He lives in a sprawling home and loves the best cars but for Dilip Piramal, chairman of VIP Industries, the biggest luxury is being the master of his own time
It’s just past noon on a hot October Saturday in Mumbai when we enter the sprawling Piramal House off the upscale Worli seaface. The 10-storey building overlooking the Bandra-Worli Sea Link is home to the Piramal family and Dilip, the second of three brothers, who is chairman of India’s leading luggage company VIP Industries, lives on the sixth, seventh and eighth floors. Younger brother Ajay, who figures at number 44 in the 2014 Forbes India Rich List, also lives in the same building as does the family of the now-deceased eldest brother Ashok. The three families occupy three floors each in the building.
We are ushered into one of the many living rooms on the eighth floor, complete with the best European furniture, sculptures and a number of exquisite Italian statuettes. Among the many large paintings is a traditional Rajasthani one made by an artist from Jhunjhunu, the district the Piramals belong to.
Piramal, 64, walks in wearing a simple tee and trousers and greets us with a warm smile. He is a friendly, chatty industrialist who, despite his wealth, comes across as a simple man who will not hesitate to travel economy if it’s a short trip to a place like Delhi. Piramal admits his views could appear paradoxical, given that he is the chairman of the country’s best known luggage maker with brands like VIP, Carlton, Aristocrat, Skybags and Alfa. The Rs 1,000-crore VIP Industries, now run by Piramal’s daughter Radhika who is managing director, has been giving global luggage giant Samsonite a tough fight ever since the multinational came into India, a fact that Piramal is very proud of. He points out that VIP has maintained its market leadership even though Samsonite, which dominates all the 100 countries in the world where it operates, came into India nearly two decades ago and is still, according to him, a distant second.
Showing us around his home, he says the elaborate chandeliers which adorn his three living rooms were imported directly by him from the Czech Republic when he realised he could source them through his contact in Prague at one-third the price of what they usually fetch in India.
This, in a sense, is quintessentially Dilip Piramal, someone who is acutely aware of the value of money despite his obvious luxurious lifestyle. Piramal, a student of Sydenham College, Mumbai, and a University of Mumbai record holder in accountancy, says his father Gopikrishna instilled these values in him. “You could say my father was extra simple. He hardly led a life like those of his peers,” he says. Piramal’s grandfather built the original version of Piramal House in 1938 and the family has always lived together despite having different business interests.
A few days before the meeting at his home, we meet Piramal at his office where he tells us that material things don’t matter much to him. The office, a few blocks away from his home, is simple and functional and he likes it that way. “This sofa set could cost Rs 6 lakh or Rs 60,000 and no one would know the difference,” he says, pointing to where we are sitting. And these are the views that make him an antithesis to the typical industrialist.
Simple Pleasures
Piramal recalls how, when he was 29, he was almost forced by a magazine to talk about the possibility of buying a jet in the future since the reporter wanted a good headline and he had become the darling of the media by then. “I told the magazine that some day, I might like to own my own jet. I said it just for the heck of it,” he laughs.
(This story appears in the 14 November, 2014 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)