Mickey speaks about the family business in the first-person plural. He has grown up absorbing business ideas and techniques, and they are a natural part of his speech.
“When our liquor business was at its height, we controlled 19 per cent of Indian liquor retail. At that time, the government auctioned liquor outlets to the highest bidder. Later on it introduced a lottery system to prevent monopolies. But we could still grow the business because we had so many employees. In any lottery in our region, out of 100 entrants, 80 were our men.”
Mickey was sent to a series of expensive schools, but he was repeatedly expelled, and at the age of sixteen he dropped out for good. He went to London for a year or two to have fun: clubs, parties, and everything else that a teenager with a well-stocked bank account can think up.
When he came back, he was put in charge of one of the family’s sugar mills. But his heart was not in it — and the real estate boom was on. In 2001, the family set up a real estate business and Mickey, twenty-one and entirely untrained, was given the task of building the largest shopping mall in northern India.
“When I was in England I spent a lot of time walking around malls, studying how they were made. There’s no point re-inventing the wheel. I know more than anyone in India about how you set up a mall, how you arrange your brands. My father had no experience in a professional context, so everything I know about the professional context I’ve learned myself. I introduced computer systems into the business: I taught myself Oracle programming because the professional contractors were no good. Then I taught myself all about the latest building techniques. My first mall was built with special pre-fabricated steel pillars which had never been used in Indian malls before. Recently, I taught myself finance. I read finance texts online and every time I didn’t know a word, I looked it up. Six months ago I didn’t know anything and now I can conduct finance meetings with PriceWaterhouse.”
Mickey’s mall was famous for having Delhi’s most luxurious and hi-tech nightclub. It was Mickey’s pet project, his personal party zone, with endless champagne for him and his friends — and his nightly arrival there, surrounded by bodyguards, was always a frisson.
“For a time I was the man in Delhi. Loads of people wanted to be my friend. Women wanted to sleep with me. I said to my wife, ‘If I hadn’t been married, things would have been very different.’ A lot of people were very fake.”
Like many Delhi rich boys, Mickey was given a big wedding as a way of winding down his wild years. When he was twenty-two, he married his childhood sweetheart; their reception had 6,000 guests and featured dance routines by Bollywood divas. Mickey still loves parties and, as I discover during our conversation, he becomes relaxed and witty with alcohol, but there is no doubt that he has by now grown into a fully fledged partner to his father. He’s ready to shut down his club: he doesn’t have time to attend to it anymore, and he doesn’t want anyone else to run it. He operates five shopping malls across India, and he has another 1,400 acres under development. And that is just the beginning. He is moving on to much bigger plans.
“We’ve just leased 700,000 acres for seventy-five years; we’re opening up food processing, sugar and flower plantations.”
He is so matter-of-fact that I’m not sure if I’ve heard correctly. We have already discussed how laborious it is to acquire land in India, buying from farmers five or ten acres at a time. I can’t imagine where he could get hold of land on that scale.
“Where?” I ask.
“Ethiopia. My father has a friend who bought land from the Ethiopian president for a cattle ranch there. The president told him he had other land for sale. My dad said, ‘This is it, this is what we’ve been looking for, let’s go for it.’ We’re going in there with Boris Berezovsky.51 Africa is amazing. That’s where it’s at. You’re talking about numbers that can’t even fit into your mind yet. Reliance, Tata, all the big Indian corporations are setting up there, but we’re still ahead of the curve. I’m going to run this thing myself for the next eight years, that’s what I’ve decided. I’m not giving this to any CEO until it meets my vision. It’s going to be amazing. You should see this land: lush, green. Black soil, rivers.”
Mickey tells me how he has 100 farmers from Punjab ready with their passports to set off for Ethiopia as soon as all the papers are signed.
“Africans can’t do this work. Punjabi farmers are good because they’re used to farming big plots. They’re not scared of farming 5,000 acres. Meanwhile I’ll go there and set up polytechnics to train the Africans, so they’ll be ready when the sugar mills start up.”
Shipping farmers from Punjab to work on African plantations is a plan of imperial proportions. And there’s something imperial about the way he says ‘Africans’. I’m stunned. I tell him so.
“Thank you,” he says.
“What is on that land right now?” I ask, already knowing that his response, too, will be imperial.
“Nothing.”
Mickey is excited to be talking about this. His spirits seem to be entirely unaffected by the recession that currently dominates the headlines. He orders another beer, though we have exceeded his time. All of a sudden, I find him charismatic. I can see why he makes things happen: he has made me believe, as he must have made others believe, that he can do anything. I ask him how he learned to think like this.
“I’m only twenty-eight,” he says. “Why not?”
He becomes flamboyant.
“We’re going to be among the top five food processors in the world. You know the first company I’m going to buy? Heinz.”
I’m interested in his “Why not?” Is it on the strength of such throwaway reason that 700,000 acres of Ethiopia are cleared and hundreds of farmers shipped across the world? I wonder what the emotional register of this is for him. It seems as if, somewhere, it’s all a bit of a lark.
“I sometimes wonder why I work,” he says. “I do ask that question. I don’t need to work. But what else am I going to do? You can’t sit in beach resorts for 365 days a year. So I think of crazy things. I like it when you think up something, and it’s so wild you’re messed in the head and you think, ‘How can I do this?’ — and then you think, ‘Why not?’”
I feel like pointing out that life holds more possibilities for someone like him than just sitting on the beach. “Messed in the head” sounds like language that remains from his wild days, as if the whole thing is about getting a high. I ask him how he wants to spend his money.
“Currently I drive a BMW 750i. It’s good for long drives to the mall I’m building in Ludhiana. The car I really want is an Aston Martin DBS. But I’ll buy it later, when I deserve it more. My father wanted to buy me a nice sports car three years ago but I said, ‘Wait.’ I set myself certain goals. By the time I’m forty I want a 160-foot boat. I want a nice Gulfstream plane. And I want to be able to run them without it pinching me.”
Mickey talks as if he were saving up for a motorbike or a fridge, and it seems strangely banal. This is a man who can dream up earth-bending forms of money-making, but his ideas of spending it are consumerist in the most ordinary of ways. His middle-class vocabulary seems at odds with his multibillion-dollar scale, and I wonder if he is deferring his sports car so as not to run out of future acquisitions too quickly. I wonder if the whole enterprise does not teeter on the edge of senselessness, if he is not in fact still waiting for someone to supply him with a meaning for this money around which his life is organised.
Unprompted, he becomes philosophical.