Meeting Sudip Dutta, the chairman and managing director of Ess Dee Aluminium, can be a surreal experience. Here he was, on a typically wet monsoon evening in Mumbai, sitting at a corner table in Copper Chimney, a restaurant that draws the reasonably well-heeled.
His Toyota Prado was parked outside, while a Mitsubishi Pajero, a Mercedes Benz and a fourth car he could not recall were at home. Clad in a tailored suit, he looked well groomed, and well fed. But when he spoke, it was of pantha bhat, which is the previous day’s fermented rice, flavoured with salt, chopped onions and pickles. It is something the poor in the eastern states survive on.
Sipping Chivas Regal, Dutta said: "Often, our family would have pantha bhat for breakfast, and we didn’t know where the next meal would come from." That was 1988, in Durgapur. His father, a former army man, had just died.
Preparing for his higher secondary examinations, all Dutta knew was that Mumbai was the land of opportunity. Finally, the day the practical exams ended, Dutta bought the ticket. "I have everything now. But there is one thing I know. You can control everything but hunger. If you are hungry, you have to do something about it."
As India has gone through various phases of growing up - turbulent, traumatic, fascinating and full of opportunities - people have come from everywhere and nowhere to script success stories. Dutta is part of a small group that has risen above its middle or lower middle class moorings, without legacy or capital, many of them without enough education, to spawn modern, but as yet unsung, fairy tales.
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