‘He had five kurta-dhotis, three suits’: KM Birla tells Nikhil Kamath about grandfather BK Birla

Kumar Mangalam Birla, Chairman of the Aditya Birla Group, said that when his grandfather, Basant Kumar Birla, passed away five years ago in 2019, he only owned 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, hence, very strikingly different people.

Birla was speaking to Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath in the latest episode of his show ‘People by WTF’. “My grandfather passed away about five years ag,o and I happened to go and open his cupboard looking for something. He had five kurtas and dhotis and three suits. That was about it. Just to get him to make a new suit for himself was like a major project for my grandmother and my aunt. That’s the kind of life that they were used to, and that’s the kind of life that we got exposed to through them,” said Kamath.

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

The industrialist said that his father, Aditya Vikram Birla, was more expansive in his view on business. “My father was more of a risk-taker, wanting 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 could. So yeah, they were all three very different people. I had a great rapport with all of them. Every equation was very different, as you can imagine. So yeah, a lot of love and a lot of good cheer and laughter,” said Birla. 

Recalling his younger days, Birla called his great-grandfather, with whom he spent hours on Sundays, his best friend. He said that his grandfather, too, loved him immensely. His father, he recalled, was a “tough taskmaster”. “When I started going to work, I saw him as if I really hadn’t experienced it before,” he said.  

Birla said his father demanded that he remain on top of things all the time, but he also gave him a lot of space. “He was also very driven and very demanding of himself as well. So I think that was fair,” said Birla.