PNC Menon: A Perfectionist at Home

I meet PNC Menon at his centre of gravity, a modern home for deprived seniors and widowed mothers in Kerala that represents everything he believes in. A charitable facility, Sobha Hermitage is located in a serene 23-acre campus in Palakkad district’s Vadakkencherry village to which he traces his roots, although he was raised in Thrissur, 30 km away. The sparsely furnished rooms of the grey-and-white building appear more inviting than most three-star lodgings in India. They speak of the property magnate’s obsession for detail, and his insistence on immaculate maintenance. The founder and chairman emeritus of Sobha Ltd looks the part of a fastidious aesthete, freshly-scrubbed and dressed in a half-sleeved shirt and beige trousers, his polished Prada shoes, diamond-flecked watch and Ferragamo belt buckle betraying a taste for luxury. When I nudge open the door to his office with a shoulder—I am juggling notebook, pen, bag and phone, but I make excuses for my cloddishness—I sense him cringe a trifle, and his retinue of executives and assistants throw sidelong glances in my direction. It is only later that I discover what an affront it may have been to his sensibilities.

“A layer of dust in a corner, unkempt hair, why, even touching the door anywhere but at the handle can upset him,” JC Sharma, vice-chairman and MD, Sobha Ltd, tells me in his corner office in Bengaluru a week later, setting into relief what I have already come to recognise as a classic Menon trait. He is a perfectionist in an industry glutted with middling products. And by extension, he almost presumes a certain neatness and poise in his employees. Having found his métier in interior design and contracting in Oman, and diversified tangentially into real estate development across the Middle East, Menon came to Bengaluru in the mid-1990s to establish Sobha Ltd. Named for his wife, the company quickly became the arbiter of quality in residential construction in the city and caught the eye of Infosys Ltd, for which it has since built about 40 million sq ft of office space. Two decades after it was founded, Sobha is today a Rs 2,500 crore brand on the verge of making inroads in the northern states, and among the country’s top real estate developers. Its success is attributed to the all-consuming focus on build quality that has remained undiluted over time. “I am very finicky,” Menon says, sipping tea on a couch manufactured at the Sobha furniture factory in Bengaluru. Sobha’s construction is backward integrated for the most part, with design, glazing, metal work, masonry, interiors and concrete casting all done in-house to ensure consistent quality. “I don’t think I have ever been happy about any project of ours,” says the 67-year-old. “The point of satisfaction, achievement, excitement, is a dynamic one. It moves. I am still waiting for that point.”

Menon may sound like a self-referential snob, but he is no misanthrope. His barometer is his vision for India. “I started talking about cleanliness much before Swachh Bharat,” he says. “If we can provide people with sufficient food and electricity, clean water and toilets, a comfortable place to sleep and decent clothes, it can do wonders for their dignity.” Menon has a theory about what went wrong with India. “The generation born between 1935 and 1965 ruined India. We were a great, honest country. Our parents were dead honest, never taking shortcuts to make money. They produced many children, so there wasn’t enough to go around. Consequently, our generation, having seen shortages and struggle, decided to do whatever it took to earn enough money. Value systems suddenly came crashing down. You could no longer expect anyone to do a good job,” he says. The post-1965 generation, Menon believes, is less inclined to be dishonest. To him, they represent the hope of India, the catharsis of corruption and inadequacy. “Structurally, the change has begun,” Menon tells me. “Education is what we need. My dream is to one day build a medical college in Bengaluru and run it without extorting large sums of money as fees.”

