospection. It
deals with hard, cold facts. It advises against adventurism and
advocates conservation. Caution is its watch word. On the other hand business consulting is prospective in nature. Optimism is its mantra. It functions in uncertainty. Its principle is gung-ho adventurism. It favours exploration of new ideas and new markets. ‘The only safe ship is the ship in a port’, business consultants wryly quote! Therefore the twain cannot meet. The split and demise of Arthur Andersen LLP
is attributed to the firm’s overweening ambition to ride the dichotomy
between auditing and business consulting at the same time. Eager to
compete with its (own) business consulting arm, Andersen Worldwide in revenue generation, Arthur Andersen compromised on accounting standards, as a result of which Enron, the Texas-based energy firm sank. Along with it the original accounting firm Arthur Andersen broke up and its regional fragments merged with Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu, Ernst & Young, KPMG, three of the ‘Big Five’ Accounting firms (which included Arthur Andersen) and Grant Thornton. In order to ward off the stigma attached to the name Andersen, Andersen Worldwide is now renamed Accenture.
However
auditing firms jockeying into business consulting is not new. James
Oscar McKinsey a Professor of Accounting at the Chicago University
founded McKinsey & Company in 1926. McKinsey was hired to turn around Marshall Field & Co
a company manufacturing and marketing readymade garments that ran into
the doldrums during the great depression of the 1930s. Many decades
before words like ‘downsizing’ were heard, McKinsey proposed that Marshall Field & Co do exactly that to turn the company around. Unable to implement his radical
suggestions the company brought him in as CEO and charged him with
implementing them. McKinsey was initially successful but because of his
overbearing nature, made potential enemies. As he ventured into areas he
knew nothing about and his mistakes caught up with him, the pressures
of work finally got him and at the age of 47 McKinsey died of pneumonia.
If
we delve into the history of businesses and accounting firms, we are
likely to come up with many more such cases. Do we learn any lessons
from these stories? The answer is ‘no’ going by the experience of Satyam Computer Services Ltd. (Satyam) and its auditors PwC – well, the Indian ‘member firm’ of PricewaterhouseCoopers International Limited (PwCIL) anyway. The two were charged with fudging accounts for several years and a partner of PwC along with the Founder Chairman of Satyam
and some others of the two firms were arrested on charges of criminal
conspiracy to defraud the public. The charge-sheet ran into 55000
pages. Did the story of Satyam and PwC inspire Anonymous, the author of Scammed to
write the novel? It possibly did. The setting of the novel is Hyderabad
and Visakhapatnam. (The British, who could not pronounce Visakhapatnam, made
it Vizagpatam and then shortened it to Vizag. For several years now the
state has reverted to its original Telugu pronunciation but the author
seems to have not noticed it. He insists on calling it Vizag). Its
characters ‘speak with a thick South Indian accent’! (What else would you have them do?)
There was a time when literary critics in the West dismissed fiction by authors like Arthur Hailey and Irving Wallace as pulp fiction, meaning really
not serious literature. This of course leads to the question whether
literature should really be as sombre as a Russian novel to be
considered serious literature. While authors like Somerset Maugham were hailed by critics in their life time, others like Jane Austen achieved this distinction only with passage of time. Although
Indians have been writing in English for a long time it was only in the
last few decades that they have really made it big on the international
scene. At the same time the Indian approach to learning, writing and
speaking English has been dramatically changing. There was a time when
people who could speak and write grammatically and idiomatically correct
English were in a minority. The purists lament that as the numbers of
English speaking and writing people multiplied, there has been a
dilution of standards. There is less exactitude with regard to grammar
and syntax. Fastidious adherence to the ‘English pure’ gave way to
colloquial Indianisms. This is because the curriculum of English
teaching in the country has also been changing. Instead of studying
Shakespearean plays, Milton’s poetry and Johnsonese,
students are taught, what has come to be known as business
communications in English - writing letters, advertisements and notices
etc.
In the literary arena, it all started (perhaps) with Shobha De who introduced Hinglish in her writings. She was not taken seriously (or kindly) by critics at first. But as her novels acquired popularity – from those readers who
did not have a stomach for more serious authors like Nirad Chaudary, V. S. Naipaul or Salman Rushidie – her publishers recognised her as a saleable author. If one can say De marked a turning point in Indo-Anglican literature, she opened up the market for more authors who catered to the needs of a certain type of burgeoning English-speaking class.
The explosion of communications through the IT, ITES and off-shoring of jobs truly Indianised
English and there is no looking back. Employees of the Business Process
Outsourcing Centres (BPOs, popularly known as ‘Call Centres’) have
created their own patois - different of course from what they were
expected to speak with their customers outside. In short, the expansion
and proliferation of the English-speaking elite (?) has resulted in a ‘dumbing down’ of standards. Shobha De did not have serious competition for maybe a decade and a half till Chetan Bhagat
debuted. He found a winning formula by precisely identifying his target
audience. If the (Indian) English-literature consuming market is
largely populated by the information technology guys (and girls) why not
directly address them? This he did and was an instant success.
Scammed is in the Chetan Bhagat mould. Its setting is the accounting / business management industry. Its protagonist Hitesh Patel
was entrusted by his accounting firm to audit a motor car company in
Visakhapatnam, where he espies a lot of white-collar crime and siphoning
of funds in it. While making a report of it to the principal board
members he finds himself making some useful suggestions for the
expansion of business. To an outside observer his formula of forward
integration may not be very appealing. For example if a motor car
company wishes to diversify into car-hiring business is it necessary
that it should confine itself to cars manufactured by the parent
company, unless it was for captive consumption? Be that as it may, the
director was so impressed with the idea that he offers him a job at five
times his salary to implement it. As fate catapults Hitesh into
the big league of five figure salaries, five star hotels and of course
beautiful girls he also willy-nilly gets sucked into a vortex of
organisational politics, political intrigues and financial
wheeling-dealings and finally financial offences. The novelist seeks to
paint Hitesh as a self-righteous manager with only a weakness for
a few girls. How else could he plant those steamy scenes so essential
in a formula novel?
In Indish, the
adjective ‘homely’ has a cultural connotation, quite different from
what the word means in general English, and qualifies a woman as dutiful, home-loving and not coquettish. Therefore high-paid eligible bachelors look for ‘homely girls’ in matrimonial advertisements. In this story too after Hitesh had had his flings with attractive but unfaithful girls he finds succour in his ‘homely’ personal assistant Payal,
whom he had ignored for long. As she dotes on him as a mother-hen he
finally finds his soul-mate. She lends him a shoulder to cry on when he
is down and generally offers him solace and succour. The characters are
too linear and colourless but the book may be a good travel companion in
a short journey. The novel could have done with some editing and
proofing - its Indish notwithstanding. But the last two chapters seem to have been written by a more professional hand.
