Noon With No View

A short review of Sir Gulam Noon's autobiography which I did for BusinessWorld online

The book is a usual autobiography one would expect from a rags-to-riches businessman — replete with movie-style stories, extolling virtues of family unity and exonerating oneself from the scandals one is embroiled in. Add to that, chapters on charitable organisations (the Noon Foundation in this case), views on religion, country and business and you have the ingredients for a perfect autobiography.

With due respect, Noon is a very accomplished industrialist. However, one can’t say the same for his writing skills. He wants to say something yet ends up nothing so he calls the Ambani feud “acrimonious” yet, hails Dhirubhai as “a great entrepreneur”. He admires Tony Blair and his “New Labour” vision but — at the same time — thinks Margaret Thatcher “did a fantastic job”.

Noon gives a blow-by-blow account of the cash-for-honours scam and presents a fairly comprehensive — butmelodramatic — argument in his favour. His views on life in Britain are no different from what is already known — a melting pot of cultures with whose strength lies in its diversity. Noon makes no bones about the fact that he knows people in the corridors of power. In fact, it seems, he is quite proud of this. Sample this: “Prince Charles came straight over to me and said how pleased he was to see me knighted”. A reproduction of Tony Blair’s letter post the cash-for-honours scam is another example of Noon’s name-dropping tendencies. And it doesn’t end there. Photographs in this autobiography show the industrialist hobnobbing with John Major, Gordon Brown, the Prime Minister of Bahrain, erstwhile Indian royalty, and heads of religious communities. But Noon With A View has the odd interesting aspects too — especially in its initial chapters.

Gulam Noon’s family was a large one comprising half-brothers and half-sisters (his parents married twice) and over half-a-dozen siblings and their respective spouses. His father died young and his brother-in-law took over the business; warming the seat for Noon. And soon after he took over, it seems luck swung to their side and the business became a huge success in the United Kingdom. However, Noon’s foray into business is unusually short and the chapter tracing Noon’s journey as a businessman is covered in just eight pages.

Photographs are used extensively to make up for the loss of words (around 50 of them) and the editing is very shoddy. For instance, the Noon’s hobbies on the cover jacket are thus described “He is a passionate cricket fan in what little spare time he can find”. In the preface, the author writes “The prime motive for writing an autobiography must surely be to record events which otherwise will be lost to posterity.” In Noon’s case it seems, the only motive to write was to clarify his stand on the cash-for-honours scam. The other chapters just seem incidental. How else would you explain a preview of the scam in the first chapter itself? And an abrupt transition to the year 1946 in the same chapter.

Noon With A View is an autobiography which is at best, an excuse to publish a book. Had it not been for the cash-for-honours scam, Noon would probably not have ever written an autobiography. And even if he was so keen on to narrating the story of his life, Noon should have got it ghost-written. It’s an autobiography which will be soon be dubbed as yet another industrialist’s attempt to glorify himself.