Starting From Nothing
Ashok Khade’s rags-to-riches story stands out because of how completely he transformed himself, with some luck and some help from India’s opening economy, from an illiterate cobbler’s son to a multimillionaire player in the booming oil services industry.
He was born in a mud hut in Ped in 1955, one of six children. His parents were [color=rgb(102, 102, 153)]day laborers[/color] who toiled in upper-caste farmers’ fields for pennies. His father would often travel to Mumbai, then known as Bombay, to work as a shoe repairman. He came from a family of Chamhars, a caste at the very bottom of the Hindu hierarchy. Their traditional job was to skin dead animals.
They were poor and always hungry. One day, his mother sent him to fetch a small bag of flour on credit from a nearby flour mill so she could cook flatbread for dinner. But it was the monsoon season and Ashok slipped in the mud. The precious flour landed in a puddle.
“I came home weeping,†he said. “My mother was weeping. My brothers and sisters were hungry. There was nothing in the house.â€
But that hunger gave him drive. “That was my starting day,†he said.
Mr. Khade got his first big break that year, when he won admission to a school run by a charity in a nearby town. Away from the village and its deeper caste prejudice, he thrived. Upper-caste teachers nurtured him, and he strived to impress them.
But caste was not entirely absent. In the school’s musty register from 1973, the year he finished high school, next to his name is his caste: Chamhar.
