Anoothi Vishal meets Samir Modi who juggles his chain of convenience stores with his brand of cosmetics and has a lot of fun in the process.
The day I meet Samir Modi, managing director, ColourBar Cosmetics — also behind the chain of TwentyFour Seven retail stores — for lunch, he is wearing a discreet coat of nail paint on one of his thumbs! Even as I gawk, he shows off the shade while explaining that this is merely testing the product and that he is as involved with the creative side of his business, with product development and selection, as with things such as marketing and management.
“This,” he tells me, holding out the thumb with the translucent coat, “will remain till it has worn off completely on its own. I won’t remove it. I want to see how long it lasts,” he says, and then begins to question my own cosmetics preferences (I have none), pronouncing that I am really the right customer for ColourBar “because we are in the business of converting”, and advising me on what make-up to wear to office! Obviously, it isn’t everyday that one has such conversations at a business lunch.
But Modi, as I am beginning to find out, is quite unusual for a corporati. Not only will he happily wear nail paint, he will also show you restaurant menus, neatly categorised, fed into his BlackBerry. The CEO-fave gizmo is used by Modi to jot down his favourite dishes at restaurants he frequents abroad, “so that I know exactly what to order when I eat there next.”
For someone who is very much a foodie — he is known to cook entire meals for friends, starting from scratch, going to the market to buy veggies and making his own pastes and sauces, no short-cuts in jars for him — Modi confesses to being quite fussy.
When he travels around the world, which he does pretty often, he knows exactly which restaurants to visit in any given city thanks to the BlackBerry lists. And he will order exactly the same dish that he had ordered the last time. “I stick to my favourites,” he announces — a mushroom salad or charcoal grilled pork at a small Hong Kong eatery called the Chilli Club but also paranthas at ITO, Delhi, off the street. And he’ll talk just as fondly of the gigantic Nirula’s milkshakes of his childhood and of omlette burgers that few of us know even existed... So, how does he ever try out anything new? Modi says that’s only when one of his dining companions has ordered something that he ends up liking and feeding into his BlackBerry! Otherwise, he is fixed about what heexpects: “Paneer and aloo are always on my table.” Plus, the cook in his house can’t ever have a bad day. “If I don’t like the look of something, I am known to walk away from the table.”
If you think that’s being imperious, it could be because of Modi’s undoubtedly privileged background — scion to the KK Modi group. But Modi insists that he has not only waited on tables and the like “to experience something different” while studying in Australia (he saved up his first earnings to buy CD players for his parents) but also that he is “as different from my father as the ground from the ceiling” in terms of style of functioning at work and otherwise.
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For instance, a fancy dress day is something his father would perhaps never have dreamt of — as part of the company’s work ethic. The son, on the other hand, has made it mandatory for his staff to come in, one day in a year, impersonating others. No excuses are accepted for not turning up. And Modi himself likes to startle people showing up once in a while in, say, a flowing Arab garb. The point? Well, to think out of the box, inspire creativity...
As a student, Modi took up boxing (making it to the state level) and says he has never lost a match. He may have brought some of that focus into his work now but more than that he feels he has inherited creative genes from his mother, Bina, a successful restaurateur in her own right and in whose Ego Thai restaurant in Delhi we now sit, having some excellent Pad Thai.
If food and fancy dress are not enough to lend an edge to boring corporate life, there are other things: At night, Modi says, he stays up sometimes to make greeting cards for friends and family members and has even put together and printed coffee-table books to mark special occasions for people.
The restaurant business, which should have been so obvious to him, is however something that he does not intend to get into what with the family already owning a chain. But his foodie inclinations have meant that he runs a set of convenience stores where food, packaged, ready-to-eat, forms a focus. “I personally approve everything that you will find there,” he says, “and test products.” We believe him.
