22 November 2003

Executive gets down to bare essentials

A middle-class Frenchman turned Hindu monk has the faithful in India kissing his feet, Eric Ellis reports

IN HIS native France, Christian Fabre's flowing robes prompt fearful locals to call him a "dirty Arab". Bemused visitors are nonplussed.

But on the road from Madras to the lush Kolli Hills, 400km (250 miles) west of the southern Indian city, the Tamil Nadu state police and the regional director of roads know precisely what to do. They fall to the ground to kiss his feet, as any devout Hindu would on encountering a sadhu (Hindu monk).

To these Indian devotees, M Fabre is not simply a 62-year-old Frenchman from Beziers, southern France. With his orange robes, beard and ashened forehead, complete with "third eye", M Fabre is Swami Pranavananda Brahmendra Avadhuta, an ascetic Hindu monk who became a swami on January 26, 1988, India's National Day, one of the few Westerners in India to do so.

M Fabre's journey from Christianity - he once wanted to be a Roman Catholic priest - to high Hinduism began in 1971 when he arrived as a middle-class Frenchman in Madras, transferred with his wife and a young child by a French trading house. The life was neocolonial: cocktail parties with India's elite, membership of the pukka Madras Club, a scion of the French community, which tended to gather 200km south in Paris's former colony of Pondicherry. However, a series of events in the early 1980s - his marriage collapsed and he lost his job - upset this idyllic existence.

"I woke up one morning and realised that I wanted so much but had nothing," he says.

A neighbour introduced him to a swami and, while going to the sage's house for readings from the Vedas, the holy texts, he encountered a man who despite leprosy was full of joy. "I wondered how this could be, what powerful force was at work here," M Fabre says.

And so began an ascetic decade of study at the swami's feet, the renunciation of worldly possessions and a permanent search for enlightenment that he now finds himself undertaking. The "Pranavananda" he adopted as his name evokes the Sanskrit terms for Aum, Hinduism's primal sound, and bliss.

But M Fabre did not have a conventional conversion to India's quasi-official faith. A rugby-loving Frenchman and a former footsoldier in General de Gaulle's forces in Algeria, he adheres to an obscure stream of Hinduism that demands that he be naked.

"I recognise that I am a most unusual Frenchman," he says at his ashram in the Kolli Hills, in perfect English and with a mischievous smile, as he frolics nude among the banana and papaya trees that stud his ten-hectare retreat.

Unusual he certainly is by Western mores, but the Tamil-speaking M Fabre is probably more connected to the world than he would have been had he remained a travel agent in Paris. For half the month, he is the chief executive of Fashion International, a $100 million company in Madras that sources clothes and accessories for brands such as Kenzo and Lee Cooper and for the French chains Printemps and Galeries Lafayette.

When he is not travelling to Europe to meet clients, he commutes in an orange Skoda, from a spartan Madras house to his stylish corporate headquarters in an industrial zone outside the city. He has a staff of 40 at head office and as many as 62,000 workers in 35 factories in India and China.

M Fabre may also be the world's least expensive executive. Although a co founder of Fashion International with two Indian partners, his Hinduism demands he holds no attachment to anything worldly, including clothes for the most part. It also means that he holds no shares in the company he directs. "I get paid only 10,000 rupees (Pounds 130) a month, just for pocket money," he says. "There is no Swiss bank account, no hidden funds, no other agenda." The company is also famous for not having business contracts, which M Fabre says are articles of distrust between business partners.

His Hinduism does not take a holiday while he is boss. Indian law bans public nakedness, even from holy men, so the pragmatic swami comes to the office in sadhu garb, often to the surprise of clients from abroad. "I don't tell anyone what to expect," he says. "Why should I? To everyone here it's just normal."

He says that it can be fun seeing people's 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."

The ashram is where M Fabre escapes from frenetic Madras, but even here, in his private temple, he remains connected with a startling array of gadgetry.

A normal day at the ashram sees the Swami rising at 7am, bathing and applying his ash markings and "third eye". He then checks overnight e-mails and catches up on Le Figaro on the internet, before a breakfast of chapatis and cornflakes, which, with the occasional jar of Nutella spread, are his sole dietary nods to his homeland.