Surviving 2008 Mumbai attacks made entrepreneur focus on purpose — and build prosperity

Shiv Puri puts his energy into philanthropy, especially in education, with healthcare on the horizon. Despite the constant drumbeat of bad news and global woes, the father of two teenagers prefers to remain optimistic.

- Wong Kim Hoh

Meet Mr Shiv Puri and you might think he has breezed through life, helped along by luck and a few well-timed tailwinds.

The 48-year-old entrepreneur and philanthropist laughs easily, tells great stories and carries the steady calm of someone who has seen the extremes of human experience and lived to tell the tale.

Behind the easy charm is a mind forged by discipline — on the golf course, where he was a teenage amateur champion; in the boardroom, as founder of boutique equity firm TVF Capital Advisors; and most profoundly, in the face of mortality, having survived the 2008 Mumbai terror attacks. The last experience reshaped his outlook and brought a deeper purpose to his pursuit of success.

Now a Singaporean, Mr Puri was born in Mumbai but moved to New Delhi when he was a child. His entrepreneur father, who left a stable job to start a real estate business, and his mother, a homemaker, raised him and his older sister in what he describes as a "very normal upbringing".

But normal is relative. Even as a child, he was "very driven to want to do something on my own".

At 11, he started his first business: buying cricket cards wholesale and selling them to classmates, undercutting the vendor outside his school. The profits, he recalls, were "great money for a kid", enough to supplement his meagre pocket money and fund fast-food treats.

Around the same age, he discovered golf. His father had joined a club, and young Shiv tagged along, quickly becoming hooked.

"Golf is a mental sport. It's all in the mind," he says.

By 15, he was playing internationally, and at 17, he represented India at the World Schools Golf Championship in St Andrews, Scotland, the sport's hallowed ground and the oldest golf course in the world.