He, and BPL, did well. For a time, Chandrasekhar and Sunil Bharti Mittal, now chairman of Bharti Airtel, were spoken of in the same breath. The two even posed in dark suits for the cover of a business magazine and presented the very image of a new India. Then things went wrong. Debt piled up, a proposed merger didn’t materialize, and BPL lost out on an opportunity to parlay its early success in the business into a pan-Indian mobile footprint like Bharti did. Still, Chandrasekhar did come out on top, when he sold BPL’s mobile business to the Essar Group in a transaction that is reported to have left him with around Rs1,600 crore. That was in 2005. And Chandrasekhar, who must have been tired of it all (he also fought a bruising battle with his father-in-law for control of BPL’s mobile businesses), took a break.
After emerging from that hiatus, Chandrasekhar has entered businesses as diverse as container trains, ports, radio, media, and aircraft maintenance. He also managed to get himself elected to the Rajya Sabha as an independent from Karnataka in 2006.
Which is why he took out advertisements (at his own expense, he hastens to add) to encourage people to vote in the recently concluded Karnataka elections.
Evidently, the man who has effected a remarkable makeover in his person and business wants to do the same with the political system, and even Ficci.
“I don’t want Ficci to be seen as a cosy lobbying agency for the interests of a section of business. I want it to be a platform for entrepreneurs and those businessmen who want to be a part of nation building,” Chandrasekhar says, adding that he would like to “reinvent” the organization.
As for politics, Chandrasekhar considers it serious business and rattles off details of the issues he has raised and his attendance in Parliament. Business itself is best left to the people he has hired to run his companies, Chandrasekhar says. He is still there to set the direction, but they do all the running there is to be done.
Jupiter’s war chest has allowed it the luxury of entering businesses that have either just emerged on the Indian landscape or those set for frenetic growth. “There is no big picture. My investments have been in five chosen areas of aviation, technology, transportation infrastructure, media and entertainment, and hospitality, sectors which I think will be relevant and fast growing in four to five years from now. Professional managers run the show, I am just a investor and lead coach,” says Chandrasekhar.
He is also wary of discussing the nitty-gritty of his individual businesses, claiming that most of his companies are still in stealth mode because he doesn’t want to attract attention or competition by talking too much about them. This, despite some very public wins such as the Rs1,300 crore Vijaydurg port in Maharashtra or the acquisition of engineering services firm Axis-IT&T.
Chandrasekhar says the strategy for his business investments is to identify a fast growing opportunity, scale up the business and bring in a partner only after it has achieved a certain size and momentum. “We are builders of ventures and not necessarily turned on by running it. We build scale and then bring in a partner.”
Chandrasekhar has big plans for media, too. He runs TV channels in Kannada and Malayalam, an FM station, and a city magazine. “I like the non-Hindi and non-English media space because I see a lot of potential. By the end of the year, we will have channels in Telugu, Tamil, Marathi…nearly nine more channels,” he says.