'You can’t deliver if your people are not happy'

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: If he can get fries, bread and cold drinks during his foreign business travel, he is ready for work. For, industrialist Krishna Kumar Modi, 69, is a workaholic first and gourmet later. And a vegetarian workaholic can keep it simple, according to him. “I can eat fruits or if I get these three things, they are enough for me to survive,” he smiles.

Modi moves around in his house done tastefully by his restaurateur wife Bina Modi much like it were his office. So be it beautifully done Tankha paintings on a wall or masks from Africa, Modi only thinks and sees one thing: his work. It’s little surprise he has taken the group where it is.

For a man who heads the Rs 3,000-crore group of industries, Modi is a simple, down-to-earth man who means business. It’s a trait, he says, he picked up early, thanks to his father, Rai Bahadur Gujarmal Modi. It’s after all not very easy growing up in a town named after your father’s last name. Modinagar in Uttar Pradesh is where Modi was born and brought up. “I cycled my way to college. I studied in the same school as the children of the workers in my father’s factories. I remember getting an allowance of four annas with which sometimes I had the popular shikanji. We grew up pretty much like others in the city. My father’s idea was that we should be able to mix with others,” explains Modi.

As a young boy straight out of college, he began working in the family’s vanaspati factory. The first thing he was given to handle was the account book. “I had to write balance sheets. It was very boring but I managed somehow. It was a good experience, I now think. But then, I wasn’t enjoying myself. Enjoyment comes when you achieve something.”

For the young Modi, enjoyment came packaged in business loss of a few lakh of rupees.