Varda Shine, the aptly-named managing director of the Diamond Trading Corp. (DTC), a global supplier of rough diamonds, welcomes me warmly into her suite on the sixth floor of the heritage wing of the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower hotel on a late November evening. Our meeting has not been easy to organize—Shine is in India only for a few days and has business meetings to conduct, a conference to attend and a dinner meeting right after our chat. It takes a last-minute shuffling of schedules before we settle on a 1-hour slot over coffee, biscuits and room service chocolates in her suite.
Change agent: When Shine took over as MD, she made several changes in top management in order to bring fresh, new voices to DTC.
(Her dinner appointment would come as a godsend. Within 2 hours of our interview, and almost moments after Shine left the hotel with associates, terrorists laid siege to it for almost three days, gunning down several guests, especially foreigners. Shine was unharmed and returned safely to London.)
That evening, Shine is dressed simply in a printed blouse, skirt and a woollen black bolero. A streak of blood-red colour in her brown hair leaps out. As we walk over and settle into the couch in the corner, I sense Shine shrugging off exhaustion and mentally preparing for our chat. And then, in a flash, there is a fresh smile on her face and she is ready to go. I ask what brings her to India.
“Basically, once a year I go round to each one of the cutting centres around the world and have meetings with all the sightholders. It is really an annual review. How the year has been so far...what are the plans for next year and so on,” explains Shine as a member of her staff orders coffees for all of us. Shine prefers espresso but “by the time they bring it here it will be too cold”, so she settles for black coffee.
She speaks with an unobtrusive but obvious accent that is hard to pin down. It is actually Israeli. Shine was born in Israel and spent the first three decades of her life there before moving to London 11 years ago. But for a quirk of fate she would have become a doctor instead of being at the helm of one of the biggest names in the global diamond business.
After her army service, a mandatory two years for all citizens in Israel, Shine was accepted to study medicine in university. “But then I had eight months to kill from the time I was released from the air force and the academic year started,” explains Shine. So while looking around for ways to “kill her time and collect a little money”, she saw a job advertisement for a sales assistant in Diamdel Israel, a supplier of rough diamonds.
“I went in, saw how things worked and then really learnt it from the bottom up,” remembers Shine. That was the moment, 25 years ago, when Shine’s relationship with the diamond industry began. She repeats the number to herself: “Twenty-five years... shocking, isn’t it?”