London, Sept. 9: Indians in London are more than a little surprised that Lakshmi Mittal has allowed himself to be photographed with his 31-year-old son, Aditya, in one of the magnificent drawing rooms in his new £57-million home in Kensington Palace Gardens.

This is because Mittal, 57, now a colossus in British financial life following the Mittal Steel Company’s takeover last year of Arcelor, is known to guard his private life and certainly the inside of his home with a certain amount of zealousness.

Still, his interview, along with the pictures, appeared yesterday in the Telegraph Magazine in the UK — the colour publication is included with The Daily Telegraph on Saturdays.

This appears to be the weekend for pieces on properties owned by Indian steel tycoons. An article on Swraj Paul’s new acquisition — a 250-acre estate in Buckinghamshire — was published in the Mail on Sunday.

Readers of The Telegraph will be aware of Paul’s transition from Labour peer to a real English lord in the style of PG Wodehouse but The Mail on Sunday has added one extra item of information.

The Mail on Sunday report — “(Gordon) Brown’s millionaire donor snaps up £6-million estate next door to Chequers” — began: “Lord Paul, the Indian-born tycoon who promised to bankroll Labour’s election campaign, has bought a £6-million estate just minutes from Chequers, the Prime Minister’s own rural retreat.”

After reading the story today, Paul remarked tongue in cheek: “They forgot to mention the underground tunnel.”

The very positive profile on Mittal in the Telegraph Magazine is by Tim Bouquet, who is described as “co-author with Byron Ousey of ‘Cold Steel’, an account of the Mittal-Arcelor takeover, which will be published by Little, Brown in April 2008”.

Mittal was born in Rajasthan but went to St Xavier’s, Calcutta. “As a small boy, Lakshmi Mittal woke daily in a small first-floor apartment in Chitpur, a poor northern suburb, to the rattle and gnash of the city’s trams,” said the article.

But “following his victory last year in an epic and brutal battle to take over his nearest rival, Arcelor”, “he is now indisputably the biggest maker of steel the world has ever seen”.

His London residence also appears to be a little bit bigger than the Chitpur flat: “Mittal paid £57 million for his gleaming white, three-storey neo-Palladian home, once owned by the Formula 1 supremo Bernie Eccelstone and the Islamic art collector David Khalili. Across the way is Kensington Palace.

“Mittal’s palace boasts a ball-room, a picture gallery, 12 bedrooms, Turkish baths, palm-tree pillars swathed in gold leaf and a jewelled basement swimming pool where the superfit vegetarian swims lengths every morning before boarding his Gulfstream G550, sometimes flying to three countries in a day.

“Servants glide across marble floors dug from the same quarry as the Taj Mahal. Mittal’s wife Usha has furnished the house with the kind of antiques and artworks most of us only see surrounded by silken ropes. Some claim it is the most expensive private residence in the world, but Mittal points out that it was Khalili who put in the pool and the marble; he, on the other hand, simply bought it to be a family home.”

Paul, who has also acquired his sprawling estate as a gathering place for his family, has not done too badly, either.

Today, he was relaxing at his country residence, and when he surveyed his land from the top of his house, he could only see up to the start of the woods in the far distance but not the forests beyond which also belong to him.

Both Mittal and Paul are former Calcutta boys who had to come to London to realise their full potential.