Capital Gains

‘The company was set up by my great-grandfather in 1952. When my father took it over in the 1980s the family was in debt. Now the group has an annual turnover of 1 billion dollars. My father’s will to succeed is phenomenal. If he sets out to do something, he will get it done. If there’s someone I want to become, it’s him.’

MC speaks about the family business in the first-person plural. He has grown up absorbing business ideas and techniques, and they are a natural part of his speech.

‘When our liquor business was at its height we controlled nineteen per cent of Indian liquor retail. At that time, the government auctioned liquor outlets to the highest bidder. Later on it introduced a lottery system to prevent monopolies. But we could still grow the business because we had so many employees. In any lottery in our region, out of one hundred entrants, eighty were our men.’

MC was sent to a series of expensive schools, but he was repeatedly expelled, and at the age of sixteen he dropped out for good. He went to London for a year or two to have fun: clubs, parties and everything else that a teenager with a well-stocked bank account can think of.

When he came back he was put in charge of one of the family’s sugar mills. But his heart was not really in it – and the real-estate boom was on. In 2001 the family set up a real-estate business and MC, twenty-one and entirely untrained, was given the task of building the largest shopping mall in northern India.

‘When I was in England I spent a lot of time walking around malls, studying how they were made. There’s no point reinventing the wheel. I know more than anyone in India about how you set up a mall, how you arrange your brands. My father had no experience in a professional context, so everything I know about the professional context I’ve learned myself. I introduced computer systems into the business. I taught myself Oracle programming because the professional contractors were no good. Then I taught myself all about the latest building techniques. Centrestage Mall was built with special prefabricated steel pillars, which had never been used in Indian malls before. Recently, I taught myself finance. I read finance texts online and every time I didn’t know a word I looked it up. Six months ago I didn’t know anything and now I can conduct finance meetings with Pricewaterhouse.’

Centrestage was famous for having Delhi’s most luxurious, high-tech nightclub, Elevate. It was MC’s pet project, his personal party zone, with endless champagne for him and his friends – and his nightly arrival there, surrounded by bodyguards, always provided a frisson.

‘For a time I was the man in Delhi. Loads of people wanted to be my friend. Women wanted to sleep with me. I said to my wife: if I hadn’t been married, things would have been very different. A lot of people were very fake.’

Like many Delhi rich boys, MC was given a big wedding as a way of winding down his wild years. When he was twenty-two, he married his childhood sweetheart, SK; their reception had 6,000 guests and featured dance routines by Bollywood stars Diya Mirza and Shilpa Shetty. MC still loves parties, and, as I discover during our conversation, he becomes relaxed and witty with alcohol, but there is no doubt that he has by now grown into a fully fledged partner to his father. He’s ready to shut down Elevate: he doesn’t have time to attend to it any more, and he doesn’t want anyone else to run it. He operates five shopping malls across India, and he has another 1,400 acres under development. And that is just the beginning. He is moving on to much bigger plans.

‘We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.’

He is so matter of fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers at five or ten acres a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.

‘Where?’ I ask.

‘Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The President told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it. We’re going in there with [exiled Russian oligarch] Boris Berezovsky. Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.’

MC tells me how he has one hundred farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.

‘Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile, I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans so when the sugar mills start up they’ll be ready.’

Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says Africans. I’m stunned. I tell him so.

‘Thank you,’ he says.

‘What is on that land right now?’ I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.

‘Nothing.’

MC is excited to be talking about this. His spirits seem to be entirely unaffected by the recession that currently dominates the headlines. He orders another beer, though we have exceeded the time he allotted me. All of a sudden, I find him immensely charismatic. I can see why he makes things happen: he has made me believe, as he must have made others believe, that he can do anything. I ask him how he learned to think like this.