Sparring Siblings

“Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way…” so read the opening lines of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina explaining why unhappy families make for better plots than their happier counterparts. Nothing sells more than a feud between famous people, its appeal only rivalled by a family spat gone public.

So, on our 18th anniversary, at a time when magazines continue to jostle for mind space in the battle against their much-younger cousins churning out short-form content, we chose feuds as ammunition for our cover story. These are battles fought within well-known Indian business families.

The paparazzi and tabloids have given you all the pulp of these famous feuds, but there is still juice in them for intellectuals looking to analyse how these spats could have been prevented. This is where we fire our salvo in this edition. We look at the armoury of family businesses to see how peace could have prevailed, and empires could have been stopped from being divided.

In our research we spoke to experts and victims of feuds and interesting details emerged on family businesses; the family constitution, the mediator who is forever behind the corporate veil, seldom recognised for her role as a peacemaker through generations.

As we went down the annals of family businesses the world over, we observed waves of modernity trying to mellow the rigidity of patriarchy, but there is still a long way to go before we reap the benefits of gender equality. The story of the women in multi-generational family businesses is not linear; some are peacemakers and some the cause of a public feud. What prompted them to choose which role, what were their compulsions?

These answers would throw up some insights as to why the father-son binary of family businesses across the world has mostly failed to survive the third generation. But that is a study for another edition.

Till then happy reading.