THE MAN BEHIND THE WHEEL: HOW ONKAR S KANWAR CREATED A GLOBAL GIANT

THE MAN BEHIND THE WHEEL: HOW ONKAR S KANWAR CREATED A GLOBAL GIANT

Author: Tim Bouquet 

Rs 595

If you really want to understand and appreciate the genius of former world heavy weight boxing champion Muhammad Ali, you have got be a boxer yourself or you need to have at least tried your hand in boxing. You need to have experienced the terrible pains of being hit on your face with a strong fist. You need to have danced in joy when your own broad fist slammed the face of your opponent sending him crashing on to the floor, knocking him out cold. It’s the same with business too. You should have dabbled in some kind of business to understand the might of a conglomerate and the people behind it.

When I was in school I remember trying my hand in boxing for a while and deciding that it’s not a sport that my parents would encourage. But when I left mainline journalism and later quit working with a leading auto magazine and decided to start my own magazine Motown India to become an entrepreneur, I realised that doing business was exciting and challenging and needed loads of stamina, will power, perseverance, guts and the ability to take buckets full of risks.

When I got my hands on this book ‘THE MAN BEHIND THE WHEEL: HOW ONKAR S KANWAR CREATED A GLOBAL GIANT’ authored by Tim Bouquet, I could not help being nostalgic. I felt as though I was very close to almost all the main stars in the book. In the late 1980s when I started my career with the Hindustan Times on the news desk and became a reporter in the Business Bureau of HT New Delhi outlet around 1991, one of my early assignments was to cover the feud between late Mr Raunaq Singh and his son Mr Onkar Kanwar in Apollo Tyres. I met Mr Singh and I was so charmed by his wit and straight talk that I was really convinced that his son Onkar was on the wrong. When the news of the Apollo feud was reported in HT, it ruffled the Kanwar camp. His PR team got into action and sent me a long note with a lot of facts explaining why Kanwar was made out to be a villain when he was on the right. I carried their views also because as a journalist I was told by my boss that we had to report the facts and not take sides.

As I moved on from HT to other newspapers and leading auto magazines, I interviewed Mr Onkar Kanwar too. My assignments later included interviewing Mr Raaja Kanwar, Mr Neeraj Kanwar, Mr Sunam Sarkar, Mr Satish Sharma.  Now if you think that is not nostalgic enough, I was also in the process of writing a book for Dr Surinder Kapur of Sona Koyo (the company has since been sold to its Japanese partner by his son Sunjay Kapur). Alas, before the book could be completed, Dr Kapur died in Germany in 2015. Dr Kapur was Mr Onkar Kanwar’s brother-in-law.  Dr Kapur was married to his sister Rani. Had the book been completed and printed, it would have also added a lot more insights into the early days of Apollo Tyres and its founder family.

‘Surinder was a very good man, a warm man, like a brother...I was fond of him,’ Onkar says in this book. Surinder too voiced the same opinion about Mr Kanwar when he was giving me inputs for his own book. Of course, during the feud between father and son at Apollo Tyres, Dr Kapur had to face his share of brickbats from both sides. But then this will always remain the untold story in our lives.

But before I move to the book I am reviewing, let me share what the late Dr Kapur had to say about his wife’s family in the book he intended to publish, “Raunaq Singh always wanted to diversify into unrelated businesses which his son was not so keen. His son rightly said that he wanted to focus on tyres. And frankly Onkar has done a great job. Today he is number one not only in India but has become a global player.... He is taking on the world which is the norm of the future. You cannot just be a local player. You have got to invest in R&D, you have to come out with new products etc.”

As for Raunaq Singh, Dr Kapur had these words, “Raunaq Singh was a self made man and a true entrepreneur in the classical sense. He took advantages of opportunities that came his way. He was like a cowboy wanting to conquer the world. Those were times when one could dream of that. The sad thing is that when I look back what legacies has he left behind? ...A lot of closed companies.”

Now coming to the book written by Tim Bouquet, it’s an incredible story of a man who has been instrumental in the growth of Apollo Tyres, a tyre company that hopes to be among the ten biggest global tyre majors. Onkar Kanwar comes out a man who is so passionate about his work and upholds family values to the hilt. You cannot but help admire this man as you progress reading the book.