Entrepreneur, activist...

discovers the many shades of The Body Shop's dynamic founder, Dame Anita Roddick

It isn't often that founders of large companies give interviews legs tucked up on a sofa, but Dame Anita Roddick defies most stereotypes. "I don't care for financial journalists," she says without a trace of rancour.

Her issue is that The Body Shop, which she set up in 1976 "to create a livelihood" and which rollercoastered into a great saga of a second-generation Italian immigrant making good ("it looked good on the stockmarkets" she notes wryly) became a point of debate between the press and her.

"They want to know how many shops you're opening, not how many people you're employing," she points out. (Note to self: don't ask how many Body Shops are opening in India.) As for the establishment and traditional businesses, they cannot understand her need to "have fun with the employees", to move away from just making profits for shareholders, out of the realm of glamour that wealth commands.

"Your press writes of a thousand millionaires, but give me a thousand philanthropists any day," she pummels a cushion into shape, dangling one leg, animated as only an activist can be.

The Body Shop is big business. At last count, it was worth £650 million, with over 2,100 stores in 54 worldwide markets. It employs, directly or indirectly, 15,000 people. and Dame Roddick, its founder and "" ever since she sold the company to L'Oreal "" its mentor, says, "Bigness kills creativity. I experienced that. Going public (in 1984) was the major mistake I made. It gave me more money for distribution, management ideas, research, building our own space, but unfortunately with investor shareholders the only focus is: how much money is the company making?"

Was it a hippy thing, this against-large-corporations role she has undertaken for herself? "I'm against global economics, not against globalisation," she explains. "I think it's a very fine thing to be able to eat Indian food in London, but there's more criminal activity in MNCs than anywhere else."

Her public stance against organisations like Exxon-Mobil are well known. "I've been criticised because I name companies," she says, "because I don't buy into their ideology. And the area of corporate social responsibility depresses me because it's been hijacked by corporate consultancies like KPMG and Arthur Andersen."

Maverick, eccentric, angry too: what is it about the establishment in Europe that fails to acknowledge her way of doing business by empowering communities, working for human rights and protesting the exploitation of the planet?

"Their curiosity," she laughs, "is why I'm giving money away." Such as when The Body Shop set up a factory in Glasgow for making soap, "25 per cent of the profits were ploughed back into the community".

"It's important to bring about social and environmental change," she insists, a philosophy that guides The Body Shop range of products too "" whether shea nuts, cocoa beans, organic honey of babassu nut oil "" sourced within community trade environments in poor countries.

"We should have alliances with countries, with botanical gardens, with women's wisdom, and buy local ingredients. And manufacturing "" 90 per cent of which is in England "" should shift across geographies. There is huge business for The Body Shop in the Asia Pacific, and there will be huge business for it in India, so it makes sense to distribute the manufacturing."

India's first Body Shop opened in June this year, in Mumbai, but Roddick has been active in India for two decades, with community project Teddy Exports in Tamil Nadu. Yet, this visit marks the company's official "launch" in India, with three stores in Delhi/NCR, one each in Mumbai and Jaipur, and assorted others to follow.

"There's greater wealth," she says, "there's optimism, but India has less cynicism, deeper intelligence and better English skills than Britain. It hasn't lost its soul, not everything is reduced to the level of economics."

Not that she is above cliches. Gazing out of a window, she says, "I can see the wealth, I can see the silos on which large tenements are being built, and the slums in between."

From the seventh floor of the Taj Mahal Hotel in Lutyens' Delhi, there are neither silos nor slums, only stately mansions and abundant greenery to be seen. Clearly, she's feeding into the third world stereotype, which would be abundantly clear in Mumbai, but is misplaced in Delhi.

Is her involvement with India on a personal or professional level? For the record, The Body Shop in India has tied up with Quest Retail, which in turn has pledged 1 per cent of sales (not profits) to charity.

"My foundation has given money to the community in Tamil Nadu, to build schools, help with water resources "" and now the franchisee here will be the best vigilante for us," she says. "The potential here, in 5-10 years, is stunning" "" and she's speaking of the country rather than for just the future prospects of The Body Shop.

She's impressed, she says, by the Prime Minister: "His village economic ideas are pretty fantastic." Where she would like to get involved would be in knowledge brokering, so anecdotal histories of birth, marriage and death ceremonies are recorded, and so practical home applications like neem oil or curd that healed our forefathers find a place on shelves, modern scientology be dammed. "The poor, whatever they can make at home by way of food, or medical help, is what India needs."

The middle classes, she points out, are afflicted with a Western arrogance, but it is also their dilemna of time that provides companies like The Body Shop with an opportunity. "You will find," she promises, "that just as everything made in Japan has a certain quality, that will happen in India too."

Typical of her generation that reached adulthood in the sixties (she was born in 1942), Roddick's vision is informal, wanting to measure the development of nations through "gross national happiness, not gross national product".

In her global quest for hope, she looks to Mexico, where an indigenous tribe that didn't even speak Spanish led a movement of "populist dissent with huge elegance" using riddles and poetry and wearing masks to "remain enigmatic". Equally resourceful was a protest by farmers in Karnataka who "laughed for 24 hours" to draw attention to the need for education. "The voice of women in India is also strong," she says.

Her own voice was heard best in Business As Unusual, a runaway bestseller. "I knew it would be good," she says, "I wouldn't read a business book without humour or anecdotes, but I also designed it like a magazine, to dip into, on the joys and dilemmas of entrepreneurs, as well as a chapter on the mistakes I made."

Other books followed, and one on global water crisis is part of the curriculum in Australia. Still, A Revolution in Kindness didn't do well. "I thought it was brave to go and speak with prisoners on death row, to go to jail and ask the authorities to be kinder..." she meanders a little.

Having sold her business to write and practice her activism, what does Dame Roddick pack into a day? "I get up, go to office for management planning or visiting labs," she says.

"I park my car by a local cinema and try to get them to screen DVDs on the prisoners on death row. I'm writing my next book, Tell Me Tales, and working on my foundation's plans to give its immense budget for social rights and justice. I visit my mum, or go to the movies. I take lots of transatlantic calls, I'm planning to go to Sudan and Bolivia ...then there's the washing and cleaning, telling the husband to fold his pants..."

Under the skin of an entrepreneur and activist, she seems to suggest, she's just another immigrant housewife in England. Only, no one's buying that.