The Hindu Business Line : Self-made journey

To be plucked from the lap of luxury and pushed into the menacing hands of hard daily labour cannot but dampen the spirit of a 12-year-old. Somehow, Pralhad P. Chhabria learnt to keep hope simmering, believing that the future would bring a completely different twist to his life.

In There’s No Such Thing as a Self-Made Man, his autobiography written for him by Saaz Aggarwal and released last month, the Chairman of Finolex Group tells of how an ‘unseen force’ scripted his rise from a cleaning boy earning Rs 10 a month at a cloth shop in his hometown Karachi to heading the Rs 3,000-crore Finolex Group, India’s No. 1 manufacturer of cables and No. 2 maker of PVC resin.

After his father’s death in 1942, Chhabria’s brothers speculated in the commodities markets, unsuccessfully, losing more than they owned. To keep the family honour intact, they sold all they had, in effect pushing Chhabria to an itinerant life as domestic servant and collection agent in Karachi, Poona and Amritsar to help look after a big family: he was the fifth of ten children.

“Although I had become accustomed to this life, I never felt reconciled to it. My mind was constantly wrestling with the thought of how I could get myself out of this wretched situation.” He would constantly seek out the expanse of the sky for answers on why he was being put through such a situation, he writes.

In 1947, his family fled Karachi during Partition and moved to Poona. For 17-year-old Chhabria, it was time “to start some type of business of my own, and look after myself”.

He tried selling cloth on the streets only to be met with uncertain looks (“unfortunately we were ahead of our time”) but patience and persistence were second-nature and, soon, stocks sold out. He moved on to trading in electrical accessories, filling samples in canvas bags and walking from street to street, driven only by enthusiasm.

Learning on the job

Younger brother and business partner Kishanchand always attempted to bring innovation to their offering, splitting open cables to find out how they worked, or scouring foreign magazines for new ideas. His efforts thrust Finolex into its next growth trajectory — fabrications — giving them many prestigious orders, including those from the Indian Army.

Chhabria learnt everything — from written communication to banking procedures — on the job. And behind every breakthrough the company achieved in trying to get a product accepted was Chhabria’s “timeless sales strategies of trying again, and again, and again”, meeting “cold response” with “patient follow-up”.

A perspective that got him through the heavily bureaucratic work-culture of post-Independent India, when markets were protected and entrepreneurs like him were just beginning to take on the big venture of manufacturing in India. The book has accounts of tedious licence and tender procedures, and hours spent looking for loopholes to cut through the bureaucracy.

“I firmly believe that when you are totally immersed in something, continuously taking feedback from the results of your actions and changing what you are doing based on that feedback to achieve better and better results, the right decisions come to you almost automatically.”

And so Finolex journeyed on, making cables, investing in new machinery and expanding from 1957 until the late-1960s. By the 1970s the company decided to get into pipe manufacture, thereby changing the lifestyle of the farmer; the 1980s saw foreign collaborations and public issues.

The 1990s pushed the company into the big league as it took up production of PVC resin, followed by the GDR issue. By now Chhabria had bought a helicopter for commuting, and stops to point out the irony. “For years on end I had ridden about on a bicycle, scratching together a living. And here I was with a private plane at my disposal!”

The book has a well-rounded feel to it, interspersed with management mantras and historical tid-bits about the cities the company found base in, sections with spiritual inferences and an account of the inner strength that Chhabria found to move past business and personal impediments: there is something for all categories of readers.

Business back then…

Notes on how business was done back then rake up delightfully humorous images, of the three-hour siesta routines of Poona businessmen, huge celebrations that follow whenever a telephone is installed, or how Chhabria’s adman had to travel to Poona from Bombay just to discuss a drawing, as fax machines were unheard of!

To think that the machine imported to undertake Finolex’s first manufacturing order was set up in a cowshed, with the floor still plastered with dung! There are many instances of how the team kept learning through experimentation. “We saw opportunity, felt enthusiasm in our minds and hearts, and went ahead and did it. Instead of logic we had passion. Today nobody could bumble along and set up an industry from scratch as we did,” says Chhabria.

On a personal level, Chhabria talks about his family, the sorrow of losing his daughter Sonali to leukaemia, and of the personal strength that his “118-year-old” spiritual guru, Swami Ram Baba, gave him. He also talks of how his community, the Sindhis, were uprooted from their homeland in Karachi during Partition, and deeply mourns the loss of Sindhi culture, poetry and philosophy and a language “on the verge of becoming extinct”. “Even today I continue to long for my ancestral home in Shikarpur,” he says.

Looking ahead

Chhabria went on to set up I²IT in 2003, under the guidance of Padmashri Dr Vijay P. Bhatkar, who had set up India’s first supercomputer series. More than 40 per cent of the students are from rural India. The government of Maharashtra also recently allocated two Indian Technical Institutes (ITI) for the company to manage. The company is now expanding manufacturing a range of new related products like power cables, switches, and compact fluorescent lamps.

Chhabria has more ahead: he is currently setting up a 1,000-MW power plant at Ratnagiri and upgrading the city’s port into an all-season general merchandise port. He also wants to establish an international university to attract global students.

Easily this story of a single man’s craving to break out of limiting circumstances, and the continuous fortuitous circumstances that paved the way for progress, falls into the category of ‘must-reads’. “There’s nothing special about me,” says Chhabria. “An unseen force has guided my thoughts and action. There’s no such thing as a self-made man.”

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