...And then began the fairytale

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal"><script language="javascript">doweshowbellyad=0; </script></div> <div align="right" style="position:relative; left: -2"><table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="2" align="right" border="1" width="36.5%"> <colgroup> <col width="100.0%" /> </colgroup> <tr valign="top"> <td width="100.0%" colspan="1" rowspan="1" style="" valign:="" top="" background-color:="" ffffff=""> <div class="Normal"><img src="/photo/1050060.cms" alt="/photo/1050060.cms" border="0" /></div> </td> </tr> </table></div> <div class="Normal">With Mittal Steel Co Ltd becoming the largest steel company in the world, with a turnover of $22.2 billion, he''s not only the richest Indian in the world, but England''s wealthiest man. <br /><br />Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, who has recently bought the world''s most expensive home, tells the story of how it all began<br /><br />Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, the richest Indian in the world and the richest man in England, was taken aback when at a seminar he was addressing in India recently, a young MBA student stood up in the audience and asked him, "How soon can I become like you?"<br /><br />"You have to work hard," he replied, "There''s no magic here that one can overnight become XYZ. There''s a process in life." <br /><br />While he said that, in his mind he was back in Kolkata, in the rains. The tram lines passing close to his Chitpur Road home made it tremble. He had to walk through waist-high water to school because he didn''t have enough money for a rickshaw. "There were a lot of rich kids at the school," he remembers. <br /><br />He was a good student. "Shy, hardworking and fairly introvert," he now describes himself as. He did well in the exams, topped the class. Then he went to Kolkata''s St Xavier''s College, where he says, he had a lot of trouble because he came from a Hindi-medium school. <br /><br />He remembers the principal being reluctant to admit him. "But I had very good numbers in accountancy and math," he tells me sitting in the Presidential Suite at the Oberoi in Delhi. "I met a lot of boys who had come from English-medium schools. They were very snobbish because they spoke good English, and I couldn''t." Ultimately, he stood first in college too. <br /><br />It was a typical middle-class Marwari household. He was the eldest in a family of five children, then there were many cousins who he was close to, living as they did in a joint family. He was particularly close to his mother. "I got a lot of affection, protection and security from my mother," he says.<br /><br />"My father was very busy, building up and working in the joint family business. Ours was a distant relationship until I was in college." When he came to know that he had stood first in college, his father was not in town and he says he did not have the courage to call him and tell him the news, so he sent a telegram. But once he joined the business, they became very close. <br /><br /></div> </div><div class="section2"><div class="Normal">"My father has been my mentor. He is also a great visionary," he tells me. He remembers a Sheaffer fountain pen that his father had given him, which he says he treasured. <br /><br />He always wanted to do something different in life. He remembers that as a child he would write ''Dr Lakshmi Niwas Mittal, BCom, MBA, PhD'' on his ruler instead of writing his name. By the time he was 16 and still attending morning college, he had already joined his father''s business.<br /><br />He had to take the first bus, from Alipore at 5.10 am and go up to Park Street, and then walk to college, and then after college, he had to walk to the main Chowringhee, then go to the office by bus, work all day and then go home to study. That was his lifestyle. <br /><br />"I have been a hard-working person from childhood. Hard work is not something that is difficult for me," he says. Even after he graduated, he continued studying, taking evening courses in finance and marketing from Calcutta University while working. He regrets today that he didn''t sit for his exams. <br /><br />"Education is something I always cherished, one should learn and one should know as much as possible. Academic knowledge, specialising in a subject, that I could have gained by, say, going to an American university, I missed out on," he says. <br /><br />Out of the imaginary academic degrees he used to doodle on his ruler, he regrets that the only one he has achieved is a B Com. It was a life of drudgery in a city known for its hi-jinks. He was very much the boy on the outside with his nose pressed against the glass.<br /><br />The first time he entered a restaurant was when he was 18. It was Flurry''s on Park Street - his friends had taken him there. By 21, he was married. It was an arranged marriage. <br /><br />"When I got engaged — in those days telephones were expensive — we were not allowed to speak for a long time. After three minutes, the operator would interrupt, and six minutes was the limit. So, when I wrote the first letter when I got engaged, I welcomed my wife Usha as my life partner — that was the spirit, my wife is my partner," he says, "She understands me very well, and she has always supported me in good times and bad." <br /><br /></div> </div><div class="section3"><div class="Normal">Already at work he was proving to be a leader. He put up a small factory along with his father and uncles. "I was very fortunate that I gained a lot of knowledge and experience in those six-seven years when I was in India. I initiated the first IPO of my joint family business. It was in 1970, when I was 20 years old, and it was a successful IPO," he says.<br /><br />Things were looking up. His father had a car. By now, he had been instrumental in launching a couple more IPOs in the family business. But one thing still remained - he had never been abroad.<br /><br />"The first time I went abroad was in 1975," he says, "I remember my wife could not come as she was expecting our son, Adit. So I went with a friend, it was going to be a vacation. We were supposed to go to Bangkok, Singapore, Jakarta, Hong Kong and back. It was a three-week holiday that we had planned. My father had visited Indonesia before and had a certain business plan there. That business was not moving forward and so he asked me to dispose it off."<br /><br />When he landed in Indonesia, as was his wont, he went into all the details in the business plan and discovered that the problem was electricity supply. Out of curiosity, he went and met the director-general of industries, and tried to solve the problem. Fate was on his side, and destiny was guiding him. <br /><br />"It so happened that that problem got solved," he says, "so I told my father that I wanted to take up this project." He says, "And I had to say to my friend that I was not going any further on the vacation and he carried on by himself. I stayed on for a couple of weeks, moved the project forward, and started working. There was a lot of excitement about doing something abroad; in those days even going abroad was a big thing. I was 25, I used to go back and forth, then in 1976, I took my wife and son, who was 10 months old then, and stayed there for 18 years!"<br /><br />"It was a small company and we faced a lot of resistance in the beginning," Mittal says, "No one thought that any Indian company could produce steel for joint ventures. Most of our customers were Japanese. It was a tough time, dealing with the issues of competition, quality and performance. I would work six-and-a-half days a week, in the early part of your life you have to work very hard to achieve some thing. It was more a question of survival. At that time you don''t think of a role model, you just struggle to survive in your business, you''re trying to establish yourself in life." <br /><br />He says his monthly expenses in those days used to be $250 a month, with two children. The family bought a second-hand car, a Holden Premier, and his children attended the American school. "I built the business up from a greenfield project," he says, "I think that was the turning point of my life." <br /><br />All this must have flashed through his mind as he stood in front of the MBA student, and said that nothing came easy, and it took many stages before coal, iron ore and limestone were processed into steel.<br /></div> <div class="Normal" style="" text-align:="" right=""><span style="" font-weight:="" bold="">(Continued Next Week - The Glory Years)</span></div> </div>