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Meet the prime mover of India's first cruise ship, ready to take holidayers aboard this October.

If Ravi K Mehrotra had made some excuse to his boss, Admiral S C Nanda, then chairman of the Shipping Corporation of India (SCI), that morning in April 1975, and wriggled out of going to Tehran at 12-hours' notice as India's representative at IranIn, an Indian-Iranian shipping company, he would never have gone to Iran.

He would never have become shipping advisor to the Shah of Iran and later Ayatollah Khomeini, never founded his own shipping and oil companies, and never launched what is going to be India's first cruise line.

SCI provided him the training and experience, and the Iran-Iraq war (1985-1989), the capital. In England, where he is now based, he taught himself to develop an appetite for risk.

As chairman of the Foresight group of companies with interests as diversified as shipping, oil drilling and exploration, hospitality, IT-enabled services and call centres, Mehrotra has staked his all ($25 million, to begin with) on one project: a cruise ship that is India's very own.

Scheduled to start on 7 October, M V Ocean Odyssey will sail from Goa to Lakshadweep Islands and return to Goa. The plan is simple "" offer chartered flights from Europe and the US to cruise-lovers bored with the overcrowded beaches of Miami, Bahamas and Nassau.

Ocean Odyssey offers the noisy sophistication of Goa followed by the solitude of the pristine beaches of Lakshadweep and the Andamans (and could extend the cruise to Colombo too). The cruise, Mehrotra is clear, will be for the high-end traveller.

The ship has been retrofitted in Greece with every possible mod con including a crane on board that will be used to land portable toilets in Lakshadweep.

The cruise line has been given clearances by the Ministry of Home Affairs and Environment on the express condition that the ecological balance of several islands (foreigners were not allowed to visit some of them at all till recently, and even Indians had to take permits) will not be upset.

Mehrotra, who continues to hold an Indian passport, says it won't. Cruise-travellers will spend the day lounging on beaches and will be transported by boat back to the ship in the evening where they will dance the night away, play baccarat, drink the best wines and dine off the finest silver.

But it is a project fraught with risk. Ocean Odyssey is a four-star ship (there are only 5-6 five-star cruise ships in the world) that will cost $20,000 a day to run even if there isn't a single passenger. A cruise liner can work only seven months a year.

He admits he hasn't decided what it will do for the rest. And the Odyssey can sleep just 250 passengers "" which simply does not work to economies of scale ("Internationally, if you have a ship with less than 750, your project is doomed to failure," he says cheerfully).

For 250 passengers, you need a crew of at least 150. The money invested in the project is all his own: as there is nothing comparable, he couldn't have borrowed money and it would have taken too long any way. He has two years to test the business model. "I'm an entrepreneur: so I must be able to take risks," he says, his eyes twinkling.