Driven , livre ebook

Jagdish Khattar with Suveen Sinha

DRIVEN
Memoirs of a Civil Servant Turned Entrepreneur
Contents
Dedication
1. Dera Ismail Khan
2. Basti
3. Chamoli
4. Noida, London, Calcutta
5. Lucknow
6. Udyog Bhawan
7. High Court
8. Gurgaon
9. Material Man
10. The Strike
11. Loss and Gain
12. New Horizons
13. Stock Market
14. The Suzuki Way
15. Carnation
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright Page
To Ammi and Babaji, Whose guidance is never far whenever I need it.
1
Dera Ismail Khan
TWENTY-FIVE DAYS AFTER WE returned, father died. It was 2007 and I had taken him on a journey to Dera Ismail Khan, across the border in the North-West Frontier Province. This trip also brought on a deluge of sepia-toned childhood memories, which had been hidden away in the recesses of my mind over the decades. It was a different sort of homecoming for him. And it could not have come a day too soon.
Babaji (that s what I called father) had stayed back while the rest of the family moved during the Partition of 1947-my maternal grandmother, mother, three uncles, sister and I found ourselves packed like sardines in a crowded train. He chose to confine himself to the sprawling house we called Sarai in Dera Ismail Khan. It had enough space to accommodate an office, and a bevy of buffaloes, cows and cars in its courtyard. We were among the most prominent families in the area; my grandfather, a big landlord, bore the title of Rai Bahadur. He executed many civil contracts for supplies to the army on the Afghan border and also played the role of an unofficial kingmaker in provincial politics. We owned Khattar Electric Co., the local electricity generation and distribution firm, which relied heavily on a bunch of diesel generators. My mother came from a family of Chawlas in Bannu, a town 100 km from Dera Ismail Khan. The Chawlas were a big name in banking; they had a branch in Dehradun which later merged with a government-owned bank.
My grandfather s passing made babaji the head of the joint family at the age of sixteen and catapulted him into the circle of the local elite. He had a mentor in Meher Chand Khanna, who went on to become the minister of rehabilitation in India after the Partition (a market in New Delhi s Lodhi Colony area is named after him). In fact, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru selected him for this assignment as the task of rehabilitating the refugees from Pakistan was a gigantic one. In Khanna he found a refugee with ministerial experience in the North-West Frontier Province government. Later, he was also made minister of works and housing. In helping my father, Khanna was perhaps paying off old debts, since he had been a prot g of my grandfather. He used to be a minister in the provincial government, representing my grandfather s party.
I could not make head or tail of why we had to leave home and move, or why babaji could not accompany us. I understood much later that there were practical considerations involved. When the terrible population shift began after the announcement of the Partition, the district magistrate and superintendent of police came to see babaji. We are friends, Shyam, they said. We meet every week socially. But you can t leave. That s the order from Peshawar [the capital of the province]. Let the family go. If you go, what happens to the electric supply?
There was also the matter of supplying foodgrain and other stuff to the army at the Afghan border. So babaji could not leave until someone could take his place and take charge. There was a spate of orders. One would say he could leave Pakistan, only to be struck down by another saying he could not. He finally managed to escape in a small aeroplane taking advantage of some friendly local officers and a time lag between the approval and cancellation orders. He brought along a few carpets and some tiger skin. Other than that, we left everything behind.
In divided India, we had nowhere to go. Two of my four buas (babaji s sisters) were here-one in Hardwar and the other in Dehradun. We first went to Hardwar, where my bua had a red-brick kothi in Kan Khal on the bank of the Ganges. That was where I got over the fear of water by repeatedly jumping from a small wooden boat that was moored upside down. After some time, we went to the other Bua in Dehradun, where her husband, seeing the thick forests in the area as an opportunity, had decided to deal in timber, and opened a sawmill at Doiwala. I studied for a year or so in Dehradun, in St John s school.
In 1950 we moved to Delhi where the government was giving houses to the displaced, in Rajendra Nagar, Patel Nagar and Shankar Road. Initially, for a year or so, we lived in a rented house in Kamla Nagar, near the Delhi University campus, until the government allotted us a house in East Patel Nagar. After we gave records of what we had back in Dera Ismail Khan, the government gave our family another house and over 400 acres in Gurgaon as compensation. It was a fraction of what we had, but I presume that was the ceiling.
