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WORK PAD

Where style meets comfort

Photo: S. Thanthoni

Elegant space Jayshree Venkatraman in her office

Hands extended, Jayshree Venkatraman, Director, TAFE (PSD), greets me outside her office.

We walk into a quiet room where style meets comfort — muted opulence updates old-world charm with modern convenience. Jayshree might have glided through the glass ceiling in a family business, but it takes nothing away from her brilliant academic record, her capability or hard work. After her MBA with distinction at IMI Delhi, she helped Amco Batteries enhance its turnover in three years. She has won a string of Business Excellence Awards and is current President of MMA and is planning a paediatric hospital.

When she returned to Chennai after her seven-year internship at Bangalore to run the fledgling power source factory, she imagined walking into a “fancy” office.

What she got was a barren one — a shell of walls and empty rooms. “You do it up to your taste,” her industrialist dad told her — a clever strategy. Jayshree, with her “classy” taste, wouldn’t have approved of an official-looking office cabin.

The cabin is a personalised showcase of who she is and how she combines her roles as a wife (“Murali and I grew up together with only a three-month difference in age”), a mom (“I leave at 5 to be with my nine-year-old”), a hardcore entrepreneur in a manufacturing business (“It’s a three-factory turnover”) and a home-maker (“I’ve done all my interiors, I love to cook!”). She’s mounted a 3x5 blue Meenakari panel — a wedding gift — on the wall, matched the upholstery on the rosewood furniture to it, added a large potted plant and Sujatha’s semi-abstract for earth tints (“We’re in the agri business!”) and trained a cook to serve oil-free Indian snacks to her foreign visitors.

The niche lighting highlights her interests. The cast iron sculpture, “the first we picked up”, symbolises man-woman partnership; her books — “make me what I am today” — are stacked in a stand-alone shelf. Between the two is the Distinguished Alumnus Award in shining silver, the citation next to it. A carved Ganesha and dolphins sit in a glassed alcove to the left.

“Look at the windows”, she says. The double glass keeps the noise out on the NH Road side and covers the partition between her cabin and the boardroom inside. “Do you see the fine, specially woven fabric in the sandwiched glass? It’s see-through, but ensures privacy.” Among the mementoes on the window sill on the lobby side is a photographer’s delight — her picture with A. P. J. Abdul Kalam taken when she released ‘A Little Dream’.

The semi-circle of objects on her table includes gold lacquered papier-mâché antique jewellery boxes, one of them swan shaped. They hold her e-mails and her visiting cards. The writing pad is embossed leather. A Jaipur handcrafted box is the pen holder. Next to a small photo of SaiBaba is a gift from a Chinese partner — a mounted castle in a glass case. It’s a paper-free office.

“I have organised my business,” she says. “I take quick decisions.” After 14 years, she feels the space crunch, but “we’re now systems oriented.” Jayshree is not shy of her success. “I do business aggressively, not irrationally,” she says, adding that she enjoys being where she is — whether in or out of office.

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