‘He had five kurta-dhoti and three suits’: KM Birla tells Nikhil Kamath about his grandfather BK Birla

Kumar Mangalam Birla, chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, said that when his grandfather, Basant Kumar Birla, died five years ago in 2019, he only owned five pairs of kurta-dotis and three suits. Birla said that his father, Aditya Vikram Birla, his grandfather, BK Birla, and his great-grandfather, Ghanshyam Das Birla, were all products of their time and were therefore strikingly different people.

Birla was speaking to Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath in the latest episode of his show ‘People by WTF’. “My grandfather passed away about five years ago, and I happened to go and open his closet looking for something. He had five kurtas and dhotis and three suits. That was about it. Just having him make a new suit for himself was a big project for my grandmother and aunt. This was a big project for my grandmother and aunt,” Kamath said. “It’s the kind of life they’re used to, and this is the kind of life we’ve been exposed to through them.”

He said that his great-grandfather was a product of pre-independence India, and his grandfather was a product of a period of scarcity, when India was in the nascent stage of being a developing country. “So I mean you lived within your means and didn’t spend much. It was a very different mental landscape back then. My father grew up in liberated India, and I think the companies you run also shape your character. It’s not just the other way around. So they were all different,” he said. completely”.

The industrialist said his father, Aditya Vikram Birla, was more expansive in his view of business. “My father was more of a risk taker, and he wanted to expand his business outside the country more aggressively. It was also a different India, so you could take bigger bets than my grandfather could, for example. So, yeah, they were all three people.” Very different. I had a great relationship with all of them and every equation was very different, as you can imagine. “Yes, a lot of love and a lot of joy and laughter.”

Remembering his younger days, Birla calls his great-grandfather, with whom he would spend hours on Sundays, his best friend. He said his grandfather also loved him very much. He remembers that his father was a “difficult manager.” “When I started going to work, I saw it like I had never experienced this before,” he said.

Birla said his father demanded that he stay on top of things at all times, but also gave him a lot of space. “He was also very driven and very demanding of himself as well. So I think that was fair,” Perla said.