Why the Curry King’s giving away his fortune (in silence and a second-hand pair of boots)
‘Happiness comes from getting rid of the desires’
ON the lapel of what he calls his ‘happy jacket’, Charan Gill wears a small pink badge. ‘Summer Love’ it declares. ‘Good vibes only.’ Not everyone is feeling the good vibes though. ‘My wife said can you not just wear that on holiday?’ Gill remarks, flicking the multicoloured pompoms that dangle from one of the pockets. ‘I said to her “I’m always on holiday.”’
That’s one word for it. It is ten years now since Gill – Scotland’s self-styled curry king and the man behind the hugely successful Harlequin chain of Indian restaurants – retired after selling his business and pocketing a cool £8million in the process.
Since then the 61-year-old has appeared on Channel 4’s The Secret Millionaire, where he gave away money to the good people of Norfolk, and reinvented himself as, well, it’s not entirely clear. The slick suits and clean shaven look of old are gone certainly, replaced instead by a fetching white beard and a rather more relaxed wardrobe (‘Do you like my boots?’ he asks, displaying a pair of grey hikers. ‘I got them in a second hand shop.’)
He’s sold his £100,000 Bentley, gets up at 5am each morning to meditate and spends weeks at a time at spiritual retreats and ashrams in India. He is in the midst of divesting himself of his £15million property empire and regularly has what he calls ‘silent days’, where he meditates in complete silence and speaks to no one.
Perhaps most startling of all, the man who loved tikka masala so much he built an empire on it and entitled his biography Tikka Look at Me Now, has given up the nation’s favourite curry dish. Now he eats only twice a day, subsisting on an austere diet of porridge, lentil curry and chapatis. No wonder he needs a ‘happy jacket’.
‘Even when I was working in business I always felt that I was being guided, that I was being told what to do,’ he says earnestly. ‘And I think if you listen to your gut instinct, your intuition becomes stronger.
‘You need to go deep. Deeper beyond the mind. You need to try not to live in the mind so much. Then the answers you get will be much more authentic.’
Gosh. The briefest perusal of Gill’s Facebook page reveals things are not quite what they once were in the world of one of Scotland’s savviest businessmen – a man who took on McDonald’s at its own game with a chain of Indian fast food restaurants, enjoyed the champagne lifestyle with a crop of celebrity pals, and once posed happily with a pouting Katie Price perched seductively on his lap.
Online he has amassed quite the devoted following and his page is littered with selfpenned poems about peace and spirituality, quotes from Sikh gurus and Buddha, songs he performs himself accompanied by a tinny keyboard, and declarations such as ‘No sir – I’m not a mug. Who wants to be with stupid folk with a million TREES to hug?’
Talk about the Buddha of Scottish suburbia. He’s not quite knitting his own yoghurt yet but it can’t be long now. So why on earth the change?
‘When I was younger, I wanted to be a success story. And yet when I was doing that it was to the detriment of many other things. And it’s only when you get to the end – when you get to the top of the tree – you realise your ladder is against the wrong tree.
‘People will say to me, it’s all right for you because you don’t have to worry about paying your bills and that’s true. I don’t. But I also know there are a lot of people who are much wealthier than me who don’t have to worry about anything who are still chasing the same shadow.’
At the peak of his game, Gill’s only interest was making money. After all, he was very good at it. Harlequin, whose Ashoka restaurants criss-crossed central Scotland, perfected the art of the decent curry house with simple menus, plenty of pakora to go round and a thriving take-out business. His Ashoka Shaks took the concept further, based in cinema complexes and competing directly with McDonald’s and KFC.
Gill was a master of self-promotion and a regular on the Scottish business scene, once engineering a sponsorship deal with Partick Thistle by getting football legend Derek Johnstone to serve him a curry on the pitch at Firhill.
He sat on the boards of the Entrepreneurial Exchange and the Glasgow Restaurateurs Association and regularly popped up on the Asian Rich List. He was made an MBE in 1998 for services to the food industry and has an honorary doctorate from the University of Glasgow. You’ve never met a less likely hippy.
‘I was incredibly focused on that one thing, that one goal. To be good at what I did,’ he says.
‘The more focused you are, the better you are and the focus can be to make money. If you want to make money, you’ll make money. Back then, every conversation I had, my end goal was to make money. If I met someone and we were talking I would be thinking, “Is there any money in this for me?” Or “How do I spin this afterward to make some money?”
