C. K. Menon: The Advocate Who Chose the Gulf
In 1976 an advocate with two years of practice at the Kerala High Court behind him closed his file, left Kochi and flew to Qatar. Two years later he started a fuel-transport business in Doha with a Qatari partner named Ali Bin Nasser Al Misnad. By the time Cheril Krishna Menon died in a Chennai hospital in October 2019, that haulage outfit had become a group spanning finance, media, steel and infrastructure across four continents — and he had become the first Indian in Qatar to receive the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman.
Thrissur
He was born in Thrissur, Kerala, in September 1949, to Puliyamkott Narayanan Nair, a transport businessman, and Cheril Karthyayani Amma. Transport, in other words, was the family trade before it was his; the Doha company was less a leap into the unknown than an inheritance relocated four thousand kilometres.
His education was entirely Keralite until the very end of it. Church Mission Society High School in Thrissur, then the pre-university course at St. Thomas College, then an undergraduate degree at Sree Kerala Varma College — all in the same town. For law he went north, to Law College in Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh, before returning to practise at the High Court of Kerala in Kochi.
Two Years at the Bar
The legal career lasted two years, and it is the most interesting fact in his biography, because it is the road not taken. Here was a young man with a professional qualification, a courtroom in his own state and a family name in his own town, who concluded at twenty-seven that none of it was the future. In 1976 he moved to Qatar, joining the first great wave of Malayali migration into the Gulf that would go on to reshape Kerala's economy through remittances.
Twenty questions, eight minutes on the clock, and a percentile measured against everyone who has taken it. No sign-up.
Take the IQ test →Behzad
Behzad Corporation was established in Doha in 1978, with Al Misnad as partner, hauling fuel. What it became is best measured by the directorships Menon eventually held: Behzad Fuels (UK) Limited, TJSV Steel Fabrication, and two television channels, JaiHind TV and Symphony TV. The Gulf Times, reporting his death, described a commercial presence of more than thirty-five years headquartered in Doha, with operations running across the GCC states, Sudan, South America and the United Kingdom. He was chairman and managing director of Behzad Corporation, of ABN Corporation, and of Ali Bin Naser Al Misnad Transport & Trading. In 2011 Arabian Business ranked him the twentieth richest non-resident Indian in the Middle East.
The Diaspora Statesman
Wealth in the Gulf diaspora tends to convert into community office, and Menon's converted extensively. He served as vice chairman of Norka Roots, the Kerala government's welfare body for non-resident Keralites; as a permanent director of the India Development Foundation of Overseas Indians; as a member of the Security Advisory Council to Civil Aviation; and as chairman of Bhavan's Public School at the Al Misnad Education Centre in Doha.
The honours followed the offices. The Pravasi Bharatiya Samman came in 2006, the highest Indian award for non-resident Indians, and the Gulf Times noted he was the first Indian in Qatar to receive it. The Padma Shri, India's fourth-highest civilian honour, followed in 2009, then the Federal Bank Kerala Business Award in 2011 and a Qatar National Award from DICID in 2012.
What He Built With It
The philanthropy was specific and local rather than institutional. He built and gave away more than a hundred houses to slum dwellers in Thrissur. He backed the Adarsh Charitable Trust, which serves mentally challenged children, and the Laksham Veedu housing restoration projects. He funded the construction of a mosque in Kozhikode and donated another to a Muslim community — a Hindu businessman who also sponsored the annual Puli Kali and the Maha Shivaratri celebrations at the Vadakkumnathan Temple in his home town. India's ambassador to Qatar, P. Kumaran, called him "a doyen of the Indian community in Qatar." A. P. Manikantan of the Indian Cultural Centre said he "was the epitome of love towards fellow human beings."
Why Cheril Is Called a Genius
The word appears in neither source consulted, and it should not be forced onto him. Nobody in the record — not the ambassador, not the Gulf Times, not his encyclopaedia entry — describes C. K. Menon as a genius, and the honest description of what he possessed is commercial judgement rather than intellect of the kind the word usually denotes. There is no invention here, no theory, no artistic object. There is a fuel-haulage business that scaled, and scaled well.
What can be defended is a particular and genuinely uncommon form of reading a situation. Menon arrived in Doha in 1976, before the modern Qatari boom, trained as a lawyer, with no capital narrative behind him beyond a family transport business in Thrissur. He identified the correct partner — a Qatari national, essential under the sponsorship arrangements that governed foreign business in the Gulf — and the correct entry sector, fuel logistics, which sits underneath every other industry in a hydrocarbon economy. From that base he diversified in a defensible order: transport, then fuels, then steel and infrastructure, then media. The sequencing is the skill, and it is a skill rather than a stroke of luck, because it was repeated in markets as unlike each other as Sudan, South America and the United Kingdom.
The counter-case is blunt. Timing and geography did an enormous share of the work. Thousands of Keralite migrants went to the Gulf in the 1970s and a great many prospered; Menon prospered more than most, but within a wave rather than against one. The distinguishing thing about him is arguably not the wealth at all but what he did with it — the hundred houses, the mosque, the school chairmanship. Generosity on that scale is admirable. It is not genius.
Legacy
He died on 1 October 2019 at Apollo Hospital in Chennai, aged seventy, survived by his wife Jayasree and three children, Anjana, Sreeranjini and Jayakrishnan. His son took over as managing director of Behzad Corporation and the Al Misnad Group. What Menon leaves in Qatar is a business and a school. What he leaves in Thrissur is a hundred families in houses he paid for, and a temple festival that still gets funded.
Achievements
- Educated at Church Mission Society High School and Sree Kerala Varma College
