Chapter 1: Arjun is Stressed

“Shriya! Where is that file?”

“Which file, Sir?”

“The personnel reports.”

“I gave them to you earlier, Sir.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did, Sir.”

“Don’t jerk me around, girl, I am in no mood...”

Shriya walked into his office, looked around for a second and picked out the files he wanted from a side table where he had placed an empty coffee mug on top of them. She picked up them and handed them to him wordlessly.

“Oh, sorry.”

“Arjun Sir, you need to go home.” Shriya said “You need rest.”

“Yes, yes, I am going. In a minute.” Arjun Rampal said “I just need to ... where are his flight details ... I had them here a minute ago.”

“No, you didn’t,” Shriya said “I emailed them to you. Check your phone.”

“Oh. Ok.”

He bustled around for another few minutes but then he finally left the office. It was well past 8 PM.

Shriya Saran breathed a sigh of relief as the lift doors closed behind him. Arjun Rampal was Chief Executive Officer of Event Genius, an event management company in New Delhi that organised big events like fashion shows, award shows, corporate dinners, celebrity weddings, club openings and many others. They did not come cheap but they did good work. At 500-odd employees it was not the biggest event management company in India but it was one of the biggest in Delhi.

Being Arjun’s personal secretary was not an easy job but in the current market any job was a good job. Shriya was only able to do it because she was single and could work the late hours required in the job. To be fair, Arjun worked the same long hours and expected his staff to work as hard as he did. Several of the managers in the company had been divorced and many other relationships had been broken thanks to this aggressive pace of work. Arjun was oblivious to all of this. He cared about work and only about work.

Even then things were not usually this chaotic as they had been in the last few weeks. Despite the hard working employees, rich clients and a lot of contracts on books, Event Genius was not doing very well. For the fourth year running the balance sheet had been in the red. In this condition when an American company showed interest in them it did not take long for a merger to be agreed. Douglas Media International was a big conglomerate of many company which owned TV channels, radio stations, ad agencies and many other communications businesses.

Douglas Media did not have a presence in India but they were hiring talent from India from time to time as well as using locations there. When Event Genius came to their attention it seemed like a good opportunity to find a foothold in the Indian market which was huge and attractive. To the EG board it looked like a good opportunity to save the company from going under. They responded favourably to the DMI offer.

Even though it was being called a merger, in fact, DMI was purchasing EG and would have complete control of it. In such an atmosphere, rumours fly freely and EG was no exception. There were all kinds of rumours going around, everything from the fear that DMI was going to sell the assets of EG and close the company, to a more hopeful one that DMI will keep the whole staff as it is and invest in its future.

Arjun knew that the reality would be somewhere in the middle. The previous year, after the fourth consecutive year of loss the EG CEO had resigned and moved off to another company. Since then Arjun had been acting CEO. He was the point man on the merger and all information flowed through him. He knew that things were still not decided and anything could happen.

The latest development was that DMI had informed EG of their intention to send an officer to assess the feasibility of the merger. This officer who would be a high-ranking executive of the DMI empire, would look at the EG business in detail and make a recommendation to go ahead with the merger or drop the idea. Two days ago Arjun had got an email that the officer appointed by Douglas for this task was called Shekhar Mansingh who was a CEO of one of the DMI companies. The same email contained information about his flight. He was arriving on Friday afternoon and EG was requested to make arrangements for his pick up and stay.

Before the email, Arjun had been anxious about the merger. The email had pushed him into full-on panic mode. Since then, he had been driving Shriya crazy with non-stop barrage of tasks. He had asked her ten times if she had arranged for Shekhar’s stay. She had told him ten times that she had booked him a suite in a five-star hotel. Thursday had been spent in similar kind of hectic activity and finally Shriya was glad that it was done. Arjun was going to pick Shekhar up from the airport himself the next day and take him to his hotel.