“I had no choice but to grow up fast… …when my father died. At the age of 28, I had to run the businesses he had built”

As chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, he has transformed the conglomerate from a $2 billion business into a multinational behemoth spanning 36 countries and businesses as diverse as textiles, cement, chemicals, retail and telecom with an annual revenue of $46 billion

- RAJ CHENGAPPA

KUMAR MANGALAM BIRLA, 53

Kumar Mangalam still vividly recalls the day his father, Aditya Vikram Birla, told him he had only a few more months to live. At first, the young Kumar Mangalam (he was 28 at this point) refused to believe him. After all, at 51 years of age, Aditya Vikram was at the prime of his life. He had successfully diversified the business group he had inherited into textiles, petrochemicals and telecommunications and was among the first Indian corporates to go international, taking the worth of the conglomerate to $2 billion in 1995. When he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 1991, doctors had assured him that this was the least lethal of all cancers and had the slowest rate of progression. Around this time Aditya Vikram had decided that he had worked hard all his life, and that he now needed to spend more time with family. But it was not to be. Inexplicably, the cancer worsened and he spent the remaining part of his life in and out of hospitals.

Till that point, Kumar Mangalam recalls, his own life, especially his childhood, had been “secure, happy and uncomplicated”. The only son to his parents (sister Vasavadatta is younger), Kumar Mangalam grew up in a close-knit, joint family environment in Mumbai. Apart from his father, he was fortunate to have both his great grandfather, the venerable G.D. Birla, who was a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, and his grandfather, B.K. Birla, to guide him as a child. By their own examples, says Kumar Mangalam, they inculcated in him the “values of honesty, consistency, integrity, hard work and putting your best foot forward in whatever one was doing”. Qualities that would stand him in good stead later in life.