Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, said that when his grandfather, Basant Kumar Birla, died five years ago in 2019, he had only five pairs of kurtas-dhotis and three suits. Birla said that his father, Aditya Vikram Birla, his grandfather, BK Birla, and his great-grandfather, Ghanshyam Das Birla, were all products of their times and therefore very different people.

Birla was talking to Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath on the latest episode of his show ‘People by WTF’. “My grandfather died about five years ago, so I went to open the cupboard to look for something. She had five kurtas and dhotis and three dresses. That was all. Just getting a new dress made was like a major project for my grandmother and aunt. This is the kind of life they were used to, and this is the kind of life we ​​were exposed to through them,” Kamath said.

He said that his great-grandfather was the product of a pre-independent India, his grandfather the product of a time of scarcity, when India was in the nascent stage of being a developing nation. “So I mean you lived within your means and you didn’t spend too much. It was a very different mental landscape at that time. My father grew up in liberalized India, and I think the businesses you run also shape you as in person. It’s not just the other way around. So they were all quite different,” he said.

The industrialist said his father, Aditya Vikram Birla, was more expansive in his outlook on business. “My father was riskier and wanted to expand his business outside the country more aggressively. It was also a different India, so you could take bigger bets than, say, my grandfather. So yes, it was three people very different. I had a great relationship with all of them. Each equation was very different, as you can imagine. So, a lot of love and a lot of laughter,” said Birla.

Remembering his youth, Birla called his great-grandfather, with whom he spent hours on Sundays, his best friend. He said his grandfather also loved him immensely. His father, he recalled, was a “hard manager”. “When I started working, I saw it like I hadn’t really experienced it before,” he said.

Birla said her father demanded that she be on top of things all the time, but also gave her a lot of space. “He was also very motivated and very demanding of himself. So I think it was fair,” Birla said.