Velumani from Coimbatore from 2 lakhs to 3,300 crores ! :- Velumani says his wife -- a woman he was initially reluctant to marry -- was the backbone of Thyrocare, the company he had built from scratch with a capital of Rs 2 lakh (Rs 200,000).
"No man can be successful unless his wife trusts, energises, supports and appreciates him," he says.
"If a wife questions or doesn't trust you, it can dissipate all your energy."
In his case, not only did she support him, she was his pillar.
Arokiaswamy Velumani with his wife Sumathi
Velumani was born in 1959 to a landless farmer in a tiny village 26 km from Coimbatore.
Unable to cope with adverse circumstances for what appeared to be an endless period of time, Velumani's father had given up taking care of his family, which included four children, early in life.
Faced with her husband's helplessness, Velumani's mother took on the responsibility of keeping their head above water by investing in two buffaloes.
The money from the milk -- Rs 50 a week -- was what sustained the family for almost 10 years.
To attend college, Velumani had to leave the village. His motivation to enroll in college was unusual: To get a 'fair-skinned wife'. "In those days in our village, only boys who were graduates could hope to marry a fair girl," he says.
Two, almost everyone who interviewed him wanted to know what experience he had. As a fresher straight out of college, he had none.
The matter irked him to such an extent that today he employs only freshers in his company that has 700-odd people.
After months of looking, he finally landed a job at a capsule-making factory as a chemist on a salary of Rs 150 a month. "Graduates in Tamil Nadu then were paid less than watchmen," he says.
He used to keep Rs 50 for himself and send Rs 100 home to his parents, who needed the money to educate his siblings.
"In some ways, I had become a father at the age of 10 when I realised that my father could not bear the burden (of the family)," he says.
After marriage, Velumani started doing his PhD in thyroid biochemistry (by then his daughter, the second child, was born).
Now 27, Velumani's son (an MTech in biotechnology) and his daughter (25) -- both unmarried and missing their mother "like anything" -- live in the laboratory with their father.
His children are frugal in their spending and approach to life. Does he then think they will amplify what he has built?
His daughter says he had an advantage, "the luxury of poverty," but he thinks the values instilled by him and his wife will hold them in good stead no matter what.
Frugality is the cornerstone of both his life and Thyrocare's.
But even as his investment of Rs 2 lakh grew to Rs 3,300 crore (Rs 33 billion), Velumani did not have the pleasure of sharing his joy with the one person who had contributed to it the most.
I feel tears pricking my eyes as I listen to Velumani's poignant description of his wife's illness, the mishandling, or so he suspects, by her caregivers in her short period of illness (she was diagnosed on October 1, 2015 and died on February 13, 2016), how he tried his best not to marry her but eventually did and how it turned out to be his best decision ever.
What kind of mishandling, I butt in. "She walked in alive and all I got back was a corpse. In between, I know nothing about what happened."
http://www.rediff.com/business/report/from-2-lakhs-to-3300-crores-how-a-velumani-did-it/20160608.htm
Posted by: Ravi Narasimhan <ravi.narasimhan.in@gmail.com>
| Reply via web post | • | Reply to sender | • | Reply to group | • | Start a New Topic | • | Messages in this topic (1) |
To subscribe send a mail to Keralites-subscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Send your posts to Keralites@yahoogroups.com.
Send your suggestions to Keralites-owner@yahoogroups.com.
To unsubscribe send a mail to Keralites-unsubscribe@yahoogroups.com.
Homepage: http://www.keralites.net
No comments:
Post a Comment