INSIDE STORY

ON THE EVENING OF 9 APRIL, a select group of Delhi’s dapper elite gathered at the ballroom of the Hyatt Regency. After about a half hour’s socialising, aided by an assortment of teas and starters, Chiki Sarkar, the co-founder of Juggernaut Books, introduced the evening’s speakers.

“Whenever we now think of Rajat Gupta,” she said, “we think of a simple question—did he or didn’t he?”

Juggernaut was releasing Mind Without Fear, Gupta’s memoir, which charts his rise to becoming the first Indian-origin managing director of McKinsey, and his subsequent felony conviction in a high-profile insider-trading scandal that shook business circles in 2012. The conviction resulted in a two-year prison sentence, which Gupta completed in 2016. After his release, Gupta sought to overturn his conviction, but in January this year, the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit—one of the United States’ 13 appellate courts, which includes judicial districts in New York, Connecticut and Vermont—ruled against him. His memoir, and its accompanying media campaign, seemed to be a final attempt at public rehabilitation.

Until his conviction, though, Gupta’s story was the quintessential template of corporate success that Indian parents envision for their children before packing them off to an engineering college and, later, a business school. He was born to a middle-class family in Calcutta, in 1948. His father, Ashwini Kumar Gupta, was a journalist involved in the freedom struggle. The family soon moved to Delhi, where Ashwini helped start the Delhi edition of the Hindustan Standard, which was, incidentally, owned by Sarkar’s family, as part of their Ananda Bazar Patrika Group.

Gupta was orphaned at the age of 19, when he was still a student at the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. He began caring for his siblings with the help of an aunt who moved into their home, which he visited every weekend. Gupta ran the household on a strict budget while carrying on with his active campus life—he was a member of the dramatics club and head of the student government. In his final year, he applied to business schools while simultaneously sitting for campus placements, bagging and then rejecting a coveted job at what was then the Indian Tobacco Company—now ITC Limited—for Harvard Business School.

“One of the things that memoirs do is that they show you the man behind the CV,” Sarkar said. Mind Without Fear, she added, “tells you the story of a shy, diffident young student who goes to Harvard Business School, and when he first goes, he finds that he’s lagging—he’d always been a very brilliant student—because he doesn’t speak up as much as the other Americans do.”

Gupta would overcome this and other tribulations to land another enviable position right out of Harvard—that of a consultant at McKinsey and Company, reverently known in the management world as “The Firm.” There, he recalls in the book, Gupta proved himself multiple times over the next twenty years, eventually securing election as the managing director in 1994.

As applause for Gupta subsided at the launch, Sarkar introduced his interviewer for the evening: Madhu Trehan, the founding editor of India Today and a co-founder of the news website Newslaundry. Trehan warned the audience that despite the empathy she had for a man who had been through so much, it was her mandate as a journalist to ask tough questions. She quoted an old friend of Gupta’s who had commented that ever since Gupta finished his third term as managing director, in 2003, and returned to being a senior partner, his “sense of having lost sway and influence was palpable.”

Gupta clarified that it was he who had instituted term limits for the position, believing that every leadership position benefits from change and a rotation of responsibilities. “So I wasn’t hankering for the loss,” he said. “I could’ve become CEO of a number of different organisations, but that was not my objective. My objective was to put the skills I’d learnt, the leadership skills I’d developed and the network I’d developed to actually work for the good of society.”

During this period, Gupta co-founded the Indian School of Business; the American India Foundation, with the former US president Bill Clinton; the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria; and the Public Health Foundation of India. Around the same time, he became friends with Raj Rajaratnam, a Sri Lankan Tamil and fellow immigrant to the United States. This friendship would lead to his