PUNE, May 28: On May 5 this year, Chandan, the departmental store on M G Road, completed 50 years. For Narayan M Chandan who, along with his younger brother Hariram, has seen the store through many changes, it has been a memorable half-century.It was not an easy beginning. ``During the Partition, my father Maganlal had to leave his grocery business and property behind in Karachi, Pakistan and move to India. He chose Pune because he had heard that it had an environment similar to that of Karachi, and started a grocery store here in 1948,'' he says.Today, Chandan is a household name for those who want to shop for anything from air-coolers to zucchini. ``The success of this store is an outcome of the philosophy that our father followed. He always told us that money was not important, it would come anyway. For any business to run successfully, a sense of business ethics and maintenance of high standards of quality in the goods was what really mattered,'' he says, adding that their popularity is largely due to the hard work that the entire family put in.The effort has paid off, for as Chandan says, they have a regular clientele with people from Kothrud and other relatively distant parts of Pune coming to shop.From Chandan Provisional Store, the family diversified into a Mini Market for food items looked after by Narayan Chandan. The Provisional Store includes the electronic goods division managed by younger brother Hariram and Chandan Sons, which stores frozen foods and toiletries run by Nitin, Hariram's son. As Chandan puts it, ``Actually, ours is a family effort, so you could say the secret of our success is good teamwork!''
