New Delhi, July 31 -- The confirmation of Cafe Coffee Day (CCD) founder V.G. Siddhartha's death has not just been met with disbelief and dismay around India, it has concentrated minds on an important question: Are we fair to our entrepreneurs? CCD is a big brand and Siddhartha's untimely demise reflects poorly on the prevailing business atmosphere, replete with "pressures" mentioned in a letter to the board of CCD and its employees. This document, which has widely been taken as his suicide note, referred to an acute financial crisis, an inability to buy shares back from an unnamed private equity partner, the duress that creditors had imposed, and also "harassment" by income tax authorities. That such a burden of stress could push a prominent businessman to the brink is disquieting. Condolence messages apart, the empathy his circumstances have evoked from corporate India suggests a broad anxiety over the vilification and worse that faltering firms and their promoters are often put to by an insensitive financial system. Unsurprisingly, the "harassment" brings back memories of the Rajan Pillai case of the early 1990s, when another government was in power....