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Karsanbhai Patel, Chairman and managing director of Nirma Ltd The round, bespectacled face, the great shining pate with a crescent-moon of hair on its fringe, and the simple white cotton shirt are typical of thousands of middle-class people who commute daily between their modest homes in the suburbs and their places or work in the city. But this is not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill blue collar worker. A closer look at his steely eyes and the determined set of his jaw will assure you that this is self-made man whose ambition is far from having run its course. It is a long, hard road that Karsanbhai has trudged to get where he has. It was partly economic adversity that first turned his thoughts to a part-time entrepreneurship in 1968. He was a chemist with the Gujarat Minerals Development Corporation, and had to work in a dingly, ill-equipped laboratory in Ahmedabad. The work was dull and his salary of Rs.400/- was grossly insufficient to take care of all his expenses. It was during experiments in his kitchen that his knowledge of chemicals enabled him to concoct an effective detergent which was inexpensive enough to allow him to sell it to his neighbour’s for a small profit. He called the turmeric yellow powder Nirma after his then one-year-old daughter, Niranjana, who was affectionately known to everyone as Nirma (she was to tragically die at the age of 20 in October, 1987 in a car accident). For harried housewives, struggling to balance their monthly budgets, the product came as a boom. It was much cheaper than Surf, which had already gone well out of their reach; and it washed clothes nearly as well. Its cleansing power was far superior to that of the slabs of cheap washing soaps that had been their sole alternative until then. As word-of-mouth spread, Karsanbhai got more and more customers to whom he effected his deliveries on foot. One of the basic axioms of management is to avoid a head-on confrontation with a giant multi-national, especially one which is the undisputed leader in its field. Karsanbhai Patel chose to buck these grandiose theories, and took on the might of Hindustan Lever with his puny homespun outfit. Taking on the might of a multinational, his-priced detergent Nirma captured a majority market share arresting the sales and growth of a consumer giant’s upmarket brand. Patel rarely gives interviews, letting his work speak for itself. And the fact that managers at Hindustan Lever continue to talk about him with great respect only enhances his standing in the industry. N R Narayana Murthy, founder & chief mentor, Infosys Technologies An Indian IT chief who's really made it big without dropping his ethical precepts by the wayside is Nagawara Ramarao Narayana Murthy, Chairman of Infosys. Born in 1946, Murthy's father was a schoolteacher in Kolar district, Karnataka, India. A bright student, Murthy went on to acquire a degree in Electrical Engineering from Mysore University and later studied Computer Science at the IIT, Kanpur, India. The Infosys legend began in 1981 when Narayana Murthy dreamt of forming his own company, along with six friends. There was a minor hitch, though-he didn't have any seed money. Luckily, like many Indian women who save secretly without their husband's knowledge, his wife Sudha-then an engineer with Tatas-had saved Rs 10,000. This was Murthy's first big break. In 21 years that have followed since then, he has managed to do much of that.
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