Once babaji, the patriarch of the combined family, joined us in India, we began to establish ourselves all over again. He and my uncles entered the civil contracts business and set up a brick kiln in Ballabgarh, near Faridabad, a short train ride from Delhi. It felt odd to see them at work. Back home in Dera Ismail Khan, the big landlords were never required to do much. But they had now adapted to the world around them. Amrik, my uncle, was at the forefront of that change. In his younger days, he was keen to join the army and even got himself into the Royal Indian Military College (now called Indian Military Academy) in Dehradun. But after completing his studies, he could not join the service. Grandmother put her foot down in an over-my-dead-body kind of manner. Later on in life, he would meet his college mates who had risen to become generals.
My grandmother s refusal changed the course of the family s history. Amrik uncle eventually influenced the fate of the family business in a manner so telling that three of my uncles moved their base to Orissa, a state with which we had had nothing to do until then. He had a college mate, Narsingh Rath, who had joined the Imperial Police Service, the precursor to the Indian Police Service, and was posted in Orissa, his home state. He told Amrik uncle that the state, where the Hirakud dam was being constructed, offered many business opportunities. One fine day, my uncle took a suitcase and moved-just like that-to a small town called Burla in Sambalpur district where the dam was coming up. Perhaps, once your roots are pulled out, resettlement and unfamiliar terrain fail to intimidate. Soon the entire family got involved in the contracts, moving from Hirakud to the Rourkela Steel Plant, and so on. That was the beginning of a long association with Orissa, which was the family s base until 1990.
Babaji stayed back in Delhi, but frequently visited Orissa; he wanted a base in Delhi to take care of our education. He was also committed to getting his four sisters settled, and the upkeep of the land in Gurgaon was a full-time job. The land was only a few kilometres short of the Classic golf course, which is the pride and joy of Gurgaon today. At the time, the landscape was in a terrible shape, very sandy and dry. To get there, he had to take a three-hour camel ride after entering Gurgaon. We tried to improve the land, but it was a tall task, and did not appear very remunerative, while encroachments were a constant threat. Besides, we had to worry about the extended family, the education and weddings of the nephews and nieces. So we began to sell it in parts. We are now left with about eleven acres while the extended family has a total of twenty.
I was admitted to Delhi Public School, Mathura Road. It was at the same location where it is now, but the infrastructure was a little different. The classes were held in tents, with heat and dust our constant companions. In a dust storm, the tents would often blow away. Rainy days resulted in holidays. We used to pray for bad weather on the day of a test if we were not well prepared. It was only in 1958, when I was in the ninth standard, the final year of school at the time, that our class moved into a pukka building in its first block. It consisted of the principal s office, staffroom and two classrooms.
One day in 1952, when I was in standard two, the principal, J.D. Tytler, came in. An imposing personality, he had a ruddy complexion and sported a French beard. But he was unfailingly gentle with children. He would often carry little kids on his shoulders and they would tug at his beard. That first day, he did not speak to us, only whispered something to the teacher. Then he went around the class and picked out two pupils, one of them being me.
We were put on a bus along with seven or eight other students similarly handpicked from other classes and taken to the Maidens Hotel (which is an Oberoi property today) in north Delhi. Clueless, we soon found ourselves face to face with a foreigner and two Indians. They conducted some sort of an interview with each of us, beginning with our names, etc. Next, they spoke to us individually. Besides other things, they asked us to sing a song. I sang the song that never left my lips those days, the title song from Raj Kapoor s Barsaat . Inexplicably, I was also asked to pose without a shirt. And that was that.
The next day, our neighbour informed us that there was a phone call. Our neighbour was a doctor and had been granted the telephone connection on a priority basis. His was the only house in the neighbourhood with a phone, and we often had to make or receive calls there. He had put a small note next to the phone, saying that four annas should be left for each call made. Those days, one had to wait up to six years for a phone connection. We threw a party when our house got a phone, even though it was dead on the day of the party. When it rang two