The cost of unfinished ambition

An unsentimental account of entrepreneurial adversity

- SRINATH SRIDHARAN

ON THE EVENING of July 29, 2019, VG Siddhartha left a note in his car and stepped off a bridge into the swollen waters of the Netravati river near Mangaluru.

The act was devastating, and deeply unsettling. It marked the end of a life that had come to symbolise Indian entrepreneurial possibility.

Siddhartha was not merely the founder of Café Coffee Day. He was the architect of a consumer habit, a cultivator of aspiration, and a man whose journey from a Karnataka coffee estate to boardrooms and political anterooms embodied a particular entrepreneurial promise. For those familiar with firsthand anecdotes, most of them generous in their praise of the his persona, the suddenness of his death and the corporate disclosures that followed arrived as a profound shock, difficult to reconcile with the persona they thought they knew.

That burden is taken up with seriousness and restraint in CoffeeKing by experienced journalists Rukmini Rao and Prosenjit Datta. The book is an unofficial but exhaustive investigation into the meteoric rise and tragic collapse of a visionary entrepreneur, and into the institutional environment that both enabled and exhausted him.

The authors begin where they must, with death, but they do not linger there. Instead, the narrative patiently reconstructs the life that preceded that moment. Siddhartha emerges first as a cautious trader and planter, shaped by land, by cycles, and by the discipline of commodities. With an initial capital of roughly ₹30,000, he built India’s largest coffee curing operation before imagining something far more ambitious.