Invisible Machines, Visible Absurdities

Consider two small but telling news items that appeared last week on Prime Minister Modi’s Birthday, both slipping into what I like to call the “News Shadow Region.” That’s the part of the newspaper where editors quietly park stories that are true but awkward—“minimum disclosure, maximum gains.”

First, Vantara—a massive animal rescue and rehabilitation centre in Gujarat spearheaded by Anant Ambani. Officially, it’s an act of compassion by the Reliance Foundation. Unofficially, it looks like a billionaire’s private zoo masquerading as Noah’s Ark. Tigers, cheetahs, giraffes, zebras, orangutans—even a mountain gorilla. They’ve got a better collection than most African reserves. Some of these animals were “rescued” from canned hunting farms.

Wildlife enthusiasts will tell you a simple, grim fact: for every exotic animal that survives transport, two others die enroute. Conservation? More like shopping with casualties.

The real miracle here isn’t the ark, though. It’s the judiciary. In just 18 days—yes, faster than you can binge two seasons of your favourite Amazon Prime series—the Supreme Court cleared every objection to Vantara. Commission formed, report filed, judgment delivered. For ordinary Indians, justice takes decades. For the powerful, it takes a fortnight. And the Court even declared that it would “not entertain” further complaints. Imagine a doctor telling you: “You’re healthy, don’t come back—even if symptoms persist.” Justice, apparently, has now joined the era of prepaid services, with priority delivery for friends of power.

The second story was even more revealing. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting ordered the takedown of 138 YouTube videos and 83 Instagram posts critical of Adani. The justification? A lower court had ruled the content was “unverified” and “defamatory.” Minor detail: the journalists in question weren’t even given a hearing. Imagine being declared guilty without entering the courtroom. Kafka would have blushed.

So now we have a new model of crisis management: don’t counter the criticism, just delete it. Why fight in the marketplace of ideas when you can bulldoze the marketplace itself? It’s the digital version of sweeping dirt under the carpet—except the carpet belongs to all of us

Both could be considered gifts from the Government to Chaebols, family run businesses which have been allegedly supporting the current ruling dispensation right from the beginning.

As Gurcharan Das once noted, “India grows at night while the government sleeps.” But what happens when the government doesn’t sleep? It watches, censors, clears, and certifies at lightning speed—provided the petitioner is a friend of power. For the rest, the queue is endless.

A decade ago, Hindustan Unilever’s, announced its purpose as “Doing Well by Doing Good.” R. Gopalakrishnan, in the Business Standard, reminded us of how this mantra spawned strategies like “purpose-driven brand & Integrated Sustainable Strategies.” Cynics laughed at it as marketing fluff.

“Purpose” is a mantra for contemporary management gurus. Making a Tangible Positive Impact, across product lines and business practices is the new philosophy.

Austria-based Living Machine Institute (https://www.livingmachine.org/) is not your average management consultancy with an army of PowerPoint consultants and coffee-guzzling analysts. It tries to do something rather unfashionable: to make visible the invisible drivers of organizational endurance—those messy, human, unpredictable things that can’t be plotted on an Excel sheet. The Institute exists to help leaders restore alignment between the “living” elements of their organizations (people, culture, meaning) and the “machine” elements (structures, processes, finances).

The Institute’s core idea is deceptively simple. Every organization is a hybrid: part machine (structures, processes, financials), part living organism (people, culture, meaning). When the machine side dominates, companies become efficient but soulless. When the living side runs unchecked, chaos reigns. The trick, they argue, is balance.

Sounds like common sense, doesn’t it? But then, in business—as in politics—common sense is scarcer than clean air in Delhi.

At the heart of their philosophy lies the “70% Zone.” Roughly 30% of enterprise value shows up in conventional metrics: profits, market share, EBITDA. The other 70% hides in softer things like mindset, culture, purpose, trust, creativity, and the unspoken assumptions that make-or-break companies. You know, the things MBAs scoff at until their company collapses.

The hypothesis is simple: successful leaders don’t just tweak balance sheets; they nurture belief systems. They manage the machine without killing the organism.

An uncle of mine used to say in Punjabi: “Sarkar kool lakh vallia dee takat honidee hai.” Roughly translated: a government has the power of a hundred thousand godmen. Which is to say, it can perform miracles—like making inconvenient truths vanish faster than a bottle of Scotch at a Punjabi wedding.

Yes, we do have a proud legacy of corporate philanthropy. The Tatas, Birlas, Sir Gangaram—all were practicing social responsibility long before CSR became a legal mandate. India is, after all, the only country to make CSR compulsory. But how meaningful can responsibility be when responsibility itself is redefined by the courts or the censor’s red pen?

George Orwell warned us: in times of deceit, telling the truth becomes revolutionary. In today’s India, even uploading a video is an act of rebellion. And rebellions, as history has taught us, rarely end well for the powerless.

So here we are. In Austria, an institute earnestly preaches the invisible drivers of organizational endurance. In India, the invisible hand of the State works overtime—deleting, clearing, suppressing. Corporates may dream of “doing well by doing good.” But the government’s mantra is simpler: “do good by doing as told.” 

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