Harsh Neotia has made a name in the real estate business with his design sensibilities, says Gargi Gupta. He's now ready to take on the rest of the country.
A man’s office is often a window to his personality. So it is with Harsh Neotia, chairman and managing director of Ambuja Realty, one of eastern India’s largest real estate developers, and the man generally credited with pioneering the public-private partnership model in housing projects.
It’s a large room, large enough to accommodate a writing desk, a conference table, and a few leather couches…with enough room left for the large built Neotia to walk about easily; wood panelled and elegantly furnished with lots of books, trophies, and everywhere, Ganeshas — in antique terracotta and dokra idols, as also paintings in the traditional Tanjore style, a few modern ones…and I see, even an oil by Neotia himself.
“Oh! That’s something I did nearly 23 years ago,” Neotia waves aside with a humility that seems quite characteristic of him. “When success is thrust upon you, you look back and think that perhaps you worked for it,” he says, “but the truth is that you were only trying to do your job properly, working around your limitations, and trying to make a little money.”
And this from a man who, despite the downturn in the real estate sector, has just announced plans to invest Rs 5,000 crore over the next five years in an array of projects — an IT park in Mohali, boutique and business hotels all over the east and, a hospital joint-venture with Elbit Imaging Group of Israel.
Grand plans, but given Neotia’s track record until now, he just might make it work. The scion of a Marwari business family settled in Bengal for more than a hundred years now (“we’re Bengalis, for all practical purposes, except that we don’t eat fish,” says Neotia — a fond “Horsho” to Buddhadeb Bhattacharya, Jyoti Basu and other Left politicians with whom he shares excellent relations), Neotia says he got into realty quite by accident.
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“A friend of my father, who had around six kathas of land in Chowringhee Lane, was leaving Calcutta but couldn’t sell it because he wasn’t getting a good valuation. He suggested that my father develop it into a block of flats that he could then lease out. I was in college then, and I said I would work on it.”
What distinguishes Neotia, and could account for his success, however modest he may feel about it, is the unique design sensibility he brings to each of his projects. Starting with Udayan, Neotia’s first big break and Kolkata’s first gated community, designed by Balkrishna Doshi; City Centre, adjudged the best mall in India last year by a leading business channel and now, City Centre II by Kapil Bhalla, Neotia manages to differentiate his projects by their architecture. And it’s not just because these are big time architects — Neotia has his own ideas about what he wants and works with his architects to realise his vision.
For example, when he was conceptualising City Centre, Neotia says he did not want to recreate the box-like mall that was the paradigm in the West. “I wanted to recreate the sense of chaos that is so integral to all Indian bazaars. I remember once my mother had asked me to pick up a sari she’d given to a tailor in New Market on the way home from school. I had gone to his shop before with my mother and felt confident that I would be able to find my way. But once inside the market, I was completely at sea. That experience came back to me and set me thinking about how to bring in a sense of discovery to the design of a mall.”
The result — a line of low buildings on various levels, connected by meandering walkways, partly airconditioned, where one could sit and sip chai at the corner shop, or lounge about on the steps everywhere. City Centre took some time to take off, Neotia acknowledges, since initially retailers weren’t too keen to come all the way to Salt Lake and consumers found it difficult to work out the floor plan in their heads, but today it’s among the city’s hippest malls, a shopping destination which boasts of high footfalls and higher conversions.
Ask him about his interest in design and in art, and Neotia says — that streak of self-effacement in evidence again — that it was a part of his upbringing. “My mother was a student of Girija Devi and my aunt was a keen horticulturist who’s won a lot of awards for her gardens.” And then, of course, there was his uncle, Suresh Neotia (co-founder of Ambuja Cements which was sold to Holcim for Rs 2,100 crore in 2006), one of the biggest collectors of ancient Indian art and sculptures. “I grew up seeing people come home to admire ‘broken torsos’ and ‘dirty murtis’, thinking that they must be crazy to find beauty in all this.” His tastes improved with age, and for a while Neotia himself turned collector.
But he stopped a few years ago, he says, when he found that he was growing “acquisitive”. “I’ve given away all my expensive pens and watches too. I’ve just one Titan watch now. Even in clothes, I pick up my regulation three-four white and blue shirts and black and grey pants, neutral colours with everything going with everything else. Madhu [his wife] gets horrified, but it makes life so much simpler.”
The only luxury he still permits himself these days is books, and the only distraction, three holidays in a year with the family. Other than that it’s work, work and more work.