🇮🇳 Anand Mahindra

Anand Gopal Mahindra was born on May 1, 1955, in Bombay — third generation of the Mahindra family that had founded a Jeep-licensee in newly independent India in 1945. His grandfather K. C. Mahindra had financed the Indian portion of Pearl S. Buck's village welfare projects. His father Harish Mahindra ran the steel side of the business. Anand was raised in Walkeshwar, sent to Lawrence School Lovedale in the Nilgiri hills, and then — in a generational departure for Indian industrial heirs of the time — directly to Harvard College in 1973 for a magna cum laude degree in film-making and architecture.

He stayed at Harvard for an MBA at the business school, graduating in 1981 with a fascination for cinema (he wrote his undergraduate thesis on the films of Satyajit Ray) and a wariness of joining the family company too quickly. He came home anyway in 1981, joined Mahindra Ugine Steel as a financial trainee, and spent five years on the shop floor of a sinkingly unsexy steel company. He used those five years, by his own later account, to learn what the family elders refused to teach: the cost of every component, the speed of every supply chain, the temperament of every union foreman.

He moved to Mahindra & Mahindra in 1991 — the year India liberalized — and was named deputy managing director by 1997. He took over as managing director in 2003 from his uncle Keshub Mahindra and became chairman in 2012 when Keshub stepped down. He restructured the group into nine business sectors, all reporting independently to a leaner holding board.

The single transformational decision came in 2002, with the launch of the Mahindra Scorpio SUV — Mahindra's first ground-up indigenous vehicle, designed and manufactured almost entirely in India, sold at a price that competed with Toyota Innova while delivering on rough Indian roads. The Scorpio sold over a million units, gave Mahindra credibility against Maruti and Hyundai, and funded the next decade's acquisitions: Ssangyong Motor in South Korea (2011), Peugeot Motocycles, the Pininfarina design house (2015), and a controlling stake in REVA, which became the Mahindra Electric platform.

He pushed the group into IT services (Tech Mahindra, acquirer of the troubled Satyam in 2009), into real estate (Mahindra Lifespaces), holiday clubs (Club Mahindra), agribusiness, finance, and renewables. The Mahindra Group today has revenue of over $19 billion across 100 countries and approximately 260,000 employees.

His Twitter — now X — presence is its own genre. Started in 2010, his account has become an aggregator of grassroots Indian innovation. He has retweeted, hired, funded, or publicly amplified dozens of self-taught entrepreneurs: the farmer who built a rain-water harvester from scooter parts, the schoolboy who designed a low-cost prosthetic, the Bengaluru woman who turned waste plastic into bricks. Critics call it CEO theater. Beneficiaries describe it as the only entry point they have ever had to Indian capital.

He is also one of the rare Indian industrialists who speaks freely on politics, art, cinema, climate, and economics — sometimes uncomfortably for his peers. He chairs the Harvard Business School board of dean's advisors, is a founding patron of the Mahindra Humanities Center at Harvard ($10 million gift), and produced Indian films including Bombay Boys before stepping back from production.

He married Anuradha, a journalist, in 1985. They have two daughters, Divya and Aalika. He lives in a sea-facing Worli flat, drives a vintage Willys Jeep on weekends as a public homage to the company's first product, and is photographed at the Cannes Film Festival as often as at the Davos World Economic Forum. He has been mentioned as a future Indian president by Twitter armchair commentators more than once. He has always declined to discuss it.