Indian owns company that once owned Indioa : Veteran Prabhjot Singh Chhatwal PLS Retd.

Indian owns company that once owned India:
Mumbai-born Sanjiv Mehta buys world’s first MNC,
The East India Company
London, February 14:With just around a month to go for the
re-launch of the East India Company, the world’s first
multinational whose forces once ruled much of the globe, its
new Indian owner says “a huge feeling of redemption”
overwhelms him. It’s been a long, emotional and personal
journey for Sanjiv Mehta, a Mumbai-born entrepreneur who
completed the process of buying the East India Compan
(EIC) in 2005 from the “30 or 40” persons who owned it.
Acutely aware that he owned a piece of history, at its height
the company generated half of world trade and employed a
third of the British workforce, Mehta, now the sole owner,
dived into the company’s rich and ruthless past in order to
give it a new direction for the future.
With a $15-million investment and inputs from a range of
experts, from designers and brand researchers to historians,
Mehta is today poised to open the first East India Company
store in London’s upmarket Mayfair neighbourhood in March.
And then there is the inevitable and daunting task of
launching in India, a country whose resources, army, trade
and politics the company had controlled for some 200 years.
It’s a task that Mehta has not taken lightly, he told IANS in
an interview. “Put yourself in my shoes for a moment: On a
rational plane, when I bought the company I saw gold at the
end of therainbow.
“But, at an emotional level as an Indian, when you think with
your heart as I do, I had this huge feeling of redemption, this
indescribable feeling of owning a company that once owned
us.”
The formal start of the East India Company is usually dated
back to 1600 when Britain’s Queen Elizabeth I granted a group
of merchants a charter under the name ‘The Company of
Merchants of London Trading into the East Indies.’
With its own Elizabethan coat of arms, now owned by Mehta,
the company was made responsible for bringing tea, coffee
and luxury goods to the West and trading in spices across the
globe. By 1757, the company had become a powerful arm of
British imperial might, with its own army, navy, shipping
fleets and currency, and control over key trading posts in
India, where it was known variously as Company Bahadur
and John Company. In 1874, the British government
nationalised the company, opportunistically blaming the
1857 uprising on its excesses. But the East India Company
army, brought under the command of the Crown, retained
its all-powerful presence in India.
“When I took over the company, my objective was to
understand its history. I took a sabbatical from all other
business and this became the single purpose in my life,” said
Mehta. He travelled around the world, visiting former EIC
trading posts and museums, reading up records and meeting
people “who understood the business of that time”. “There
was a huge sense of responsibility - I didn’t create this brand,
but I wanted to be as pioneering as the merchants who
created it.”
“The Elizabethan coat of arms stands for trust and reassurance,
but we are not repeating history. It took me four years to do the
brand positioning and put up the milestones.”
The ‘relaunched’ company, with its headquarters on Conduit
Street in Mayfair, is set to open a diverse line of high-end,
luxury goods in London in March and in India some time this
year. EIC products in India will include fine foods, furniture,
real estate, health and hospitality.
“India is the spirit of the East India Company in many ways -
it evokes a huge amount of connectivity and emotions,” Mehta
said. “It’s also a major ambition to bring Indian products to
the rest of the world. Today there is no single brand name
from the East that can stand alongside, say, Hermes or Cartier
from the West.
“The East India Company has that ability.” — IANS