May 3, 2008

Dealing with the staff … Fashions International head Christian Fabre.

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

Eric Ellis in Chennai
 

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."

Eric Ellis writes for Fortune magazine from S-E Asia