Successful businessman Nat Puri seems at his most relaxed when watching India play England at Trent Bridge.
It is all the better when India triumphs in the fixture, as they did at Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club's home last year.
He admits he was not particularly good at the games, but he has a quick recall of scores and the finer details of the game.
His guests at, matches will frequently include cricket legends such as Farokh Engineer who played for India and Lancashire.
Another friend is Ken Clarke, the outgoing Rushcliffe MP and distinguished ex-chancellor of the exchequer.
Sitting at home with the former India captain, Sunil Gavaskar, Puri, a former president of Nottinghamshire County Cricket Club, hatched the idea of offering £50,000 to the first Indian batsman to score 300 runs in a Test innings.
At a glitterati dinner in 2004, he presented a cheque to Virender Sehwag for scoring 307 runs in an away test with Pakistan.
By some accounts, Puri, who recently celebrated his 80th birthday, is one of Nottingham's richest men having built up a business empire in engineering, hotels, packaging, paper and plastics under the umbrella of Purico turning over $450 million a year.
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Through his Puri Foundation, he has helped causes in England, India and Nepal. “Money is not the thing for which people respect you,” he says. “You make a place by helping others.”
His foundation distributes an average of £600,000 a year, two thirds of which finds its way to support education in Nepal and 2,300 schools.
Says Puri, an Indian citizen: “The Nepalese Gurkhas helped the British Empire, even after fighting for you in Afghanistan and the Falklands, they did not get anything from the 海角视频. India succeeded because people locally created educational facilities. In Nepal, village after village there is no school.
“It is basic but a million have come through those schools and received some education. Our aim is that they can read, write and learn arithmetic. Too much is thumb print, people don’t know what they are signing because they can’t read.
“The first time I went to a Nepalese school, a father and son were sitting in the same class. What can I say? The father wanted education but never had any but made time from work to try. I could have cried. With sadness and joy, sadness at why the situation existed and joy that I really helped one person who wanted education and got it. They are simple things and I achieved heaven that day.”
Every year Anil, Puri’s nephew who today runs Purico, goes to Nepal with family for a week to help.
His contribution to the Indian community, charities and education was recognised with an honorary CBE presented by Prince Charles.
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Puri was born and brought up in Mullanpur. Chandigarh in the Punjab in 1939 into what he described as an upper middle class family. “My father used to be a teacher but had a money lending business. We had land, buffaloes, cows and a horse.
“I did reasonably well at school, I would study but as temperatures got hotter, at lunchtime I would go to the small lake and not return to school and got caned.
“I was good at learning but didn’t study, I didn’t apply myself. I was very good at maths which is the thing in my family.
“My uncle used to say ‘If you can’t read and write, it is okay. But if you cannot add, subtract and multiply you are an idiot.”
At school he learnt Urdu, Hindi and English. At a college affiliated to the University of the Punjab, he studied pure and applied maths before adding psychology to his learning.
Psychology laid the groundwork for a successful business career, Puri says, banging the table lightly to stress the point. “In negotiations, you know what you want and you always want what you want. I look at what they want. If I understand what they want, and can satisfy them, then I can get a better deal.”
Aged seven at the time of India’s partition in August 1947, Puri vividly remembers the turmoil as Muslims headed west to the newly formed Muslim Pakistan.
“I was on the Indian side but my mother’s brother, a court advocate, was in Pakistan. About a week before partition, we went to see him, fearing a mess and urged him to leave. He said all was calm and sent us away. About August 12, passing through Lahore, our eyes were opened and my uncle came.”
In the evenings, the children would congregate, banging to sound warnings to their exhausted parents who had been working on the land. Puri recalls seeing the beheaded body of a man who had come to the village at night time to warn everyone to leave ahead of his gang looting and pillaging it. The men had taken the law into their own hands.
“What else would you do? We didn’t have a jail,” adds Puri.
The tensions prepared him and his brother to fight and defend themselves, even as children. Together, they had a go at making a bomb. “Whether it would have worked, I don’t know,” he says.
Puri, a longstanding Labour supporter until the advent of Corbyn was nevertheless a strong advocate of Ken Clarke, who he backed financially for the Tory party leadership. Clarke should have led a cross party government as prime minister to stabilise the country faced with Brexit, says Puri.
