“I am sorry, sir, but you are not allowed in the tea room,” the head chai-wallah said to me politely but firmly. “It is OUR job to bring you cups of tea when you request them.”
I was learning that, in India, self-service was a social crime and servitude was still alive and well. I had wandered into this tiny room from my desk a few steps away in my quest for an alternative to the thick, sugary tea I had been served, reminiscent of the disgusting, syrupy ‘Camp Coffee’ my mother always drank in the 1960’s. In the ‘tea room’ was only one big aluminium machine on which there was a single large red button. Press it holding your cup underneath and it delivered ready-sugared, ready-milked tea. No options. Henry Ford would have been proud. Admonished, I skulked back to my desk, visions dancing in my head of unavailable herbal teas and a former existence in which I was allowed to make my own beverages.
My desk was on the edge of an open-plan space occupied by ‘Channel [V]’, a music video station whose ratings were failing to compete with ‘MTV Asia’. It was not hard to see why. Peeking over my desk divider I would observe the young, educated, urban team’s enthusiasm for American and European rock music which, for India’s largely rural audience, probably sounded as if it came from another solar system. At one nearby desk, a hip young man spent most of his day quietly strumming an acoustic guitar as if he were Dylan (the rabbit). This wing of the top floor of ‘Star TV’s building in Mumbai was as laid back as I imagined the Hunter Thompson-period ‘Rolling Stone’ magazine office to have been.
Why was I there? The team creating India’s first commercial FM radio network was so nascent that we had no office space of our own as yet and had to be squeezed into other channels’ unused corners. On the opposite side of my work station usually sat my young colleague, Sandeep Kapur. He was absent today sorting out paperwork that would prove he was not dead. This required him to purchase classified advertisements in several newspapers stating that he was, in fact, very much alive. After the stated period during which he hoped no objections would be lodged, he could then apply to the government for a ‘Life Certificate’, necessary for transactions such as a mortgage. In India it was insufficient to BE alive; you required a piece of paper to prove it.
At the end of every morning, the tiffin-wallahs arrived to deliver hot homemade lunches in circular metal lunchboxes to male workers at their desks. Each box was colour-coded, numbered and inscribed with symbols to designate a particular desk on a specific floor of our office building in the Andheri district. All had been collected from homes and conveyed long distances by bicycle, train and car within the previous few hours. Those of us unlucky enough not to have wives at home, or to be one of the organisation’s few female staff, could buy subsidised cooked lunches in the building’s ground floor canteen, at its busiest on Friday when the weekly Chinese fare was sufficiently admired to persuade men to forgo their wives’ home cooking.
Today had been designated a special day because the several hundred staff working in the building were to be addressed by the Great Leader via a live television satellite link. At the appointed time, I pulled up a chair alongside the hip Channel [V] dudes in a semi-circle around one of the many television sets affixed high on the corridor walls of every floor. There was an air of anticipation because we had been promised/warned that a major corporate announcement was about to be made. Reorganisation? Closures? Would a pink-slipped Dylan have to find another gig where he could continue killing his workmates softly with his songs?
The satellite connection flickered and we could see a fixed camera focused on a young man sat behind an ordinary office desk in Hong Kong. It was the very moment he started talking inanimately to the camera that the event started to become somewhat surreal. This man was chairman and chief executive of a huge media conglomerate broadcasting multiple television channels by satellite across most of Asia. He apparently had important developments to share with his workforce of thousands. So why did he have the air of a wayward son forced by his father to smile for the annual family group Christmas photo? Why was he oozing the reluctance of a boy ordered to attend his stepmother’s birthday bash and to bring a suitably expensive present that had not been manufactured in China?
I could not supress a snigger. My young Indian colleagues turned and stared at me as if it were heretical not to show the utmost respect to our ultimate boss. I realised then that they probably knew next to nothing about the twenty-eight-year-old James Murdoch who was addressing us or how he had been appointed to this job. His track record hinted at his posting to the furthest reaches of the Murdoch galaxy. Aged fifteen, daddy Rupert had given him an internship on his Sydney newspaper, only to find him photographed by a competitor asleep on a sofa at a press conference. Later on, how disappointing it must have been to buy your son’s education at Harvard to study film and history, only for him to drop out in order to launch a rap music company … which later you have to bail out.
Murdoch’s Star TV operation based in Hong Kong had been losing US$200m a year by 2000 so, naturally, it was decided to send a boy to do a man-sized turnaround job. What was the son’s new strategy to stem these losses? We learned from the television address that Murdoch Junior had come up with the amazing idea of changing the business’ name from ‘Star TV’ to … ‘Star’. I kid you not. This was apparently necessary because ‘TV’ was an outdated, fuddy duddy business while the ‘internet’ was the medium of the future, despite it having already existed for almost two decades. So it required us all to wave goodbye to the ‘TV’ brand and say hello to ‘….’.
This sounded remarkably like a rehash of Murdoch Junior’s lobbying of Pops three years earlier with his strategy that the internet was where it was at, resulting in News Corporation having submitted a $450m bid for online startup ‘Pointcast’. I had been an enthusiastic early adopter in 1996 of its application which downloaded news stories using ‘push technology’ onto a computer about topics and from leading global newspapers personalised by each user. Working months on end in Russian isolation, I would spend evenings redialling hundreds of times until my laptop’s modem connected to a landline good enough to receive the latest news stories to devour. The phrase ‘never look a Murdoch horse in the mouth’ must have eluded the Pointcast board who stupidly rejected Junior’s vastly inflated offer. Two years later, it sold the business for a meagre $7m to a different company that shut the news service after one further year of operation. Pops had been miraculously saved from a half-billion sinkhole dug by Junior on that occasion.
Quite why Junior’s ongoing affair with the internet demanded us to interrupt our work schedule for half-an-hour I had no idea, but we watched until the screens went blank again and then walked away … totally underwhelmed. I returned to my desk and found that fairies had magic-ed a hardback notebook with the new ‘Star’ logo onto every desk in the building. The change made absolutely no difference to my work. We were planning to launch our radio network with the brand ‘Star FM’ (though this plan failed once we found a competitor had already bagged the name). When I left the building that evening, I had to avoid a crew with a crane who were busy swapping the huge illuminated logo over the front door to one with the new name. Apart from losing the ‘TV’, the logo still looked much the same to me.
Less than three years after having banished Junior to Hong Kong, Pops called him back to manage a different part of his empire in Britain, claiming that his son had executed a hugely successful turnaround strategy during his posting to Asia. One Australian newspaper ran this story in 2003 under the headline ‘James Murdoch didn't shine at Star’.
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