Cafe Coffee Day: Empire of froth

“If you were a teenager in Bengaluru in the late 1990s, CCD was your go-to adda. All the cool kids hung out at CCD,” writes journalist Rukmini Rao in her introduction to the book Coffee King:

- CHINTAN GIRISH MODI

The Swift Rise and Sudden Death of Café Coffee Day Founder VG Siddhartha, which she has coauthored with Delhi-based journalist and editor Prosenjit Datta. Ms Rao, who lives in the so-called Silicon Valley of India, and has reported extensively on businesses in

Karnataka, speaks for numerous teenagers of her generation, scattered across India’s major urban centres.

No wonder then that Siddhartha’s suicide in 2019 sent shockwaves throughout the country instead of affecting only his family, employees, business associates, and fellow entrepreneurs. As Bidisha Nagaraj, whom Siddhartha hired as the president of marketing, reveals in the book, “He wanted to build a brand where people felt comfortable in their chappals.” However, he did not want it to be “considered downmarket” because he wanted to attract “coffee connoisseurs”.

Being able to achieve these seemingly opposite goals must have been a tall order but Siddhartha had his way. The fact that Ms Rao and Mr Datta are able to bring out what the protagonist of their book was good at is worthy of applause. They approach Siddhartha as a whole person, with complexities and inconsistencies rather than only as a businessman buried under the weight of debt or as a man who used his political connections to amass wealth and bypass scrutiny.