April 13, 1998
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The
Millionaire from Jalandhar The tycoon's autobiography is rich in earthy wisdom but offers few candid vignettes. By Gita Piramal BEYOND BOUNDARIES: A MEMOIR
At first glance the two books would appear to have been written by two very different men. In 1984, when Indira Gandhi was published, Paul was embroiled in his messy and eventually abortive bid to acquire Escorts and DCM. Today, Paul is a British peer, a member of the House of Lords and, as he readily acknowledges, a man who knows himself and who is at peace with his own being. This inner peace has not been achieved easily. He has had to fight his way to the top and his life-story merits recounting. Paul was born in 1931 in Jalandhar, one of the seven children of Mongawati and Payere Lal. Lal eked out a living making buckets and tubs from sheet metal. It was a modest life made more so when the children were orphaned at an early age. Mongawati died in 1938 and Lal in 1944, when Paul was 13. His elder brothers, Stya and Jit, took over the reins and made it possible for Paul to study at Boston's MIT. It was the first turning point in his career. A second came in 1966 when he and his wife Aruna took their fourth child Ambika to London for medical treatment. There was no cure for leukaemia then and Ambika died in 1968 but her family decided not to return to India. Paul borrowed £5,000 to start the only business he knew -- making steel tubes -- and it turned out to be the right business then. The late '60s were years of shortage in the British steel industry and his company was built "on an opportunity". Between 1978 and 1988, sales of his Caparo Group jumped from £4 million to £167 million. During this period, Paul diversified with amoebic rapidity, mostly through buy-outs. He acquired a hotel and three tea companies. He spent £150 million on five engineering and metal bashing companies in the UK. Caparo went public. This was, as Paul writes, "the pretty side of our picture. It even captivated us. By the mid-1980s we thought we could do nothing wrong!" Then came the downturn in the shape of a consumer electronics company, Fidelity, which Paul acquired in 1983. After four traumatic years, it had to be closed down. Next were his predatory raids on Escorts and DCM which didn't go well. In 1991, Caparo had to be privatised. That same year Paul tried in vain to acquire the Indian Iron and Steel Company. While Paul's image in India took a beating, his reputation in the US soared. Caparo bought over a string of sick American companies and managed to revive them. Paul's outstanding achievements in a so-called sunset industry, his ability to turn around sick companies in developed countries and his rise in the Labour Party could offer many lessons. But a reader is unlikely to find them in Beyond Boundaries. There is much earthy wisdom behind the posturing in his autobiography, but unfortunately the richness of detail is missing. Without the anecdotes, the true day-to-day examples of how he tackled business problems and vignettes on how an immigrant came to be accepted in caste-ridden London, much of the hand-down value of his experiences is lost. A pity. But Paul can be expected to have more in store.
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Swraj Paul takes pride in his
reputation as a man who doesn't mince his words. He doesn't, even in his much-awaited
autobiography -- at least where the Gandhi dynasty is concerned. Beyond Boundaries is a
slim book packed with provocative nuggets. In his earlier book, Indira Gandhi, Paul had
written: "She is plus everything and minus nothing." In Beyond Boundaries, Paul
appears to have changed his mind for he now writes that "Indira Gandhi was far from
perfect" and goes on to discuss some of these imperfections. 
