“There are huge challenges, but huge opportunities in India and companies are constantly converting threats and risks into success,” says British entrepreneur, Lord Karan Bilimoria, who founded the Cobra beer company and is founding chairman of the UK India Business Council. 

India today, he asserts, is very different to the country many recall 25 years ago.

Back then, says Bilimoria, “it was one of the most closed, insular, inward-looking and protectionist countries in the world,” but today it is one of the “brightest economies” in the world.

When Bilimoria arrived in Britain at the age of nineteen from India more than a quarter of a century ago, he was told there was a glass ceiling, and it was a place where a young Indian would never get to the top.

Since then, both countries have transformed dramatically. And, says Bilimoria, it is thanks to those changes that he was given the opportunity to build a business from scratch.

Further testimony of those changes is that in June 2006, Britain honoured

Bilimoria with one of its top accolades – it made him Lord Bilimoria, of Chelsea. 

Or put another way, as Bilimoria told delegates at the UK India Business Council’s inaugural summit in London, Next Generation India: Talent, Trends and Technology; if there hadn’t been transformation in both countries, he wouldn’t be standing there in front of them today.  

On ambition

Today Cobra Beer claims to be one of the fastest growing beer brands in the UK and is sold in more than 50 countries worldwide. It has an estimated current retail value turnover of more than 225 million US dollars. 

Bilimoria’s vision at Cobra Beer is to “aspire and achieve against all odds, with integrity.” That, he maintains, is the definition of entrepreneurship.

“You come up with an idea, you want to get somewhere with that idea, you invariably have limited or no means, you invariably have all the odds stacked against you.

“You go out there and you make it happen, you make it happen, with integrity!”

But Bilimoria, who studied law at Cambridge University and later qualified as a chartered accountant with Ernst & Young in London, acknowledges that along with opportunity, achievement needs nourishment and mentoring.

And he credits his grandfather for steering him on the right path at an early age. He recalls that when he was a teenager, he didn’t set his sights on being an entrepreneur.  Instead, he wanted to be a tennis champion. Having lost a match after feeling sorry for his opponent, his grandfather had the following advice: “Don’t ever step back on that court again unless you are going to do your best … In fact, in life, don’t ever do anything unless you are going to give it your very best.”

“And I’ve never forgotten that,” Bilimoria says.  

On foresight

Bilimoria says it was his great grandfather who had the foresight to start a business in the liquor industry.

“The secret of success I am told was that he was a man of great foresight,” he says.

Bilimoria recalls a few years ago, Larry Summers, then President of Harvard University, giving a talk in Mumbai to launch Harvard Business School’s international research centre.

Summers, an economist who became US Treasury Secretary, had been part of a special team tasked with helping to rescue India when it went bankrupt in 1991, which only had its gold reserves and two weeks’ worth of foreign exchange left.

According to Bilimoria, Summers admitted he never possessed the foresight to predict India’s phenomenal change in fortunes.

Bilimoria recalls Summers saying: “If you had told me then, in 1991, that India in just over 15 years was going to be one of the fastest-growing economies in the world, growing at approaching 10 per cent a year, I would have said you were mad.

“If you told me that just over 15 years from then that a country that was bankrupt was going to have approaching 200 billion dollars of foreign exchange reserves I would have said you would be insane!”

Bilimoria wonders who has the foresight now to see where India will be in the future, based on how far India has come since liberalisation 17 years ago.

Inspiration, inheritance and philanthropy

The best gift that can be passed from one generation to another is ‘inspiration,’ Bilimoria says, and it is “absolutely priceless.”

On his great grandfather’s legacy, Bilimoria says he not only looked after his family very well, but he also became involved in his community in many different ways and performed a lot of charitable work. He also became a member of the Rajya Sabha, the equivalent of the House of Lords.

“I never heard a bad word said about him. That legacy of inspiration is more than any money that he could have left for future generations.”

“So when we talk about philanthropy it is as much the ‘inspiration’ that is left behind by the Carnegies, the Rockefellers, the Bill Gates of today and the Sir Tom Hunters of the world,” he says. “That legacy is much, much more than the money that they leave behind.”

On the subject of inheritance, Bilimoria cites the American investor and philanthropist Warren Buffet, known for his frugal nature: “A very rich person should leave his kids enough to do anything, but not enough to do nothing!”

So, concludes Bilimoria, a person’s future in life, “is down to opportunity, to aspiration, and it is down to achievement.”

The power of education

The opportunity for education in India is absolutely huge, asserts Bilimoria, pointing out that all it costs to give the same opportunity of education to a child in India is 120 US dollars a year.

“That hunger for success that the youth in India have – it’s difficult for us to imagine in this country, where I think quite frankly we are thoroughly spoilt.”

Bilimoria illustrates this hunger with the story of Indian President K.R. Narayanan: “I could tell you hundreds of stories, thousands of stories – I could tell you one story: there was a young boy in South India. 

“His parents couldn’t afford to send him to school, so he would follow his brother, his elder brother would go to school … because his parents couldn’t afford to send him, he had to stay outside the school building and his brother would pass him the books out of the window. And he would read, and copy out those books.”

“He was from a Dalit community so the Indian caste system, which is still present in India – they couldn’t get anywhere just a few decades ago – that individual went on to the London School of Economics, that individual went on to become one of India’s most successful diplomats, that individual went on to become President of India.”

“And President Narayanan – I have had the privilege of meeting him – is the most wonderful, humble, inspirational human being who started in that position.”    

DT 10/08