GOLDEN YEARS: Anu Aga at the Thermax Group guest-house Photo: Gajanan Dudhalkar

This is one dictum that needs to be buried: men who head multi-crore corporations are businesslike; women who do so, chew iron nails for breakfast. Still, you?d think that the chairperson of a Rs 538-crore company would be a tough-talking boardroom power-dresser. The image vanishes the moment Anu Aga walks in.

The first thing that strikes you about the billionaire ? among the eight women who figure in a recent list of India?s richest ? is her grace. Anu Aga is a picture of gentility, as she walks down a flight of stairs in her company guest-house in south Mumbai. Certainly, there is steel ? how else would she have pulled her company out of a mess? But the lasting image of the 62-year-old is that of gentleness.

Anu Aga stepped down last week from her high-profile job as the chairperson of the Thermax Group, bringing an end to her exceptional 19-year-old corporate career. Aga handed over the reins of the engineering company to her chemical engineer daughter, Meher Pudumjee, and walked into her vanaprastham.

There are quite a few surprises there. Though more and more women are making a mark in the corporate world, she is one of the few to successfully head a company. And in handing over the baton to her daughter, she has kept the corporate women?s flag flying.

Not that, she stresses, she is where she is because she is a woman. But Aga likes to point out that women, to an extent, have a certain edge over men. ?If you ask me, there is no difference between men and women except biological differences. But over the years, conditioning has created differences. Women have to manage their homes and workplaces and they are better equipped to multi-task, are more adaptable and more resilient.?

And that is why, she adds, quite a few of them are making it to the top in the corporate world. Aga lauds the achievements of Biocon chairperson Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, HSBC?s Naina Lal Kidwai, and ICICI?s formidable group of women that includes Vandana Gupte, Shikha Sharma and Kalpana Morparia.

She knows what she is talking about. Forced to take over as the executive chairperson of Thermax after her husband Rohinton?s sudden death in 1996, she has steered the company out of danger. In 1996, Thermax had shown a healthy growth of 33 per cent, but in the next three years, the sales dwindled to a low, registering a negative growth of 13 per cent. Aga adopted a series of bold measures to bring it back into the reckoning. ?We are in the turnaround to transformation stage,? she says.

Aga is now ready to give it all up. Dressed in an elegant black and gold embroidered sari, Pune-based Aga, nee Bathena, recalls how it happened. ?Being a human resource person, I firmly believe in succession planning, and I felt my daughter was more suited to the job,? she says.

Anu married Rohinton Aga, a Harvard-educated entrepreneur who later partnered her father in their engineering company, Wanson Engineering. Born in an upper middle-class Parsi family, she majored in economics from St Xavier?s College and did her postgraduation in social work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai.

The Agas shifted base to Pune in the Seventies, soon after the birth of their first child, Meher. Rohinton Aga transformed a small boiler manufacturing firm into a multi-divisional engineering major making heaters, absorption cooling solutions, water and waste solutions, chemicals for energy and environment applications, captive power generation systems and air pollution and purification systems. Anu Aga started handling its human resources division from 1985.

The turning point in Aga?s life came when first she lost her husband, and then, within 14 months, her son, Kurush. Thermax had just gone public and there was concern as to how the market would react to the news. ?The board of directors thought the Thermax staff accepted me very well and suggested that I take over. But I was not a businesswoman nor was I interested,? says Aga. ?However, looking at the circumstances, I took it up,? says Aga, who was executive chairperson and then, non-executive chairperson.

Caught in an emotional turmoil, Aga turned to Vipassana, the Buddhist form of meditation. ?I don?t how I could have coped with their loss, especially that of my son, without Vipassana,? she says. ?It gave me the courage to do whatever needs to be done.?

Courage, she discovered, was what she needed in steering Thermax back to its former glory. As the company sales plummeted, Aga hired the consultancy firm, Boston Consulting, and sought advice on ways to turn it around. She supervised the makeover of the company, pruning the employee strength, reconstituting the board of directors, and bringing in a new work ethic. It wasn?t long before the company started growing.

In 2002, Aga decided to put away one per cent of the company?s profits into the social sector. ?My son was very affected by the poverty he saw around him when he returned from UK and threatened to go back there if we didn?t put away some of our family income into social development. I believe that society is an equally important stakeholder in a corporate company. One per cent is too little, but we have made a beginning,? she says.

The social sector has always been close to Aga?s heart. She is the chairperson of an NGO, Akanksha, which runs education and other projects for more than 1,600 underprivileged children in 36 centres in Mumbai and Pune.

That there?s a lot more to Aga than corporate zeal became evident in the aftermath of the Gujarat violence of 2002. She was among the few corporate bosses who raised their voice against the violence. ?I visited Shah Alam and Bapunagar relief camps in Ahmedabad and you have to be really inhuman not to be moved by the stories of injustice. What role did women and children have to play in the Godhra carnage? But, they were literally butchered, their bellies were slit open. I spoke against it and I hope I always do so if there is such gross injustice,? says Aga.

She believes that big corporate houses and industry associations can play a significant social role. ?These groups have the financial power and managerial talent, and they can collectively be a powerful pressure group that no government can dare to ignore.?

Aga?s own plans for the future revolve around her social passions: communal harmony and human rights issues involving women and children. And she wants to spend quality time with her nine-year-old grandson and five-year-old granddaughter. ?I have been a ?hi-and-bye? grandmother so far. I would now like to be with them,? she says.

After bowing out on October 6, Aga wrote a touching letter to her daughter. ?I told her, Parsis don?t believe in rebirth, but I do. The belief in rebirth brings a little sobriety to this life,? Aga says. ?Life is insignificant, and any event in this insignificant life is further insignificant. Your joys and sorrows are a passing phase and a very small spot in our long journey. So, don?t overfocus on your achievements or failures; they too shall pass.?