by Siddhartha D. Kashyap

For the living doyen Pralhad P Chhabria (78), chairman of the Finolex Group, there is always something more than God-and-luck to succeed in life. “One should have the right attitude, be observant and very clear on what s/he wants to achieve,” he said.

And there couldn’t be a better example than the man himself, the chairman of the Rs2000crore Finolex Group, which has its interest in cables and PVC resin.

There’s No Such Thing as a Self-Made Man, the 334-page biography, is an attempt by Chhabria to inspire GenNext that the word ‘impossible’ doesn’t exists, ‘’if one has the right attitude and thinks beyond destiny.’’
Authored by Saaz Aggarwal, the book will be released on released by former director-general of the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), RA Mashelkar on March 8.

Written in first person account, There’s No Such Thing as a Self-Made Man gives a detailed account on Chhabria’s life, from the turbulent times after partition to becoming the champion of the Indian industry. What’s more, Chhabria has just passed the second standard.
At one level, this is a thrilling rags-to-riches story, where Chhabria, then just 15-year-old, arrived in Pune two years after the independence, and worked as a domestic help in the home of a relative.

He, however, began his career at the tender age of 12, as a cleaning boy in a small cloth shop at a salary of Rs10 every month.
“As a worker, I had to change my style of dress from the shirts and shorts, I had worn all these years and adopt the more grown-up kurta-pajama and topi. Since I could barely read or write, I could be given only casual work. My duties included sweeping and cleaning the shop before we started the day, offering water to customers, clearing away the samples of fabric and other goods after they left, and performing any odd job given. All this was a great shock to me. My childhood had led me to believe that work was something done only by servants. Until the death of my father when I was 12, I had never even dressed myself without help. It was just incomprehensible that I should now find myself in this position,” Chhabria wrote in the first chapter My Interrupted Childhood.

As Chhabria said, “When I was fulfilling my duties of cleaning, buying vegetables, staying up late to fill buckets of water and rising early to bring in the milk, could I have ever dreamt that one day, I would be where I’m today.”

Chabbria’s daughter Aruna Katara, who runs the International Institute of Information Technology (IsquareIT), said, “Journeying with my dad through the events and twists of fate gives the experience of a best-selling thriller.

It was Aruna and her brother Prakash who ‘nagged’ the otherwise reclusive Chhabria for three long years to accede to this idea of narrating his life in the form of a book. Ulhas Latkar, the publisher of the book, said it will become a case study for most management institutes.
Computer scientist Vijay Bhatkar, who has written the foreword of the book, said, “Finolex’s success comes largely from PP saheb’s inclination to seize opportunities, ability to take quick, clear decisions, and to monitor implementation to the smallest detail, persevering despite all obstacles, and only then moving, single mindedly, to the next target.”