BENGALURU: From a minute-to-minute schedule to an empty calendar. From the hustle and bustle of the boardroom to solitary confinement. On Monday evening, Rajat Gupta, the former managing director of management consultancy firm McKinsey & Company, shared some moments of the ‘agony and torture’ he went through after being convicted for insider trading in 2012.
In those moments, Gupta reflected and in a way regretted, not the trial he had been through, but that of not testifying in court during his trial. Which is why he decided to write Mind Without Fear, a book which he feels gives him a chance to share his side of the story. “I wanted to testify, but my lawyers didn’t prepare me for it, and I decided against it last minute. In the book, I’ve tried to give people the feeling of what I went through,” he said, adding he wouldn’t be the same person had he not gone through the experience.
“ I’ve made my days in prison sound like a piece of cake, but it was far from that. Solitary confinement was the hardest. I was lodged in a small cell with a toilet, with everything around me in steel. And with the mattress worn out, it was almost like sleeping on steel. While one would assume solitary confinement cells are the quietest, they turned out to be the noisiest with people lodged there banging on the walls and screaming. Every once in a while I would be brought out handcuffed to the conference room for a call with my lawyers,” he said, adding since that was his only outlet, he requested his lawyers to call him every two or three days, during which he spend an hour or more on the phone with them. “At those points, the prison officer was required to stand outside and wait. He once mentioned that I was among the few who never asked him when I would be let off and I replied, ‘Why should I?’, after which I was transferred to the high-security area.” Two books that he had ‘insisted’ on taking along – the Bhagavad Gita and a book on pranayama by BKS Iyengar – kept him company.
Organised by SpeakIn, a consortium of industry leaders, the gathering included alumni from the Indian School of Business, which was set up by Gupta. Veering away from the usual format of a discussion followed by an audience interaction, Gupta preferred a Q&A session, during which he shared details from his personal life, including how he didn’t initially get a job with McKinsey during campus placements, but a recommendation by his professor to someone known at the New York office, eventually got him the job. He went on to spend 37 years and even became the first foreign-born managing director of the firm. “Now, I’m looking at working on social causes, with the maternity and child health department in Gujarat, and working on the criminal justice system int the US and spending more time on myself,” he said.