The Spiritual Capitalist

Yash Birla on his spiritual leanings, the partyboy image and why he decided to talk about his life’s journey in the book On a Prayer.

In the meeting room by the swimming pool, books on religion and meditation line the shelves on the wall. In the plush Birla House, symbols of spirituality are everywhere, including about the man of this house, Yash Birla, who sports a tattoo symbolic of Krishna and Shiva. “I first got a barbed wire done on a whim in Singapore. I had just started weight training and thought it would look good. But a year later, I hated it,” he recounts. Unwilling to go through tattoo removal, the industrialist decided to have it transform into something else, something he wouldn’t regret even at the age of 60. “It had to be connected with spirituality,” he says.

A scion of the famous Birla family, Yash has allowed spirituality to guide him throughout his life, especially after he lost his parents and sister to a plane crash when he was 22 and pursuing his MBA in the US. In his book, On a Prayer (Penguin; Rs 599; co-authored with Vishwaveer Singh), he speaks of his encounters with faith and religion in his youth and how it helped him sail through the shock and loss he suffered due to the tragedy and, following that, the responsibilities he had to take on.
“My initial exposure to spirituality was through religion, stories that my grandmother would read out to me. But it was in college that I started to rely on them, they became my anchor in a foreign land,” he says.

This book, however, just happened. Yash was approached by socialite Shobhaa De to pen one on fitness, an important aspect of his lifestyle. But it changed when he started to write it. “One-third of it was supposed to be about my life. But when I started to talk about myself, the spiritual aspect took over,” he says, looking out into the garden-and-pool area of the palatial Birla House. The heritage structure was built by his great-grandfather Rameshwar Das Birla, an industrialist-philanthropist who knew Mahatma Gandhi and often hosted him at home.

Such details and more pepper Yash’s narrative, where he also speaks, although fleetingly, of the infighting between the various factions of the Birlas, their preference for a male child to carry forward the family name and also the traditional family’s initial disapproval of his relationship with Avanti, a Maharashtrian middle-class girl. The book thus, provides a glimpse into the lives of the conservative and largely introverted Birla family. Yash maintains that his revelations have not upset any of the family members: “None of them have called me to express displeasure. Besides, it’s an expression of myself,” he says.

Of the many people Yash speaks of fondly in the book, some are the domestic help he grew up around. Bahadur, whom Yash mentions often in On a Prayer, in fact, is the one who greets us at the entrance.

This isn’t what one expects of an industrialist who, along with his wife, is also a glamorous fixture on the city’s Page 3 scene. Most people know Yash for his blond streaks, fondness for fashion and obsession with gymming. The 46-year-old laughs at the thought. “It’s what people want to see of me,” he says. Then, brandishing a cheap candybar phone that belongs to a decade ago, he adds, “I’m technologically challenged. My children download stuff for me on my iPhone when I need it.”

A vegetarian, Yash hopes to pass on the same values to his sons, Nirvaan and Vedant, and daughter Shloka. He dreams of giving up “the worldly things” and retire to the Himalayas. Until then, he will continue to retreat to his bungalow by the Ganga in Rishikesh when he’s too tired of city life.

dipti.nagpaul@expressindia.com

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