Indian cricket draws oodles of aggression from its flamboyant Mr. Fix-It
March 21, 2009: A phone rings at 5 am in a London house. A just out of bed Andrew Wildblood answers it. The voice on the other end is from 5,000 miles away in Mumbai. It belongs to Indian Premier League (IPL) Commissioner Lalit Modi. “I have your IMG team [event managers] sitting with me in my office. Is it possible to shift the IPL to South Africa with three weeks notice?” Wildblood replies, “If the team thought it was possible then it was possible.” Modi says, “Let’s go for it, meet us in Johannesburg on Monday”
At 46 years, Modi wears many hats and juggles them well: IPL Chairman and Commissioner, Vice President of BCCI, Vice President of Punjab Cricket Association, Executive Director of Godfrey Philips India and Director of Various Modi Group Companies. He has to work hard for success; controversy on the other hand comes easily to him. An issue which surfaces every couple of years is his conviction for possessing 400 grams of cocaine when he was a student at Duke University, USA in 1985. In early December his supporters were manhandled by Congress Party workers at the Rajasthan Cricket Association elections. There is a case against him for fraud in the RCA.
(This story appears in the 08 January, 2010 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)