Building My World

Swraj Paul – The Lord Paul of Marylebone – is Labour peer in the House of Lords, Chairman of the £500 million Caparo Group, a philanthropist best known for saving the London Zoo from closure, and a prominent politician. Unusually for an NRI, he is also recipient of one of India’s highest awards, the Padma Bhushan. By any yardstick his has been a career crammed with incident and achievement. Raised in Jalandhar, Punjab, where his father ran a small foundry making steel buckets and farming equipment, he went to the US to read mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. A thriving business career in India, taken up on his return home, was unexpectedly diverted into a heartbreaking battle to save the life of his fourth child, Ambika. The search for a cure led him to London in 1966, and it was there, eventually, as he emerged from the trauma of her death, that he set up Caparo, today the largest family-owned business in Britain. In his memoir, Building My World , Lord Paul recounts the high points of a life well lived. Here are the details of his business career, including his run-in with DCM and Escorts, his encounters with the famous and the mighty, notably Indira Gandhi, Sanjay and Rajiv; and a distillation of his personal and business philosophy. Written with insight and candour, this memoir provides a glimpse into the making of one of the most outstanding success stories of our time.