Unlike America, India is not known as a land of great upward mobility. We don’t have too many Andrew Carnegies — the billionaire son of an impoverished Scotsman who had relocated to America — or Sergey Brins — the Google founder whose parents immigrated to the US from the USSR during the Cold War with practically nothing but the clothes on their backs. So when one hears of a homegrown, jaw-dropping reversal of fortunes story, it is all the more spectacular for its rarity.
Baba Ramdev’s journey from rags to multi-billionaire is perhaps one of the country’s most striking in recent times. The hirsute, saffron-clad guru helms Patanjali Ayurveda Limited, which is valued at over $3.6 billion (though, as a renunciate, he can’t directly own shares; 96% of the company is owned by his long-time deputy, Acharya Balkrishna).
When the going gets tough
Born Ram Kisan Yadav, sometime between 1965 and 1975 (curiously, he refuses to budge when I press him on the exact year, while an older biographer of his informs me the yogi ‘philosophically’ claims to be born in 1995, when he took sanyas ), to a farming family in the dust bowl of a village called Said Alipur in Haryana, he had a tough childhood. His family was so poor that he and his siblings slept on the floor, he tells me, and played with balls made up of tightly-rolled rags. He used to walk several kilometres to school, wearing slippers made of old tyres.
But, most surprisingly, the man who is a symbol of good health today, was once a sickly child. Ramdev was so obese that he admits to me, “I had to be carried about. I had massive, painful boils on my legs (cupping his hands to demonstrate a golf-ball size) and I still have marks on my thighs.” He was reportedly also afflicted by paralysis, which claimed part of his face. But his superstitious grandmother refused him treatment. “When my mother returned with the medicine, she forced her to throw it out,” says Devdutt Yadav, Ramdev’s older brother, standing in the desolate courtyard of their childhood home.
Life at home was a trial, too. Despite his infirmities, Ramdev had to pitch in with the hard labour on the farm. His father, a taskmaster, occasionally beat him for misdemeanours, real and imagined. Ramdev recalls one occasion when there had been a petty theft in his school. “I kept screaming that I had not stolen anything, but nothing affected him. My mother was crying and he told her that if she tried to protect me, he would hit her, too.” And, in a rare tender moment, he confesses to me, “Had it not been for the diligent care of my mausi and my mother, I probably would have died.”
The tough get going
Today, Ramdev has shrugged off his past, to become a brilliant showman and consummate politician. He comes across as earthy and charming when you talk to him, but also calculating — he wants you to like him, steers the conversation deftly, and reveals little and very carefully. The sanyasi media mogul — he controls two of India’s most prominent religious TV channels, Aastha and Sanskar — is arguably the face of modern yoga and steers the country’s fastest-growing consumer goods company. As is well known, he sells food items from ghee to honey, and cosmetics from shampoo to toothpaste. In fact, the former CEO of Patanjali, SK Patra, reveals to me that Ramdev’s business mantra is to produce everything an ordinary Indian would use from dawn to dusk. So it isn’t surprising that he has also launched swadeshi jeans, and, most recently, started a private security guard agency called Parakram Suraksha.
Challenging the big guns
However, the business tycoon’s biggest success is that he has completely changed the rules of the market. Ramdev speaks to an Indian who was earlier ignored by corporate India. First, he took yoga (once the preserve of the posh, living in the metros, who could afford private teachers and expensive lessons) to the small towns. Meanwhile, his TV show also simplified the discipline — he decoupled asanas from its esoteric and obscure philosophy, and ‘sold’ particular asanas as cures for certain ailments. And he made yoga simple and easy to do, even on the bus or metro — remember all those people you saw rubbing their nails, or doing kapalbhati and pranayama ?
Similarly, when he got into the consumer goods market, he focused on the price-sensitive consumer — who now swears by him, his costing, and his swadeshi ethics. Perhaps no one in recent memory has shaped this market as Ramdev has. In May this year, he announced that the Patanjali group has doubled its revenues, to ₹10,561 crore, in just one year, making it the second largest FMCG company in the country, second only to Hindustan Unilever. But Unilever should not be complacent — the battered, sickly boy from Said Alipur is closing in fast.
Godman to Tycoon — The Untold Story of Baba Ramdev is published by Juggernaut Books. Priced at ₹299. Details: juggernaut.in
