Circa 2006 — It was a regular day at work. Neeraj Gupta was in a meeting at his sprawling, newly acquired office in Goregaon when the dreaded call first came.

‘Come out and take a look...’ hollered that familiar intimidating voice on the other side of the line. Gupta skipped a heartbeat and rushed out, dashing down the stairs to the garage below, praying to the lord to give him strength to face what was about to greet him.

The scene he witnessed still flashes like a strobe in his memory. Broken windows, cracked windshields, and splintered glass on the floor—the brand new garage below the office, where he parked his fleet of taxis, had been rummaged through by one of the biggest names in Mumbai underworld.

Gun shots had been fired, property had been damaged, a business for which Gupta had given his sweat and blood was being seized up literally. His life was in grave danger.

One day, 24 hours The first set of calls had started a year earlier. On the morning of 26 July 2005 to be precise — the fateful day that ravaged Mumbai as torrential rains inundated the city, causing largescale destruction of life and property. Curiously, just the night before, four of Neeraj’s vehicles had met with fatal accidents all at once, forcing him to spend the entire night at Lilavati Hospital in Bandra, attending to his staff.

‘One of the drivers has died,’ a shaken Neeraj remembers telling wife Farhat on the phone, perplexed at how four vehicles from his staff transportation business were involved in mishaps on one single night. She asked him to come home early, sounding anxious. He did, but only the next morning — weary and fatigued. And just as he was about to crash into bed the cell phone rang.

‘Dubai sebaat kar raha hoon ...,’ someone said in Hindi. It wasn’t a voice Gupta recognised, but the tone was telling enough. Thankfully, the minute he uttered ‘Dubai’, Gupta had the presence of mind to start recording the conversation.

‘ Do crore,’ the man threatened and hung up, elaborating no further. His instinct had been proven correct. It was an extortion call asking him to pay up.

Everything that could go wrong did on that day. Mumbai was devastated by such a ferocious downpour that by 4 pm large parts of the city had completely flooded, Neeraj lost contact with his wife and would have to walk chest deep in water for hours, looking for his missing family. It didn’t stop at that. A dozen more of his cars were smashed beyond repair as the garage was inundated by water.

‘Even the newspapers had splashed photos of one of our car wrecks on the front page,’ Gupta remembers. ‘The accident, the underworld threats, the terror of a missing family, and large scale financial losses — I was staring at, it was easily the worst day of my life, and I still shudder when I think of it.’

Ironically it is this day of adversity that also proved to be a turning point for Gupta in life, and particularly in business.

Growing up Neeraj Gupta was born in Mumbai in a family of second generation entrepreneurs. His grandfather’s story is a quintessential rags to riches saga.

‘As many unemployed young men in those days would, he boarded a train from Lucknow to arrive in (then) Bombay, with pretty much nothing but a suitcase in hand and a family to feed,’ Gupta’s father would tell him. In the course of the next few years he established a flourishing business, owning by the time of his passing, a chain of 14 eateries across the city — little shops in cinema halls, outside railway stations, and crowded business districts that sold snacks and tea to office goers. It was hard work, but it propelled the family out of poverty.

Neeraj’s father, Vishnu Kumar Puranchan Gupta, himself, a docile, happy-go-lucky man, wasn’t really a desirous contender who harboured any ambition to steer the business into the big league.

But the family always led a comfortable, middle-class life. With his grandfather’s untimely death at the age of 40, it was Neeraj’s uncle who handled the trade, running all but one restaurant, and eventually changing his line of business entirely to get into the manufacturing of corrugated boxes.

The one restaurant his father did inherit was leased out to a ‘Shetty’ man to run. Vishnu was a carefree soul and had decided very early on in life that making money and doing business did not excite him.

Endowed sufficiently with an inheritance and with a steady income from the restaurant he had leased out, he spent his days pursuing other interests— which meant starting his day with a morning swim at the Mafatlal Club on Charni Road, an afternoon session of badminton at Khar Gymkhana, evenings at the Santacruz club, playing billiards, and finally calling it a day with a game of cards with his friends. Quite evidently, the family wasn’t swiftly climbing the ladder of monetary success, but, were a happy and contented lot.

If business had skipped Vishnu’s genes, there was enough of it happening around Neeraj for the seed of enterprise to be sown somewhere. Whether within the paternal side of the family, or in his mother’s maternal home where the nana and mamas operated steel mills and ready garment stores, people were always engaged in some entrepreneurial activity or the other. Neeraj never knew anyone who did a job. And so right from the early days, it was very clear to him that he will not work for someone else, but create something of his own.

‘I remember raking in ₹20,000 for a college fest that we organised. In 1991, for a teenager still to hit twenty, that was a princely sum,’ reminisces a grinning Neeraj. He was an average student at best, more interested in girlfriends, extracurricular activities and in pursuing a myriad different hobbies, which on most occasions he managed to successfully monetise.

The first of these sideline fads that caught his fancy was inspired by a gentleman he met on a family holiday. ‘He sold us a grain of rice with an inscription on it and I instantly thought — why can’t I do this as well? And so I did it — gifting one to my thoroughly impressed girlfriend,’ Gupta laughs. He was also crafting these by the dozen for friends who implored him with requests to flatter the ladies, and even sold in bulk to a trader who peddled them at stores like Archies and Hallmark that were all the rage back in the day.

‘I will pay you ₹20 a piece. Make me 500 of these,’ the trader told him. And so, Neeraj got his first paycheck crafting 500 assiduously inscribed one-liners on rice grain. It made him richer by ₹10,000. Neeraj graduated with a decent score and with ample time on hand with not much to do.

‘You must do something, Neeraj. This is not the age to be sitting at home,’ his father said at last. ‘A friend of mine runs a textile manufacturing company, I have spoken to him about you, and he has agreed to have you on board.’

And so with no good enough reason to defy his dad, Gupta reluctantly began work at Tunicas. It was the first and the only time he worked for somebody else. Three months was how long the stint lasted.

With permission from Random House India

Nikhil Inamdar is a journalist with Business Standard in Mumbai. He has worked with Times Now, NDTV and Bloomberg TV India

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