Gautam Lewis before the BBC interview. Telegraph picture

London, Oct. 25: A 31-year-old man, dumped by his parents outside Mother House in Calcutta when he was three because he had polio, last night won an award in London for his polio alleviation charitable work in Calcutta.

At the annual Asian Who’s Who dinner at Dorchester Hotel, Gautam Lewis, who thinks his original name might have been Gautam De, struggled to the stage on crutches to the loudest applause of the evening and collected a prestigious award for “Asian Leadership in Charity”.

Gautam, whose charitable work now brings him to Calcutta three times a year — “I was very happy with the piece which appeared about me in The Telegraph when I was there in July” — was interviewed by presenter Matthew Amroliwala live on BBC Television Worldwide where his inspirational story was heard by an estimated 80 million viewers.

He stumbled as he came off the raised platform BBC engineers had erected for last night’s live broadcast — Indian businessmen told the BBC that despite the financial crisis “things are not too bad for us because we are global and if we go down in one place, we go up in another” — and was checked from falling by several helping hands.

One thing Gautam does not do is feel sorry for himself, it became clear when he had a “heart to heart” afterwards with The Telegraph.

But how would he feel if he were to meet his biological parents, for example, on his next trip? “I would freak out,” confessed Gautam.

A Bengali son, Gautam knows, has a special relationship with his mother who is supposed to spoil him rotten. But his life has raised the question: “Who is the real mother, the one who has given birth to him, or the one who has brought him up and given him unconditional love?”

In his case, the latter had been Patricia Lewis, an English nuclear physicist who was 27 and doing voluntary work in Calcutta when Gautam was abandoned by his family in the early 1980s.

From what he could pick up from Mother House, an old woman, “possibly my grandmother, or an elderly aunt or a mid-wife”, had brought him from Howrah, though the family was settled either in Behala or South Parganas.

Adopted by Lewis, a single parent, Gautam was brought to England, via New Zealand, and sent to two very exclusive and expensive schools. His preparatory school was Hill House, “behind Harrods in Knightsbridge — Prince William was there”.

After that, Gautam went to Bedales, in Hampshire, arguably the most liberal school in England which is so progressive that pupils are encouraged not to study if they don’t feel like it (this usually has the effect of making them work very hard and become highly individualistic pop singers or artists).

“It is ironic that I came from the poorest of poor families in Bengal and ended up studying with the richest children in England,” said Gautam, who went on to Southampton University to read business studies with French.

He then became a successful music producer and has learnt to fly “because I have the freedom of the skies”. But what has given him the deepest meaning in life is his polio eradication work in India, which he has taken up on a full-time basis.

All his youth, he said, he had rejected all that was Indian. “I was not angry with my mother for abandoning me because she must have loved me to have parted with me but I was angry for having polio.”

Coming to India had brought a greater sense of identity and an awareness, for the first time in his life, of who he really was. “I don’t feel Bengali, I cannot speak Bengali — funnily, my mother, to whom I owe everything and whom I love very much, speaks more Bengali — but India has become very important to me.

“India is doing amazingly well in literature, in the arts, economically. I am proud to be Indian.”

His sense of humour, though, is distinctly English public school. Were his parents to meet him now, he jokes, they might say: “You again? We thought we got rid of you!”