Menon’s father, who ran a trucking business, died when he was 10, leaving the family of five children and an ailing mother to fend for itself. Menon dropped out of college and in his mid-20s, left for Muscat after a fortuitous meeting in Kochi with his partner- to-be, Brigadier General Suleiman al Adawi of Oman, who would help him secure royal patronage. Menon was hardly a sophisticate then. “Life presents you with opportunities all the time. You learn how to sit, how to talk, to wear trousers,” he says. The man who now lives in a contemporary villa in Dubai’s Emirates Hills, wears bespoke Italian suits and loves his Bentleys, was sculpted, like a Louis chair from rough-hewn timber, in the interior decor studio of his Muscat-based company, Services & Trade Company LLC. As Menon groomed himself for the world, the company groomed an army of skilled Indians who were already working in the Gulf. “I remember meeting German technicians and trainers on the factory floor. We lived on the second floor, above the factory and the studio. Father was strict; he wouldn’t let us lean on the walls or leave marks on the furniture,” says Ravi PNC Menon, who took over as chairman of Sobha’s India business in 2012. A civil engineer from Purdue University, he is famously reclusive at 34. His labour of love, Sobha Dream Acres, 6,400 affordable units in Bengaluru made entirely of precast concrete elements, is under construction in a state-of-the-art factory set up within the project site in Balagere. Having sold over 1,200 units, he must feel the weight of customers’ expectations on his shoulders. “This is the future. With a capacity of 20,000 sq ft a day, the plant will help us achieve economies of scale and shorten construction cycles,” Ravi says.

With commercial contracting projects, premium residences, non-profit infrastructure and integrated townships already under its belt, and now apartments for middle-income families on the way, Sobha is maturing into a full-spectrum developer. Menon is clearly proud of his son and happy to have hung up his boots as far as the India business is concerned. On the day of his son’s wedding, 13 May 2007—Menon is said to be sentimental about few things, among them the number 13—he unveiled Sobha City, an integrated township on the outskirts of Thrissur that has since become a landmark. It is to attend the naming ceremony of Ravi’s son, his seventh grandchild, that he has flown in from Dubai. Menon is in the midst of two high-end developments in the heart of the city—District One, a luxury housing project, and Sobha Hartland, a mixed use development—which could net billions of dollars in revenues for the group. The Group’s revenues from India, 80 per cent of which come from Bengaluru, are not even half its Dubai revenues, but the Indian business leads in square foot terms.

Menon polished his reputation gilding palaces for Middle-Eastern royalty, but his own empire was built on a foundation of middle-class values. His day begins at 4.40 am with yoga and prayers. “My wife has to suffer, being with a man who is completely aligned to his work and his social responsibility.” He has pledged half his wealth—valued at about $1.4 billion—to charity and increasingly finds himself contemplating new ways to make an impact on society. “When Bill Gates and I had a one-on-one meeting in Abu Dhabi recently, I told him it is all well for the rich to donate money, but if we’re able to tap the middle layers of the pyramid of society, we can make a visible dent,” Menon says, between small bites of pazhampori (banana fritters) from the kitchens of Sobha Academy, a school for underprivileged children from the Vadakkencherry and Kizhakkencherry panchayats that shares the Hermitage campus. “I was very impressed with his school,” says Infosys founder NR Narayana Murthy. “The level of his passion for making the school is no less than his passion when he builds a palace for a king. This is a quality that I greatly admire.”

Quiz Menon about his idea of philanthropy and he extracts a calculator from his pocket—a companion he cannot shake off—and starts running numbers. “There are about 25 million Indians living outside the country. Add to that the 10 million people here who can afford to commit Rs 1,000 a month for the next 10 years. We should easily be able to collect $4 billion. But it will take time, and an institution with thousands of modules, each run by honest youngsters,” he says. “I have this dream of building an institution that will work to empower women and the destitute. I will put in X amount of money, and the rest I will raise in this fashion from the middle-class.”

The story of a contractor turning real estate tycoon is dramatic enough, but duplicating the success in Bengaluru, a price-sensitive market where he had no prior moorings, surely belongs in the realm of fantasy. “With his very first project in 1995, PNC Menon revived the quality of Indian construction and made the market sit up and take note,” says Naresh V Narasimhan, principal architect and managing partner, Venkataramanan Associates, who designed Sobha’s first apartment building in India, the Oman Topaz on Sarjapur Road, back when Menon’s company was called Oman Builders. The Indian construction sector had suffered a drastic decline in quality following an exodus of master craftsmen to the Middle East in the late 70s and the 80s. “When Menon set up the India business, he brought with him a crew of craftsmen and carpenters from Oman highly skilled and trained in the latest techniques. This was his secret weapon. Bengaluru had never seen such high standards of construction,” Narasimhan says. Later when Infosys top brass NR Narayana Murthy and TV Mohandas Pai asked Narasimhan—who has since designed many buildings for the company— to show him his best finished work, he took them to Oman Topaz. “The lobby alone was enough to impress the Infosys team. It was so clean you could eat off it,” Narasimhan says.

