The Quiet Iconoclast

Anuj Puri, chairman, ANAROCK Property Consultants, would like to overturn dubious business practices by introducing impeccable values and corporate governance in the Indian real estate industry.

- Jayashree Kini Mendes

He’s not your ubiquitous camp follower. Disrup-tive thinking is what he does best. That is a requirement of today’s age. It is probably the reason why real estate honchos throng him and thrust their high-priced apartments in his hands knowing they can well depend on him.

For long, Construction Week India’s association with Anuj Puri, chairman, ANAROCK Property Consultants, was mainly confined to reading his columns and the occasional interviews. But a relationship developed when last September Anuj agreed to moderate the memorable panel discussion at the 7th Construction Week India Awards that had some of the country’s well-known developers as panellists. Anuj threw questions that could well have confounded stronger people, especially knowing that some of them were clients or possible ones in the future. But that did not stop him.

Playing in the world of real estate calls for gumption. One would like to liken it to Freemasonry. Not just comprising influential people, it is also accompanied by much guile and hard smiles. In such a milieu comes a man with a conscience. You can well imagine what that means (and happens) when everybody else around you is tight-lipped and inhibited.

But Anuj has done well. One could attribute it to his immense and fathomless knowledge of the industry and, more importantly, his reliability. ANAROCK is barely nine months old and already prime developers, industrialists with interests in real estate, film producers, are all clientele.

IN COME THE WAVES