Here's what life in Baba Ramdev's company, Patanjali, looks like

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Here's what life in Baba Ramdev's company, Patanjali, looks like
In a single year, Ramdev's company has leapfrogged giants such as ITC, Nestle, Godrej, Dabur and Tata. So Patanjali is certainly a corporate high performer.
ET CONTRIBUTORS | July 31, 2017, 09:14 IST

Here's what life in Baba Ramdev's company, Patanjali, looks like
Priyanka Pathak-Narain

Walk into any high-powered corporation in India, and the picture is the same. You will see a glass-and-chrome office filled mostly with men in suits and ties or, at their most casual, shirts and dark trousers; meetings are usually held around a glossy table, with a screen for a PowerPoint presentation or a white board in the background; professional HR teams manage salary raises, hires and exits.

But what is life like in a company that’s run by a sadhu?

Patanjali Ayurved Limited is India’s fastest growing FMCG company. In May 2017, the company announced that it had doubled revenues in just a year to over Rs 10,000 crore, becoming India’s second largest consumer goods company, second only to Hindustan Unilever. In a single year, Baba Ramdev’s company has leapfrogged past giant companies such as ITC, Nestlé, Godrej, Dabur and Tata. So Patanjali is certainly a corporate high performer.

Like any other big FMCG company, Patanjali may have an impressive food park, stretching across acres and acres of land, with state-of-the art machinery imported from around the world, and the factory floor may be governed by intricately detailed standard operating procedures with workers in hair nets and gloves. Yet, I discovered, while working on my book on Ramdev, some fascinating facts that showed a very different culture of work, one that’s completely unique in Indian corporate life.

No Mean Feet

The first — feet-touching. When the saffron dhoti- and shawl-clad Ramdev enters the complex, workers abandon their posts, rush out and queue up to touch his feet. The same treatment is given to Acharya Balkrishna, Ramdev’s short and stocky, white-robed deputy who notionally owns 96% of Patanjali’s shares, and Ram Bharat, Ramdev’s tall, strapping and mustachioed brother who manages the company’s monies.

While it is ordinary for people to touch the feet of a sanyasi like Ramdev as a mark of respect, it certainly isn’t the regular practice in an ashram to revere a brahmachari like Balkrishna or a householder like Ram Bharat.

Little over a year ago, I witnessed Balkrishna walking into his offices on the first floor of Patanjali’s ayurveda hospital in Haridwar. The hospital staff, administrative officers and guards all rushed to greet him. They touched his feet and he tapped their backs in blessing, occasionally saying, “Khush raho”, be happy.

Not only do employees touch the feet of the leadership team but meetings aren’t the standard round-table affairs. “During meetings, Ramdev sits on a high seat. Everyone else — from the CEO to factory workers — is expected to sit on the floor, below him,” says SK Patra, Patanjali’s CEO between 2011 and 2014. As a result, Patra says, there is a gurubhai culture at Patanjali, a sense of brotherhood — and equality — as disciples of the same teacher.

For the IIT and IIM-educated Patra, the man who laid the foundations for the company’s meteoric rise, and who had a proven track record working with blue-chip firms owned by the Birlas and the Bangurs, this was a source of some tension: it meant that his subordinates viewed him as a gurubhai rather than as their boss. This was one of the reasons why Patra says he eventually left the company in 2014.

Reverence for the guru is just one facet of work life at Patanjali Ayurved. The other is the missionary zeal with which the company is run. More than the man at the helm of a nearly $4 billion commercial enterprise, Ramdev is a man on a swadeshi mission. And so more than a conservative corporate CEO, Ramdev sounds like a colourful crusader.

Will any other CEO say something like, “Colgate ka gate bhi band hoga, Pantene ka to pant gila hone wala hai, Unilever ka lever bhi baithega aur Nestlé ki chidiya bhi udegi (The gate of Colgate will shut, Pantene will wet its pants, the lever of Unilever will break down, and the little Nestlé bird will fly away),” as Ramdev said about his competition in 2016? Or, even that, “Patanjali has become a great brand, I hear. But you’ve seen nothing yet. There are two things that I have to do. Make all foreign companies do sirshasana (headstand) within five years, and put Mother India on the throne of the world. Kitna mazza aayega (What fun it’ll be)”.

While Ramdev may be an entertaining