One man stands between ESPN Star Sports (ESS) and absolute monopoly over cricket telecast from India: Subhash Chandra, the chairman of the Rs 3,500 crore Essel Group.
He has pipped the sports broadcaster in the race for the telecast rights for all cricket played in India for the next four years. ESS has of course challenged it in the courts and a final verdict is awaited.
Though key ESS functionaries say in private that they are still confident of bagging the deal, they know they are against a seasoned street fighter.
The bidi-smoking, softspoken Chandra is known for hardly making any wrong moves and his family and friends alike insist he takes only calculted risks.
For somebody who started his best businesses more by accident than design (Essel Propack, the world's largest flexible packaging company, came into being after a visit to an exhibition abroad, Essel World after a visit to similar entertainment parks overseas and Zee Telefilms after a visit to a friend's place who worked for Doordarshan), Chandra's reputation in the country's corporate circles is formidable.
Born on November 30, 1950, at Adampur Mandi village in the Hissar district of Haryana, Chandra comes from a family of grain traders. His business acumen became visible very early in life when, aged three, he asked his father Nandkishore Goenka to put a lid on his costs if he wanted to make more profits. From a very young age, he was given lessons on the ins and outs of the business from his grandfather, Jaganath Goenka.
The eldest of seven siblings, Chandra set up an oil mill in 1973 when he was just 19. Three years later, in 1976, he started exporting grain to Russia.
The business flourished and he was soon riding the gravy train. He now had the money to get into new businesses which would help him leapfrog into the big league in a little over a decade.
Chandra started the packaging business in 1982 (the family was baffled by his move but Chandra stuck to his guns) and the amusement parks business in 1986. But the biggest of all his ventures happened in 1992 when he set up Zee Telefilms.
That year, he outbid all top Indian businessmen and signed a $5 million lease deal for a transponder on Asiasat with Richard Li, the chief of Star TV, then owned by Hutchvision Group of Hong Kong. Sir James Goldsmith and other UK-based businessmen came forward to help the young aspiring Chandra with funds.
Indian laws restrained him from starting such a project, but Chandra found a way out and set up Asia Today Limited with equity participation from non-resident Indians. Zee TV made its debut on Indian TV screens on October 2, 1992.
Since then, Chandra has considerable expanded his entertainment business. He now has a slew of channels, owns a cable distribution company (Siti Cable), has made films (the hugely succesful Gadar) and runs the country's first DTH service (Dish TV).
He has done two acquisitins -- ETC Networks Ltd and Padmalaya Telefilms Ltd "" to grow the business and has formed a joint venture with AOL Time Warner to form a new company called Zee Turner Private Ltd.
Only a few of Chandra's ideas have ended in disaster, with the most notable being the US satellite communication firm Iridium, which met with a spectacular failure. And he seems to be in no mood to add the cricket telecast rights to the short list.
