POWER PLAYERS
IF RADHIKA CHOPRA, ART PATRON AND FOUNDER OF LUXURY TEA BRAND, NO. 3 CLIVE ROAD, IS A ROLE MODEL WORTH EMULATING THEN ARUNIMA PATEL, FOUNDER, IGENETIC DIAGNOSTICS, A HEALTH START-UP, IS MAKING MEDICAL TESTING EFFICIENT. 11 SHEPRENEURS WHO ARE MAKING NEWS
Ten women who know how to shape their dreams and business ideas
When she was
14 years old, she was involved in a car pile-up that left her neck shattered. Paralysed from the neck down, she spent a year learning to walk again, and had to start writing with her left hand. That same year, she graduated as valedictorian of her high school class. But it’s typical of Radhika Chopra that this story is the last thing she mentions as you prepare to leave her home.
Chopra comes from an adventurous Sikh family and moved to the US when she was nine after her electrical engineer father was offered a job in the US. The family of four (Chopra has an older sister) were the only Indians in a small farming community in Vernon, New Jersey, and her father was the only one wearing a turban. She and her older sister (Nandita Chopra, posted at the US Embassy in Delhi as the India Representative for the US National Institutes of Health) learnt to work hard in the America of the 80s. Chopra went to Wellesley College (Hillary Clinton’s alma mater) to study economics and subsequently worked at the Federal
FROM THE ARTWORK ON THE TEA TINS TO EXPLAINERS ABOUT EACH BLEND, CHOPRA IS INVOLVED IN DRIVING EVERY ASPECT OF THE BRAND
Reserve Bank in the emerging markets sector in Manhattan.
She continued her education at the John F Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University, for a two-year postgraduate course in public policy. It taught her consensus building, working in a team, defending her point of view, and most importantly, democracy. But when she went back to the Federal Reserve Bank, she felt oddly restless. After following up on a job advertisement in The New York Times seeking someone with experience in public policy and central banking, she started to work for the late Richard Medley, adviser to financier George Soros who co-founded an elite economic magazine that sought to explain world markets to a more general audience. The start-up dealt with emerging markets, which meant getting into work at 4 am, to cover Southeast Asia and leaving the office at 7 pm every day. It allowed her to travel the world and meet senior economists such as Larry Summers and then Japanese Finance Minister—where she was able to converse in Japanese (among her many acquired skills). But it was also exhausting and after two years, Chopra quit her job without a plan. While she was trying to figure out her next move, she was asked by her sister who she most envied and Chopra immediately responded with “people in the art world”.
At her sister’s encouragement, she started interning at the Bose Pacia Gallery in New York that specialised in contemporary Indian art, eventually becoming gallery director. Three years later, she was ready to get married to long-term boyfriend Rajan Anandan (they had met when he was at MIT at a Babson College party and dated for 10 years) and moved to Chicago where she went back to the Federal Reserve Bank and continued to support the arts in her free time. Eventually, they moved to Austin, Texas, where Anandan worked with Michael Dell as his executive assistant, and she was allowed to work from home by the Federal Reserve Bank. One thing led to another and the young couple landed in Delhi in 2004, packing up their Austin home, putting it in storage in New York, hoping to return soon. They were planning to stay for six months but then Chopra got pregnant with their daughter Maya.
It’s been 14 years now. Anandan has moved from Dell to Microsoft to Google now, where he heads their South Asia and Southeast Asia business. Chopra has turned her passion for art into a full time occupation, starting the Foundation for Indian Contemporary Art for the Vadehras to support the arts (she is now on the board), patron of the Kochi Biennale, on the art advisory council of Harvard South Asia Institute, and building up a staggering private collection of some of the finest Indian artists. But then can that ever be enough for someone who is both creative and motivated? So, here is Chopra in yet another avatar as an entrepreneur, with a story to tell.
No. 3 Clive Road was where her grandfather lived and where her father was born (it is now No. 3 Thyagaraja Marg). Her grandfather was the comptroller, keeping accounts for the British Government in India, while New Delhi was being built in 1931. He maintained a beautiful diary which was introspective and reflective of the world that was changing around him. “I wanted to bottle up that history and keep it forever,” she says, recalling how her mother saved the diary from the dustbin after her father-in-law’s death in 1963. Her luxury tea brand, No. 3 Clive Road, is dedicated to those origins, of large families coming together for tea in a home that was always welcoming. “I always wanted to create a product,” says Chopra, “something I could design myself.” From the artwork on the tea tins to explainers about each blend, Chopra is involved in driving every aspect of the brand. Marketing the tea has been quite a journey. Starting in 2015, with a personal investment of $25,000 (`16.92 lakh), she has built a company of 12 people, eight of them women (all in the front office), and they now retail online through a beautifully designed website. “Tea estates who didn’t even look at me earlier now call me.” She learnt everything from scratch, from packaging to shipping,
procurement to blending, from designing to selling. She started small, with four blends and 100 boxes each, but then an order from hotel Andaz, Aerocity, Delhi, to design their in-room tea service over 550 rooms changed the game. Her last big order was for two tonnes of tea. “It was delivered to my home in packets and the whole house smelled like a tea garden,” says Chopra. The eventual goal is to create an Indian brand that is internationally recognised and valued.
Her interest in art continues unabated, and her home is probably the most exquisite gallery possible—it houses everything from a Shilpa Gupta neon installation (Where Do I End
and You Begin) to a Subodh Gupta painting. Dayanita Singh’s photograph of Chopra’s husband and 12-year-old daughter, a gift, is on one wall while Ayesha Jatoi’s stripped Mughal miniatures are on another.
Chopra is fanatical about exercise because it is also her physical therapy, and does so with a trainer before dropping her daughter to school. Then it’s work, school pick-up and back home. The mind is always buzzing—she is off this summer to Foundermade in New York City, a consumer discovery fair for small brands in health, beauty, wellness and food. As expected, she has charted out her goals already—soak in as much learning as possible, make friends and sell No. 3 Clive Road—which for the first time this month has made a profit.
Typical of many women her age, she manages a demanding business, an active engagement with the arts, ageing parents (the sisters moved the parents to Delhi), a daughter about to be a teenager, and a busy husband. And oh yes, a complete numbness on the left side of her body which she shrugs off with a smile.