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things when he’s taken care of food and shelter. Although my father must have been having the same thoughts, he had to be doing his duties to his family. I’m a little more comfortable at a younger age. That is one of the reasons why this comes up.’
    ‘Can anyone be successful in business without some aggression?’
    ‘Aggression creates a vicious circle. I’ll give you an example. We have a man called Ambani here. He’s going to become the largest industrialist in India in a couple of years. This man would really give you the true picture of how business success works in India. He is a good administrator and a good manipulator. Those are different words. An administrator organizes his business, a manipulator manages the world outside. Ambani’s got the foresight, and finally he’s got the aggression. If you compare him to old industrialists like Tata and Birla, he’s one generation ahead. Birla had the licences. He put up industries, he’s manufacturing goods. This man Ambani goes one step ahead. He makes and breaks policies for himself. Now he sees a demand for polyester. It’s shiny and it lasts and lasts. It’s perfect for India, where people can’t afford to buy too many clothes. So he gets into polyester, and he makes sure that nobody else is involved in it. After this he takes the next step – makingthe raw material for polyester. Then he wants other people to make polyester so they can use his raw material. This backward integration will get him to a situation where he will control the textile industry in India. Polyester will be the largest market.
    ‘If I want to go out into any business in India, that is what I would have to do. Something like that.
    ‘But there is another side. There is a firm here called Bajaj. They are the second largest scooter-manufacturer in the world. Three years ago, when the Japanese entered India, we thought that Bajaj would soon be out. He’s not only able to stay, but he’s grown much more than all of them. He’s a Harvard graduate. But it’s a conventional family, with all the culture and conventions of Indians. They’ve gone through personal taxation at 97 per cent and inheritance tax as high as 80 per cent, and yet today they are still very large. This gives me confidence that it can still work.’
    By ‘it’ he meant the traditional Indian way, the way that fitted in with ‘all the culture and conventions of Indians’.
    Papu said, ‘The important point here is your asking me how to be sucessful without aggression. The problem is discipline. I don’t find my non-vegetarian friends have the will-power and discipline and character that the vegetarians have. When we started out being vegetarians we never thought of these things. But now, looking back at life, we find the non-vegetarians have a problem.’
    Papu had a plan of sorts for his own future. He wanted to work for the next ten years, to exercise the business faculties with which he had been endowed. He wanted in those ten years to make enough money to live on for the rest of his life. And then he wanted to devote himself to social work. But he had doubts about his plan. He had doubts especially about the wisdom or efficiency of giving up. If he personally went out and did social work, wouldn’t that be a waste of his natural talent? Wouldn’t he serve his social cause better if he continued in business and devoted his profits – which would grow – to his social work?
    These ideas were worrying him. He was uncertain about his promptings, and that worried him even more. He thought that, living the kind of life he did, the concern he felt for the poor was at the moment only ‘hypocritical’.
    ‘If I say I should be doing social work, why should I be here in an air-conditioned office? If I have a genuine feeling, I should beout there in the slum, working. But up to the age of forty I may have to continue to live like a hypocrite. And then I would do what I want. Today I am getting so great a