There's a reason you don't see a photograph of the subject of this piece: he wouldn't allow himself to be shot. Not that a photograph would tell anything. Sixty one-year-old R.N. Kaul is a little on the plump side, completely unassuming, and so softspoken that this correspondent almost got a crick in his neck craning to hear the man's words. He's also more comfortable discussing books-one passion, and he is currently reading John Lee Anderson's Che Guevera: A Revolutionary Life-and music (Kundan Lal Saigal is a favourite), than the cases he is working on. ''You know I am bound by an oath of secrecy,'' he shrugs.

For this is the man who is investigating how the promoters of some companies have defrauded banks and financial institutions by siphoning off money released for various projects into their own pockets. Little known Mr Kaul, and his company, R.N. Kaul & Associates, made the headlines when they discovered the exact route used by the Rais of the Usha Group to divert part of a Rs 1,363.93 crore loan from IFCI, ostensibly to fund a steel project, to other group companies.

His former colleagues in Central Bureau of Investigation speak highly of the man who retired as a joint director and now heads the Multi Disciplinary Monitoring Agency created to probe the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi. ''Kaul was a first-rate officer,'' says S.K. Dutta, a former CBI director. For the record, the low-profile Kaul has investigated the Jain Hawala case, the Bofors case, the Bombay blasts, and the Urea scam. The work he is doing now, then, is a logical extension and Kaul says so himself. ''Investigating financial frauds is the only thing I know and the only thing I did in my 35 years in the CBI.'' Once a snoop...

-Ashish Gupta

GODREJ APPLIANCES
Turning The Heat On
Godrej Appliances is turning around, one product line at a time.

Godrej Appliances: Cool!

Godrej appliances is back in the reckoning after nearly a decade-long snooze through the 90s, when it had a strategic tie-up with General Electric. Last year, its newest refrigerator Pentacool helped push refrigerator sales by 25 per cent-although the segment declined by 10 per cent-and gave it a 21 per cent share in the refrigerator market, making it No. 2 along with Electrolux and right behind Whirlpool (28 per cent).

Now, gal is pushing its other white goods like air-conditioners and washing machines. Last year, washing machines sales were up 45 per cent, doubling marketshare to 8 per cent. Its share in air-conditioners is just 5 per cent, but the company plans to leverage its expanded distribution network (9,500 outlets compared to 8,000 last year) to increase sales. Says Jamshyd N. Godrej, Chairman and Managing Director of the company: ''In the recent past, we focused on refrigerators to stage a comeback and having done so we are now in the process of undertaking a similar exercise for washing machines and ACs.''

Simultaneously, gal is focusing on its servicing business, which grew some 30 per cent last year. It is even willing to service competitor brands, although that's a tough territory to invade. Questions Pradip Tognata, VP (Sales & Marketing), LG Electronics: ''If they are servicing other brands, where are they getting the replacement components from?'' Good question, but one that wouldn't need answering if gal's topline stays north-bound.

-Moinak Mitra

REPORTER'S DIARY
Wake Of The Flood...
... or three Delhi dotcoms that survived the great bust.

Indiamart.com's Dinesh Aggarwal: Surviving the crash

Alliterative appeal apart, studying Delhi's dotcom detritus can be an enlightening experience. This is just a reporter's informed (Ha!) opinion, but at the peak of the hype cycle it was India's capital city that hosted the dotcoms with the most harebrained business models. www start-ups in Chennai and Bangalore went the tech way, most of those that sprouted in Mumbai did what the city's movers do, leverage arbitrage, but it was Delhi's dotcoms that explored the highs of irrational exuberance. One city dotcom delhigossip.com, tried to build community around gossip-mongers and make money from advertising.

The volatile mix of dotcom hubris, and Delhi's proclivity for ostentation and its get-rich-quick culture resulted in flashy cars and flashier offices. In 1999, there existed around 25,000 registered dotcoms in the country, propelled by investments in the range of Rs 500-700 crore from generous angels. By 2000, the numbers had gone only up, with investments shooting up to Rs 2,200 crore. Then the bottom fell out of the market.

Not for everyone; Dinesh Aggarwal's Indiamart.com survived (as did many others). His P2P (path to profitability, a term popular with dotcommers): patience and progenitors. ''My traditional business background helped,'' says the 32-year-old CEO. As did the fact that Indiamart underwent numerous changes before settling on its current business model: from a pure html-based online catalogue of small and medium-sized Indian companies seeking export opportunities, to a b2b site facilitating auctions, tenders, and electronic trade offers. Today, sitting in his new office-it cost Rs 2.5 crore in noida (a Delhi-satellite)-Aggarwal, who employs around 170 people, claims Indiamart was never a dotcom in the conventional sense of the term. Business wasn't bad in 2001-02: revenues of Rs 4.18 crore and earnings of Rs 9.5 lakh.

NOIDA, and Okhla, are popular destinations for dotcoms that are still around. Aggarwal moved because he wanted more space, but most others do from financial considerations. Online brokerage Indiabulls is the only dotcom still around in Delhi's Central Business District, Connaught Place; two years ago, there were around a dozen such. Only, Indiabulls Chief Marketing Officer Gagan Banga is not too keen on being stuck with the d-word. ''We have online as well as off-line models,'' he hedges. ''The split is 40:60.'' CEO Sameer Gehlaut has moved to Mumbai to focus on the offline bit. Indiabulls returned profits of Rs 5.22 crore in the first quarter of 2002-03 and Banga says the company will make an ipo if the market looks up or ''declare a dividend for our VCs''. Technology, Indiabulls reckoned in 2000, was the differentiator; today, the company thinks it is customer relationship.

Unlike Banga, jobsite Naukri.com CEO Sanjeev Bikchandani has no qualms about classification. ''Yes, we are a dotcom, period.'' Bikchandani is on a high: in Q1, 2002-03, Naukri returned profits of Rs 30 lakh on sales of Rs 1.9 crore, and was ranked India's top e-recruitment agency (marketshare: 48 per cent) by research firm NFO-MBL. ''Twenty years hence, we will still be around,'' vows Bikchandani. That it probably will: there will always be companies needing people, and people needing jobs.

Elsewhere in the world, Amazon.com, the bellwether of dotcom stocks, has emerged the best performing stock in the nasdaq 100. That should bring some hope to India's dotcom survivors.

-Praveen S. Thampi