Kartikeya Sharma BREWING A LEGACY

The president of AB InBev India talks about his 18-year stint in the company, loyalty for an organisation and industry, and why India should drink more beer

- Shrabonti Bagchi

His colleagues have not heard this story-you can sense that Kartikeya Sharma, president, India and South Asia at the world's largest brewer, Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev), doesn't talk about it often. But something compels him to share it this weekday afternoon as we sit chatting in the offices of AB InBev, which makes popular beers like Budweiser, Corona and Hoegaarden, in Bengaluru.

Maybe it's all the cheerful Christmas and beer-themed decorations in the hip office space-it is literally "deck the halls" hereor the late afternoon sun streaming in through the windows, but in answer to a question about his 18 years at the company, Sharma, 41, opens up about how he almost didn't get the job.

It was 2005, and Sharma was working with the student-led leadership platform AIESEC as the head of its India chapter, as a part of which he had to liaise with many global corporations, including AB InBev. He was backpacking through Europe when he got a call from the company asking if he would like to "come in for an interaction". He said yes.

On the day of the interview, he took a train from France to the company's headquarters in Leuven, Belgium-or thought he did. "So I have this interview scheduled for like 2.30 or 3 in the afternoon. I show up at the station 30 minutes before time, suit in hand, and go into the men's room and change, feeling very proud as an Indian about my punctuality," Sharma recalls. "I get out of the station and start looking for the office, wearing this suit that I probably borrowed from someone, sweating in the warm July sun, and people seem puzzled. Then I say 'Stella Artois?' (one of the most popular European beers made by AB InBev) and someone says 'ah, you're in the wrong city."