“If I were Corbyn, I would have gone to Ken. ‘Come and solve this problem, help stabilise the country’. Corbyn could have been his deputy.”
That Puri has had conversations with politicians from the main parties shows the breadth of his network. Sir Vince Cable was briefly a non-executive director of Purico before becoming leader of the Liberal Democrats.
Puri arrived in England a few weeks short of his 27th birthday to study building services, essentially air conditioning and refrigeration, at Southbank Polytechnic, now London Southbank University. He had scrimped and saved and borrowed money.
In search of his first job, Puri came to Nottingham for an interview, applying for a vacancy in the firm’s London operation. But they only offered him work in Nottingham. “So I took my expenses and went back to London.” It was 1967.
But then a job offer came from heating engineers FG Skerritt’s in Sherwood Rise in Nottingham on £850 year, less than an apprentice on £900.”
When he proposed leaving 17 months later, they offered him £1,550 subsequently offering £1,800 plus a car to keep him. “I was the air conditioning man,” he says. “No one studied air conditioning in the 海角视频 then.”
Over time, Puri worked at 35 RAF bases, his prices were keen, 40 per cent lower than the next while making 30 odd per cent profit, he says. “Coming from India, I knew how to do things using my brain.”
A speciality was switching boilers from coal to oil fired, carrying it out without the expense to the RAF of relocating families. He acquired a reputation for effectively executing supposedly impossible tasks.
Working all hours, for Skerritt’s and on properties he had acquired or for friends, he recalls a point where money was becoming his God. “I did not want to become money-minded. My father helped people and I understood him more after he died.”
As he approaches his 80th birthday, Puri says he was not ambitious as such. “I didn’t think of becoming anything. I just wanted to be good at whatever I was doing, to be respected for what I did.”
Nevertheless, when the opportunity came to go it alone in 1975, Puri took it, establishing Environment Design Consultants. He won contracts to install air conditioning in hospital operating theatres, first in the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in Stanmore, again showing that he was slicker than competitors by minimising downtime.
By January 1983, he was in a financial position to buy his old employer, Skerritts, and quickly added more building services to his ownership.
Puri had won a legal action against the government earlier in the year settling on the second day of the trial for damages of £670,000 plus £78,000 in costs. It gave him the financial strength to be acquisitive at a time when many businesses were struggling in the early Thatcher era.
He bought what is now Bolton Plastic Components, today manufacturing blow moulded products such as engine air intake ducts for vehicles. In-house designers help customers with their design concepts and find solutions. It turns over £16.7m. A sibling business, Bettix, with sales of £5.6m, manufactures, among other things, sophisticated twin neck plastic bottles used for dispensing liquids such as garden bug killer.
The Purico jewel in the crown is arguably Bolta Werke in Bavaria, the largest operation of its kind in Europe supplying high quality plated and painted plastic parts to car makers around the world. The company is famous for making specially moulded plastic with a painted, chrome or other metal finish.
Purico has invested more than 80 million euros in Bolta Werke and its 1,300 strong workforce in recent years and now generates an annual turnover approaching 200 million euros. Factories in Alabama and Mexico were formally opened two years ago.
Chrome-plated badges, decorative trims, radiator grills and exhaust ends provide elegant accents, from bonnet to boot, on aspirational car brands such as Audi, Mercedes-Benz and Volkswagen. The factory also produces parts for Ford, Lamborghini and Porsche. More than one million components are moulded every week.
By 1988, Puri was sufficiently successful and confident as a businessman to bid, albeit unsuccessfully, for Rover cars when it was privatised.
The Purico empire embraces businesses in a wide range of sectors from artificial salami skins and tea bags to a tea plantation producing fine Oolong tea, widely considered to be the best in the world. It is grown in Anxi County, the tea capital of China, and costs around $150 per 20g of tea.
All these businesses are ultimately run from modest offices in Huntingdon Street in Nottingham. The walls of the boardroom display pictures of Puri with distinguished political leaders. Four years ago, the President of India awarded Puri the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award made to non resident Indians for their achievements outside their home country.
Expect the unexpected with Puri. He is a generous host and every year pays for an extravagant firework display in the city centre for the people of Nottingham to enjoy. During this interview, I found myself in his car as he drove to his doctor’s surgery for his flu jab. If only I had known, I had been there two hours earlier.