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| Reproduced with permission
from Madras Miscellany, by S Muthiah, The Hindu Metroplus– May 13,
2002 |
| State-of-the-art, heritage-touched |
| Dragoco India’s
new plant, 20 km down the Old Mahabalipuram Road, may be a state-of-the-art
factory, but I was delighted to see in it a feature out of the
past that would make it different from Dragoco’s Australian,
Singapore and Shanghai plants. This was a Chettinad-style courtyard,
complete with broad, surrounding corridor, antique wooden Chettinad
pillars on traditional stone-cut bases and carved capitals that
alone appeared to be the art of the re-creators of the antique.
The only thing gently nudging this vaasal out of Chettinad tradition
was the greenery and cascading water. A joint effort of Singapore
and Madras architects, the pillared courtyard was the distinct
touch I recognized of A Venkat of the Geoffrey Bawa School that
adds indigenous features to modern architecture. |
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| Vast lawns, glassed in foyer, work cubicles and
labs, office space and testing facilities, even the pictures on the
walls, all reflected exterior and interior designers teaming to make
a state-of-the-art manufacturing facility’s front office deserve
several pages in the design glossies. Looking at it, K S Narayanan
(‘Nana’), patriarch of the Sanmar Group, whose joint venture
this has been in another setting these past eight years, could well
have been thinking that it reflected well how far the Group had come
from those small beginnings in 1938. |
| In an attractively brought out private memoir late
last year, Friendships and Flashbacks, K S Narayanan (KSN) reminisced
about those first steps he had taken in industry as he moved out of
banking. Then too as with Dragoco, it was a venture that was chemicals-based.
Recalling the takeover of a failing printing ink factory, he wrote,
“In a huge property on what was then the Guindy Road (now Sardar
Patel Road), a High Court officer built a shed and installed some
newly bought machinery to give his son a start in life. The son was
a chemist… and had wanted to try his hand at running a printing
ink factory.” When KSN bought it from the chemist and his father,
he named it Nanco Printing Inks, from ‘Nana and Co.’; “it
made sense in those days to give a company a name that was not too
unmistakably ‘Indian’.” |
| About 30 years later, when I had strayed into the
printing business, I had visited that shed. By then, it was the Ganges
Printing Ink factory, but I remember that a more unprepossessing,
ill-kept and dirty shed I had rarely seen. It may have been closer
to mint condition – though still very much a shed – in KSN’s
days, but even that must have been a far cry from the squeaky clean
facility of international standards that I was wandering through,
I thought the other day, registering how far the group had been brought
by father and sons, Sankar and Kumar. |
| To meet his
first big order, from T Sadasivam for Kalki, who believed in
‘just in time’ ordering, KSN, his friend T S Narayanaswami,
with whom he was to establish India Cements in time, and his
driver worked all night to fulfil the order given after the
factory had closed for the day. Dragoco would not be making
its flavours and fragrances, for food, beverages, soaps and
detergents, on that kind of schedule, looking at the air of
German clinicalness it appeared to have. |
| It was also
at Nanco that KSN first came in touch with several Europeans
involved in industry, and found it easy to forge friendships
with them. One of them was Emil Fjermeros, a Norwegian whose
Ganges was to take over Nanco and induct KSN as a director of
the Norwegian company. When I knew Ganges in its shabby state,
it had been taken over by other Indian interests. KSN’s
close relationship with Scandinavia and the family’s enthusiasm
for joint ventures with foreign partners – the Group has
16 going today – could well have been laid in that friendship. |
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