Menon had spotted Narasimhan at a networking party in Muscat two years ago and pulled him aside for a chat. It was 1993 and the Indian economy was just opening up. Narasimhan was in Oman to look for work, but Menon would not hear of it. “Go back to India,” he told the architect over dinner. “I thought it was a strange thing to say to someone you had just met. But he was convinced India was the place to be. He said, ‘I will come to India in exactly two years and call you’,” Narasimhan says. True to his word, Menon rang him from his hotel suite in 1995.

Over the next few months, suite 1515 at the Taj West End would be permanently reserved for Menon. Bhavna Alvarez, who was an executive housekeeper, says the staff would dread “the arrival of this man, who was impossible to please”. “He would call me to point out the tiniest detail that was amiss—a water stain in the bathroom or a screw missing from the door hinge,” she says. “So when I had enough money, I went and bought a Sobha home.”

It was at the Taj West End that Menon later interviewed JC Sharma, on the strong recommendation of a mutual friend, for a financial role in the company, nearly rejecting him for his table etiquette. Abhay Jain, who heads corporate affairs for the Manipal Group, was that friend. By then, Menon had found himself two lieutenants: Ashok Kumar R, a civil engineer who managed Sobha’s projects and HR, and N Veeraraghavan, who handled the commercial side of the business. “He was still on the lookout for someone with a solid financial background. After meeting Sharma, he complained that he did not know how to hold a knife and a fork,” says Jain, who asked him to reconsider. Sharma joined in April 2001 and soon came to enjoy Menon’s trust.

For all his eccentricities, Menon is not a fusty patriarch. “He has never questioned my decisions,” says Sharma. “In 2006, I felt that an IPO would give us visibility and capital, that our story needed to be communicated to a larger audience. He agreed it was the right move,” he says. The business hit its rockiest patch in 2008, when the US sub-prime crisis boiled over into the Indian real estate sector. It was left to Sharma to once again orchestrate an infusion of capital to the tune of Rs 524 crore via a QIP (qualified institutional placement). Now, having raised over Rs 1,000 crore from the markets, the promoters’ stake in Sobha Ltd is down to about 60 per cent.

Menon has a healthy disregard for corporate hierarchy. He hired Ashok Kumar, then a young civil engineer, as manager, planning and quality, for Rs 25,000 a month. Half a year in, Kumar found himself a director, with a Rs 90,000 pay cheque that doubled the following month. “I was working on Sobha Pearl in the central business district, and he was on a site visit. It was a complicated project and he was very impressed with how clean it was turning out. That was when he announced the promotion,” Kumar says. Menon could be overwhelmingly generous. “I drove a Maruti 800 those days and he once crossed me at a signal. A week later, there was a Lancer with a driver waiting to take me home.” Kumar has his own architecture firm now and specialises in temple design. Menon’s largesse could take the form of wardrobe overhauls, gold Rolexes, and once, an apartment to a deserving foreman. But equally, he was a demanding boss who unceremoniously fired and dressed down errant employees. “Everything was always supposed to be done yesterday, never tomorrow,” says Veeraraghavan, president of Puravankara’s Provident Housing Limited, who worked at Sobha for a decade. “To many of us working in real estate, Menon was and always will be an inspiration.”

“He belongs in the same category as Rai Bahadur MS Oberoi, who not only built the best hotels but also stayed in each one to make sure they were maintained well,” says Mohandas Pai, who was instrumental in connecting Murthy and Menon.

Seeming untouched by the weariness of life, Menon says his latest obsession is to build a world-class music school in Thrissur. Does retirement ever cross his mind? “Who was it who said fools build houses and wise men live in them?” he says. “Well, I guess I am not a very wise man.”

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V Shoba

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