Trouble finds unicorn

With the traditional brick-and-mortar retail outlets expected to have their worst-ever year in the US, and with a Credit Suisse research report released this April predicting that 8,600 stores could close down in America in 2017 (the previous worst being 6,163 in the year of the meltdown of 2008), this thriller by R V Raman, which is set in the e-commerce world of Bengaluru, is topical. While e-commerce is the villain responsible for this year’s anticipated loss of 147 million-square-feet of American retail space, the whodunnit in Raman’s fictional crime-thriller is revealed at the end of the book.

In Saboteur, it’s left to the young motorbike-borne Inspector Dhruvi Kishore of the Bengaluru Crime Branch to find the villain who doesn’t shy away from murder in the relentless pursuit of pelf. The inspector arrives on the scene when an executive working for a private equity investor, and involved in a due-diligence exercise of India’s sixth-largest online retailer, MyMagicHat, disappears amidst indications of an unexpected cash- crunch, followed by a massive data theft. And all this just when the Bengaluru-based e-retailer is in the final stages of wrapping up its eighth round of funding.

It is up to Inspector Dhruvi Kishore to find out who is behind it all, while zipping around Bengaluru on her Royal Enfield Thunderbird. Is it the business competition, or is it a personal vendetta? Remember Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestseller The Godfather, where those who initiate the inter-mafia gang violence keep maintaining that it is just business, even while those targeted are convinced that everything is personal? Or does it have something to do with cutthroat e-commerce competition based on the credo of ‘Greed is Good’, as articulated by the omnivorous takeover tycoon Gordon Gekko in the 1987 Hollywood release Wall Street? (Australia’s former prime minister Kevin Rudd even attributed the 2008 financial crisis to ‘the children of Gordon Gekko’.)

What make Saboteur so fascinatingly readable are the insights it offers into the world of e-commerce, which, in real life, is concentrated to a large extent in and around India’s Silicon Plateau of Bengaluru. The corporate consultant-turned-thriller writer Raman combines fact with fiction to spin a compulsively readable yarn. You could talk in terms of the Raman effect, with apologies to the legendary Sir C V, after whom a suburb in Bengaluru is named. Writer R V Raman, who teaches business strategy at IIM Trichy, gets his fundas (fundamentals) right.
Saboteur, like his first two thrillers, is well researched. In Fraudster, an Indian banking executive is murdered a day after she deposes before a commission investigating a banking scam, a doyen of corporate India then falls to his death from a south Mumbai flat, and the high-security server room of a multinational accounting firm is hacked. In Insider, a hotshot CEO is accused of insider trading, while a software engineer disappears in the Baltic region, and a stockbroker is murdered in a bar.

In Saboteur, Raman doesn’t need foreign locales to grab the attention of the reader. In keeping with the desired contemporary manufacturing ethos, it’s a Make-in-India thriller, set in the bewildering world of e-commerce where valuations keep going up simultaneously with rapidly escalating losses, until each unicorn (meaning a start-up with a valuation of over a billion dollars) is confronted at some stage with the seemingly irreconcilable challenge of maintaining a frenetically rapid sales growth, even while resorting to drastic cost-cutting.

Throw in a massive data theft and a murder just when the unicorn is in the climactic stage of wrapping up a fresh round of funding, and you have an explosive situation that can only be defused if Inspector Kishore nabs the criminals in time. Today’s crimebuster needs not just the intellectual tenacity of a Sherlock Holmes or the little grey cells of a Hercule Poirot, but an understanding of data analytics.

In the wake of last November’s demonetisation in India, data-mining and analytic software have, according to the latest media reports, been used to track the money trails of an estimated 18 lakh individuals suspected of depositing more money into their accounts than explained by their income. The quantum of deposits to be flagged is estimated at a whopping 4.5 lakh-crore rupees. Which does not include the fake Indian currency being manufactured in neighbouring nations for funding cross-border terrorism and extremist attacks.

Robert Kanigel’s 1991 biography of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the mathematical genius who died young, is titled The Man Who Knew Infinity. With the presumptive loss in India’s 2G and other scams estimated by CAG reports as running into lakh-crores of rupees, the masterminds behind such institutionalised white-collar crime could perhaps be dubbed as ‘The Men Who Swiped Infinity, or Tried To’, with apologies to Kanigel. And if art imitates life, Raman will have enough material to pen not just four but more thrillers based on corporate crime.