Lal wanted to be a fighter pilot in the navy but destiny had other plans. Today, with Lal PathLabs, he is at the forefront of a health tech revolution seventy years after his father started the company as a single private diagnostic lab in New Delhi
Dr. Arvind Lal of Dr Lal’s Laboratory
Image: Madhu Kapparath
Arvind Lal believes in divine interventions.
Maybe because he is spiritual. Or maybe because strange coincides have led him to believe in them. Either way, in mid-October, after spending over 11 days in the hills of Uttarakhand—where he had gone to celebrate Navaratri at an ashram—Lal returned to his hometown of New Delhi, refreshed, rejuvenated and feeling divine.
The next day, Uttarakhand was hit by heavy rainfall, leading to floods and landslides, and a death toll of nearly 60. Ranikhet, where Lal was stationed, is still cut off from the rest of the state. “It’s a close call, a divine intervention,” Lal tells Forbes India. “I mean, everybody is seeing what has happened. For somebody who got out of there just 24 hours earlier, after spending 11 days, you can call it a coincidence. But you know.”
(This story appears in the 24 December, 2021 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)