"Money has never motivated me. It's always been the cause," he declares from his sparsely furnished office at Jain Hills, the headquarters.
On his office walls are pictures of people he admires most: Mahatma Gandhi; India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru; and John F. Kennedy. "They were all dreamers, and so am I," he says.
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His friends and colleagues describe him as an agricultural guru. "B.H. is a son of the soil entrepreneur who truly knows the pulse of rural India. I've learned a lot from him," says Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, chairman and managing director of leading biotech company Biocon, who got to know Bhavarlal in 1979 when he was a supplier of papain, an enzyme extracted from papayas that her firm was using.
Success hasn't motivated Bhavarlal to give up his strict Gandhian lifestyle. He is a vegetarian who eats only home-cooked food, avoiding processed items like biscuits and chocolates.
His preferred attire is white cottons. "I like white because of its purity." This color penchant extends to the surroundings--Jain's offices and factories are mostly painted white. He makes a concession in the yellow, green, blue and brown of the company logo. These are the colors of nature, he elaborates, symbolizing the sun, trees, water and earth.
Image: An Indian farmer cleans wheat at a grain market in Moonak, some 150 km west of Chandigarh. | Photograph: Pedro Ugarte/AFP/Getty Images
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