For those growing up in the 1990s and early 2000s, Café Coffee Day (CCD) was about affordable coffee dates, hanging out with close college friends, or finding a place to wait for the bus while travelling intercity. In the ’90s, its ₹20 cappuccino and the long conversations over its latte showed Indian masses what a coffee café culture was truly about.
Nostalgia was thus the driving factor for Rukmini Rao to choose this subject as the topic of her first book. “I remember going to CCD as a college student. It came up when we were in high school. The prices were very pocket-friendly. What it offered was more a place to catch up with friends where irrespective of the purchase price of coffee you could sit for hours without anyone asking you to leave,” she recalls.
From visiting CCD as a college student to covering the brand as a corporate reporter, she had witnessed it all. The book Coffee King (Pan Macmillan India) by Rao and Prosenjit Datta is a chronicle of the ambition, success and loss in the life of the late entrepreneur VG Siddhartha, the man behind the iconic enterprise, and how his sudden death changed the fate of his business empire. While the media focus has shifted to how his wife, Malavika Hegde, has safeguarded the business after his sudden death, the book explores much more than regular reportage.
Datta says they aimed to ensure that theirs would be a nuanced picture, capturing “shades of grey”, and the subtle complexities of his life without reducing his legacy to a simple narrative of praise or condemnation, so as not to write a book portraying him as either a “hero or a villain”.
Blast from the past
Between 2000-2012, the emergence of rival café retail chains in India, such as Barista and Starbucks, challenged CCD’s monopoly. And then came the shocker. In the last week of July 2019, the body of Café Coffee Day founder VG Siddhartha was recovered from the Nethravathi River. Siddhartha had been missing since the night of July 29, and it was suspected that he had jumped into the river.
In Coffee King, Rao and Datta open the first chapter with the missing-person complaint filed by the CCD owner’s driver, Basavaraj Patil, the last person to see him alive. The book captures the narratives of Siddhartha’s family members, employees and friends, why he took such a step remains open-ended.
In his last note, the book quotes Siddhartha saying: “I have failed as an entrepreneur. This is my sincere submission.” While many blamed harassment by the Income Tax department, he may have also taken to heart the debt trap that followed CDEL’s disappointing 2015 IPO. “Siddhartha promised a lot but failed to uphold the agreement. This became a pattern in his business operations over the years,” says the book, quoting Naresh Malhotra, the first CEO of CCD.
A man of honour
Datta focussed on how Siddhartha’s commercial playbook evolved over the years, shifting from an era of visionary, prosperous ventures to a precarious cycle of securing new capital merely to service existing debt. His eventual downfall was further accelerated by aggressive overexpansion, particularly across logistics and real estate ventures, paired with an over-reliance on continuous banking lines that abruptly collapsed once HDFC Bank declined to extend further credit. Ultimately, the overwhelming burden of sustaining optics alongside spiralling financial liabilities drove him toward desperate choices, leaving him with a deep sense of unfulfillment regarding his legacy when compared with his industry peers.
Two chapters of the book, ‘The Debt Trap’ and ‘Mindtree: The Last Effort’ captured how Siddhartha burnt down even his last resort by 2018-19 and sold his entire stake in Mindtree to infrastructure giant Larsen & Toubro (L&T) as he was grappling with acute liquidity crunches and soaring debt pressure. The authors draw an analogy with other failed businesses and what Siddhartha chose not to do. Unlike other businessmen with much debt and not enough cash flow who chose to flee India for a good life overseas, or those who allowed their lenders to declare their companies bankrupt after the Insolvency and Bankruptcy Code (IBC) was enacted in 2016, “Siddhartha did neither, perhaps because he was too proud of his family's reputation and not thick-skinned enough to see it through,” states the book.
Datta’s research demanded a rigorous examination of the entrepreneur’s long-term financial liabilities and strategic business decisions over the years. However, the most challenging part, according to him, was to get the details of the ransom paid by Siddhartha to Veerappan. Following the abduction of actor Dr Rajkumar in 2000, the Karnataka state administration led by Chief Minister SM Krishna—Siddhartha's father-in-law—allegedly sanctioned payment to secure his release. Former DGP C Dinakar claimed that the CCD supremo personally facilitated the transaction.
The personal angle
Being a resident of Bengaluru. Rao, on her part, had witnessed the different phases of the brand’s growth. She undertook comprehensive boots-on-the-ground reporting across Chikmagalur and its neighbouring belts, tapping into the ecosystem of coffee growers and corporate leaders bound by the region’s coffee network. Knowing the local language also helped her interact easily with Siddhartha’s staff and family members to probe facets of Siddhartha’s personality.
“I lived the brand growing up in Bangalore. I think from the lived experience and now from a journalist's lens, we knew we could do justice to the subject," says Rao. She mentions Siddhartha’s mother, Vasanthi G Hegde, being extremely courteous and that she had shared important details of Siddhartha’s childhood and how his family bond shaped his thinking and his business.
“Growing up, Siddhartha didn’t have any close friends. Even as an adult, when he had many people who considered him a friend, he found it difficult to open up and confide in anyone,” the book quotes his mother saying. This also explains how people around Siddhartha had no clue about what he was going through before he decided to take his own life.