Back with a Banga
No, really, Harry Banga was set to enjoy life when he retired from Noble. But his sons begged him to join them in a new venture, writes Anna Healy Fenton
Two years ago Harry Banga stepped down as co-founder of Noble Group, one of Asia's biggest business success stories.
"The time comes in everyone's life; it's been 32 years of hard work and no weekends and no holidays," he said then. "After 60, I don't want to be on that treadmill.
"Our baby is now an adult. It's time to start letting go."
But Banga now admits letting go was harder than he thought. Fast-forward to last month. Now we're sitting on a whole floor of Central Plaza, the 78-storey tower in Wan Chai district. This is Banga's new family office. He and his two sons - Guneet, 34, and Angad, 30 - along with 90 workers are running their new venture, Caravel. Banga, guessing the first question, looks sheepish. What happened to golf and reading fiction? He laughs heartily and says: "I know. Retirement. It just hasn't happened."
Stepping down from Noble, which Banga and chairman Richard Elman built together, proved a challenge for Banga, 62, who has received India's highest civilian honour, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman Award for Indians and people of Indian origin. "It was very difficult to leave Noble," he admitted. "I'd been involved from the very beginning, in 1984."
The plan was to retire, settle back and relax. "Everybody was so happy, and then my two sons and my colleagues changed my life. They badgered me to work with them." Banga shrugged with mock helplessness: "What could I do? I don't want to work, but here we are, starting again, all together in Caravel."
