Firoz Merchant, From School Dropout in Mumbai to Billionaire Pure Gold Owner in Dubai

The family (all 11) lived inside a 100-square-foot room in the ‘Imamwada’ chawl of Mumbai’s Bheendi Bazaar. For those of you not familiar with the concept of a chawl – it is tenement housing, a residential option for the poor in the city. Each building of this type has kholis, or rooms, with a little space for a kitchen and a tiny living room. There are no toilets or baths inside the unit and people have to go outside the building to use these facilities.

“We were a poor middle-class family. Every day was a struggle. I was the eighth child for my parents and very close to my father. I would hold his hand and go along wherever he took me,” he recalls.

“My father taught me to embrace our struggles with compassion and gratitude. Every time I felt I was losing ground in life, he would tell me to find the strength from within. There was no room for self-pity, we just had to get on with life and accept what we had been dealt.”

Merchant said he had to drop out of school when he was in Grade 2 as his father could not afford his tuition fees. “I was a good student. In Grade 1, I did well in academics and stood second in class. The teacher even awarded me a certificate of merit. But sadly the following year my father had to pull me out of school as there was no money for my education. And so my father was the teacher; in fact, he was a body of wisdom and knowledge and I learnt the art of survival from him.”