This obsession with making cold, hard cash came, he says, from his upbringing. Born in the Punjab in 1954 into an impoverished rural family, he moved to Scotland at the age of nine.
‘I was taught as a young child that success was all linked to material wealth. We came from a very poor village and my grandfather would tell me, “One day, if you work hard enough, you’ll have a motorcycle with a glass screen”. The reason he sent us to Scotland, sent away his only son and his grandchildren, was so we could have a better life.
‘He would say that you have to be successful and success was wealth. It was the biggest house, the biggest car, and with success comes prestige and respect.’
He pauses and shakes his head. ‘It’s amazing how people think if you’ve got money you must be intelligent. They run the two together and think, “He must know what he’s doing.” And we know that’s not true.’
The family – Gill’s parents and five young boys – lived in a one-bedroom flat in Glasgow. At 15 he left school and started as an apprentice turner fitter in the shipyards, earning £13 a week, supplementing his income working as a waiter.
‘When I was a waiter I wanted to be in the boss’s shoes and I’d think, if I had one restaurant I’d be happy. Then, after I got my first restaurant, I thought I’d be happy with two restaurants. Then four, then six, then eight.
‘It goes on and on. Ultimately you say to yourself, what am I chasing? I’m chasing shadows here. So it’s that recognition that
happiness doesn’t come through fulfilment of desires. It actually perhaps comes through getting rid of the desires completely.’
It all sounds a bit radical. Once a prodigious drinker, for example, regularly spotted with a champagne flute in his hand, he has now given up the booze. He was on holiday in Thailand with a group of friends sipping a beer four years ago when he announced not only was he not going to finish it, he was never going to drink again.
His friends, perhaps unsurprisingly, were wary. ‘They say they don’t want to go to the pub with me now because it makes them not want to drink. But what can I do about that?’
Then there are what he calls his ‘silent days’ in which he will literally not speak a word, choosing instead to meditate in silence. This, he admits, did not go down awfully well at home initially.
‘When you walk into a room and see your partner sitting there in silence, you’re going to think, “What’s going on here?”’ he says.
It must have seemed rather like a mid-life crisis in reverse. Some men buy themselves a Porsche and take up squash. Gill’s family meanwhile, had to adjust to the fact that the man who once lived and dreamed about money, is now more concerned with meditation and second-hand shoes.
‘There was some concern. Is he going to join a cult? In the back of their minds they were asking, “Why is he changing; how does that change affect everything else; what kind of person has he become?” I suppose you can understand that because there could be this fear of “Am I going to give away everything and leave my wife penniless?”’
Mrs Gill was particularly concerned about what was happening to her husband.
‘If somebody doesn’t talk all day, you would be concerned. But we have to accept that we’re all on our own individual journey. They’re on theirs, I’m on mine, and although we have friends and family, at the end of the day it’s our journey. And they have to embrace that too. I think they do now. Because personally I think I’ve changed for the better. I don’t think there’s anything bad or negative just now.’
His strict diet, which has seen him go vegetarian and involves eating no lunch (one delightful benefit of which, he reveals with a grin, is that he has lost four stone), is another cause for occasional friction Chez Gill.
‘My wife said why don’t you eat fish? I used to love fish. I used to love chicken. I used to love everything. But I don’t want it. I just don’t need it. I’m not depriving myself.’
It is a curious sort of retirement, not quite the afternoons on the golf course and first class cruises you might expect from one of Scotland’s top businessmen, and one that is not without its occasional dilemmas.
‘I used to travel business class but I’ve stopped doing that,’ he says.
He pauses. ‘Although I do it now and again. The thing about money is, it’s not having it that’s the problem, it’s the fear of losing it. What worries a person is actually losing what they have.
‘But if it doesn’t matter any more if you have it, you’ll go business class, or you can go in the back. If you recognise it, it doesn’t really matter. I’ll sit anywhere.’
But Charan, I point out, having that sort of choice in the first place is a privilege not many of us ever has. He smiles. ‘I do know that,’ he says. After our meeting Gill sends me one of his poems. It is entitled My Transformation, an arresting set of rhyming couplets that attempts to set out why he has ended up on this spiritual journey.
It includes the lines: ‘I pen these words, my friends to explain, I may be spiritual, I’m not insane, even if my brain they wash, they’ll never get the bloody dosh.’
In among all the good vibes it seems, there’s still a dash of the savvy businessman.
‘What worries a person is losing what they have’