Post # 038
Reluctant, very reluctant...
In 2015, Dilip Shanghvi briefly toppled Mukesh Ambani to become the richest Indian on the Forbes list. But he is not a household name as some of his contemporaries are. Outside a small circle of insiders, even to whom he is an enigma, hardly anybody knows him. He likes it that way. He works hard to keep it that way.
Business journalist, Soma Das, wanted to know him. But there was no satisfactory content available about the kind of person that he was. So she decided to write the book she wanted to read. “The inspiration for this book didn’t pop into my head suddenly one day. It sneaked in, nagged me and haunted me till I yielded,” she says.
That's when she encountered the legendary reluctance of Dilip Sanghavi. He apparently told her, "Why are you working so hard for me? Why don't you write about somebody more interesting, like Sunil Mittal? My life is not so interesting."
This, from a man who started with INR 10000, borrowed from his father, in 1982, to become the largest pharma company in India, the fifth largest in the world, the richest self-made man in India and a Padma Shri.
That's how reluctant he was. So Soma Das aptly named his biography - The reluctant billionaire. I have not read it. But I have read excerpts from it.
1. Dilip Shanghvi is known for his frugal nature and simple living. He loved to go to simple joints like Ram Ashray, a South Indian tiffin center in Matunga, on Sundays. One day, while he was in one such small eatery, some one walked up to him and said, "You know, you look a lot like Dilip Shanghvi."
2. He used to learn by what he called the Ekalavya-Dronacharya method - learn in-absentia. He says, he would read up and study the methods of successful people, like Dhirubhai Ambani or U.N.Mehta, founder of Torrent Group and implement learnings from their lives.
In 2014, Dilip Shanghvi invested INR 1400 crores of his personal wealth in a struggling company called Suzlon. Suzlon is still struggling. It narrowly escaped bankruptcy earlier this year. Will Suzlon be Dilip Shangavi's Waterloo or will it turn around one day? I hope...just hope...
I will sign-off with a quote from Mr. Shanghvi that I simply loved - "Just because a company is not doing well doesn't mean that it is not a good company."
