He'd rather be nude: how an expat found peace and business success

[Guest guest]

He'd rather be nude: how an expat found peace and business success

 

Eric Ellis

Chennai

May 3, 2008

 

In an era of Enrons and HIHs, Opes Primes and

Chartwells, an unusual French-born businessman in

India may well be the corporate antidote for this age of

greed.

 

Christian Fabre is the chief executive of a $300 million

company based in the southern city of Chennai. The

company, Fashions International, is one of India's most

successful ragtraders, employing 72,000 people and

sourcing product for big international fashion lines such

as Kenzo, Lee Cooper, Nike and the French department

store chain Galeries Lafayette. Operating out of stylish

modern offices, it exports around five million garments

a year worldwide.

 

That's all fairly straightforward; India as a cheap product

source for Western buyers. What isn't so simple is that

Fabre is paid just $250 a month for his chief executive

duties. Moreover, he spends much of his time in the

nude or, if he's negotiating with business partners, in a

light saffron shawl.

 

The office wear is saffron-hued because for 20 years,

M.Fabre has been Swami Pranavananda Brahmendra

Avadhuta, an ascetic Hindu monk who was elevated to

swamidom on January 26, 1988, India's National Day.

The nudity comes from his Avadhuta order which

teaches that devotees should be absent of worldly goods,

including clothes.

 

While it's hard to see Rodney Adler and fellow

Australian corporate failures opting for this path to

business success, the Swami swears by it, if his faith

permitted such oaths.

 

M.Fabre's journey from Christianity - he once yearned

to be a Roman Catholic priest - to high Hinduism began

in 1971 when he arrived as a middle-class Frenchman in

the then Madras, transferred with his wife and a young

child by a French trading house. He was a rugby-loving

Frenchman and a former conscriptee in General de

Gaulle's forces in colonial Algeria.

 

The life in Madras was neocolonial: cocktail parties with

India's elite, membership of the pukka Madras Club, a

scion of the French community, which gathered 200

kilometres south in Paris's former colony of

Pondicherry.

 

However, a series of events in the early 1980s - his

marriage collapsed and changes in Indian law saw his

company go broke and his job lost - upset this idyll.

Devastated, he started reading the Vedas, Hinduism's

holy texts, after encountering a man who despite

crippling leprosy was full of joy. " I wondered how this

could be, what powerful force was at work here, " he

says.

 

And so began an ascetic decade of study at a swami's

feet, the renunciation of worldly possessions and a

permanent search for enlightenment as he took saffron

himself. The " Pranavananda " Fabre adopted as his name

evokes the Sanskrit terms for Aum, Hinduism's primal

sound, and bliss.

 

Business has been blissful too. The Swami explains the

delightful irony of how he turned his back on the

business success he coveted as Christian Fabre, only for

it to arrive in spades as Swami Pranavananda. But now

that success has been achieved for the company he runs,

he's quite fulfilled not having it, even though its

available to him if he wants it, which he doesn't. By

conventional standards, he's successful by being, well,

unsuccessful. Indeed, in a grasping era where executive

compensation is measured in billions, Swami

Pranavananda may well be a poster boy for how big

business could be.

 

His business goal is progress with the people around

him, " all as a team. How many more kilos of rice can I

eat per day? How many more cars can I have? How can

a man have millions of dollars? It's better to share it with

everyone. "

 

Though wielding a reputation as a tough negotiator and

delivering ever-rising profits in booming India, he's paid

less than Pinky, his office assistant. " I receive 10,000

rupees (about $250) a month as a salary, just for pocket

money, " he says. " There is no Swiss bank account, or

Monaco or Bermuda, no hidden funds, no family trust.

 

" It's not necessary to fill up my pocket. The point is that

I do not force anyone to believe. I'm not affected if you

don't believe me because I don't have anything to sell to

you. It is as it is. "

 

" What's the difference between a business crook,

Mafiosi, and a mass murderer? " he asks, before

answering himself. " Nothing, they all steal from other

people, their lives and their money. They don't bother

about human life. They are all rogues and murderers.

 

" Fairness makes for good business. A street cannot be

always one way because sooner or later you will find

yourself in front of a wall with nowhere else to go. You

can not always take, take, take all the time. Business has

to be an exchange, because a product is the sum total of

all the work into it of so many people. "

 

Though a full-time Swami, he divides his month

between the office in Chennai, and the ashram retreat

where he rises at 7am, bathes and applies his ash

markings and " third eye " .

 

" I want to be able to spend most of my time in the

ashram. They want to keep in touch with me at the

office and I want to make sure that everything goes right

there, so I have the internet provided and we

communicate. " The Swami travels on business at

company expense.

 

In his private temple, he has a startling array of

gadgetry, catching up on emails and checking if staff in

Chennai, 400km away, are at their morning desks. He

breakfasts on chapatis and cornflakes, an occasional jar

of Nutella spread, the sole dietary nods to his former

homeland.

 

 

I ask if being a Swami helps him as a businessman. " It

helps because they know I will not take any kind of

nonsense. I have had people take too much advantage of

my kindness in my life. But anyone who commits

hanky-panky will have it turn on them like a tonne of

bricks later on. "

 

His ascetic Hinduism doesn't take a holiday when he's

boss but his nakedness does. Indian law bans public

nakedness, even from holy men, so the pragmatic swami

comes to work in sadhu garb, usually just a robe and no

underwear.

 

" I cover in Chennai because there are social norms that

are prevailing there, " he says.

 

Still, it can shock clients from abroad, arriving to do

business with an expatriate Frenchman. " I don't tell

anyone what to expect, " he says. " Why should I? To

everyone here it's just normal. "

 

The Swami enjoys seeing prospective clients' faces

when they meet him. " I tell them, sit down, don't worry,

the pain won't last very long.

 

" And then we get down to business. "

 

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