\u2018The company was set up by my great-grandfather in 1952. When my father took it over in the 1980s the family was in debt. Now the group has an annual turnover of 1 billion dollars. My father\u2019s will to succeed is phenomenal. If he sets out to do something, he will get it done. If there\u2019s someone I want to become, it\u2019s him.\u2019<\/p>\n
MC speaks about the family business in the first-person plural. He has grown up absorbing business ideas and techniques, and they are a natural part of his speech.<\/p>\n
\u2018When our liquor business was at its height we controlled nineteen per cent of Indian liquor retail. At that time, the government auctioned liquor outlets to the highest bidder. Later on it introduced a lottery system to prevent monopolies. But we could still grow the business because we had so many employees. In any lottery in our region, out of one hundred entrants, eighty were our men.\u2019<\/p>\n
MC was sent to a series of expensive schools, but he was repeatedly expelled, and at the age of sixteen he dropped out for good. He went to London for a year or two to have fun: clubs, parties and everything else that a teenager with a well-stocked bank account can think of.<\/p>\n
When he came back he was put in charge of one of the family\u2019s sugar mills. But his heart was not really in it \u2013 and the real-estate boom was on. In 2001 the family set up a real-estate business and MC, twenty-one and entirely untrained, was given the task of building the largest shopping mall in northern India.<\/p>\n
\u2018When I was in England I spent a lot of time walking around malls, studying how they were made. There\u2019s no point reinventing the wheel. I know more than anyone in India about how you set up a mall, how you arrange your brands. My father had no experience in a professional context, so everything I know about the professional context I\u2019ve learned myself. I introduced computer systems into the business. I taught myself Oracle programming because the professional contractors were no good. Then I taught myself all about the latest building techniques. Centrestage Mall was built with special prefabricated steel pillars, which had never been used in Indian malls before. Recently, I taught myself finance. I read finance texts online and every time I didn\u2019t know a word I looked it up. Six months ago I didn\u2019t know anything and now I can conduct finance meetings with Pricewaterhouse.\u2019<\/p>\n
Centrestage was famous for having Delhi\u2019s most luxurious, high-tech nightclub, Elevate. It was MC\u2019s pet project, his personal party zone, with endless champagne for him and his friends \u2013 and his nightly arrival there, surrounded by bodyguards, always provided a frisson.<\/p>\n
\u2018For a time I was the man in Delhi. Loads of people wanted to be my friend. Women wanted to sleep with me. I said to my wife: if I hadn\u2019t been married, things would have been very different. A lot of people were very fake.\u2019<\/p>\n
Like many Delhi rich boys, MC was given a big wedding as a way of winding down his wild years. When he was twenty-two, he married his childhood sweetheart, SK; their reception had 6,000 guests and featured dance routines by Bollywood stars Diya Mirza and Shilpa Shetty. MC still loves parties, and, as I discover during our conversation, he becomes relaxed and witty with alcohol, but there is no doubt that he has by now grown into a fully fledged partner to his father. He\u2019s ready to shut down Elevate: he doesn\u2019t have time to attend to it any more, and he doesn\u2019t want anyone else to run it. He operates five shopping malls across India, and he has another 1,400 acres under development. And that is just the beginning. He is moving on to much bigger plans.<\/p>\n
\u2018We\u2019ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we\u2019re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.\u2019<\/p>\n
He is so matter of fact that I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers at five or ten acres a time. I can\u2019t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.<\/p>\n
\u2018Where?\u2019 I ask.<\/p>\n
\u2018Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, This is it, this is what we\u2019ve been looking for, let\u2019s go for it. We\u2019re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That\u2019s where it\u2019s at. You\u2019re talking about numbers that can\u2019t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we\u2019re still ahead of the curve. I\u2019m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that\u2019s what I\u2019ve decided. I\u2019m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It\u2019s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.\u2019<\/p>\n
MC tells me how he has one hundred farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.<\/p>\n
\u2018Africans can\u2019t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they\u2019re used to farming big plots. They\u2019re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile, I\u2019ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans so when the sugar mills start up they\u2019ll be ready.\u2019<\/p>\n
Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there\u2019s something imperial about the way he says Africans. I\u2019m stunned. I tell him so.<\/p>\n
\u2018Thank you,\u2019 he says.<\/p>\n
\u2018What is on that land right now?\u2019 I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.<\/p>\n
\u2018Nothing.\u2019<\/p>\n
MC is excited to be talking about this. His spirits seem to be entirely unaffected by the recession that currently dominates the headlines. He orders another beer, though we have exceeded the time he allotted me. All of a sudden, I find him immensely charismatic. I can see why he makes things happen: he has made me believe, as he must have made others believe, that he can do anything. I ask him how he learned to think like this.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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