SRI PRAKASH LOHIA and his son, Amit, are chairman and vice chairman, respectively, of the Indorama Corporation. The company employs 45,000 people in 38 countries, has a turnover of $20 billion (£16bn) and will mark its 50th anniversary in 2025. The Lohias were ranked third on the Asian Rich List 2024 with a net value of £10.1bn. Sri Prakash’s wife, Seema, happens to be the younger sister of the steel tycoon, Lakshmi Mit tal, who, along with his son, Aditya, was ranked second with £12.9 billion. According to the company’s literature, “Indorama Corporation, which is headquartered in Singapore, manufactures a multitude of products, including nitrogen fertilisers, phosphate fertilisers, polyethylene, polypropylene, polyester, textiles, cotton fibre, and medical gloves.
We are the largest producer of urea and phosphate fertilisers in Sub-Saharan Africa, the largest producer of polyolefins in West Africa, and the third largest producer of synthetic gloves in the world.” Amit is now settled in the UK, with his wife, Aarti, and their three children, Aria, Sohum (who is on the verge of becoming a chess grandmaster) and Shorya. The Labour party is not very happy that Amit had made a £2 million donation in a “personal capacity” to the Tories. In fact, it got into a fake rage about Indorama’s tenuous Russian con nection. Amit’s spokesman had to put out a statement: “Avgol Russia makes materials used in babies’ nappies and feminine hygiene products. It represents less than 0.19 per cent of Indorama Venture’s operations.
” But what is perhaps most unexpected about Amit is that he writes poetry. He published his first collection in 2022, and is working on his second. Amit said: “Siouxsie, The Cure, James, Morrissey and U2 are some of the timeless musicians who have had a profound influence on me. “I started writing poems when I was in middle school and by the time I finished school, I had written extensively. Poetry was my faithful companion every step of the way; my selfless biographer marking my ups and downs in candid verse. The poems in this anthology are mostly from that phase in my life.
” He added: “The poems are about many a thing, but if I had to choose a handful of re curring themes, they would be about inspiration, identity, and longing in all their colours and shapes. I have always be lieved there is a poet inside everyone.” The first poem in his collection, “god too cries” – he avoids capital letters – might be considered singularly prescient given today’s Israel-Gaza conflict. The poem begins: “i saw a war-burnt child/ on a broken field.” And in ends: “for how long/in the heavens above/can we close our eyes?/and in some forsaken corner,/yes, god too cries.
” Amit was born in Delhi on 20 October 1974. He began working at Indorama after graduating in finance in 1996 from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. He is now on its executive board for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. The board’s purpose is “to advise the School and enhance and expand Wharton’s impact as the foremost teaching, research, and experience-led business school in the world”, and al so support its externals affairs department “in its efforts to engage Wharton alumni globally through learning, community, and philanthropy and increase lifelong affinity to the School”.
As a young executive, he told Indorama’s employees: “Nowadays, companies have equipment, technology; but if they don’t have good people to help the company grow, then the company will achieve nothing.” Amit learnt the business from his father, just as Sri Prakash Lohia, who was born in Calcutta (now Kolkata) on August 11, 1952, was trained by his. He has a house in Mayfair but the Lohias have also bought Culverwood, a country mansion in Hertfordshire with 40 acres of land. It is here that Sri Prakash and Seema celebrated the golden jubilee of their wed ding last year. “I made a library there,” said Sri Prakash, who has built up a formidable col lection of illustrated art books since he started in 2000. He is obviously an immensely powerful man, befriended by heads of government, as the billionaire chairman of a global corporation. But his influence manifests itself in another way. He has digitised his book collection so that he can share his rare treasures with the world – free of charge. He has written about his business activities in his memoirs, Threads of My Life, but that is not the only book he has published.
He has curated his favourite images into a lavish volume, Meditations on Colour: A selection of 150 colour illustrated works from the Lohia Collection, which he is gifting to leading libraries, muse ums and universities throughout the UK. Perhaps Amit inherited his spiritual values from his father. It has been pointed out: “The 150 items in this illustrated catalogue have been selected because they each have some sort of spiritual resonance but this is a theme that runs throughout the Lohia Collection and perhaps because, as the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky once noted, ‘colour is a power which directly influences the soul’.” Sri Prakash’s collection includes “Thomas and William Daniell’s magnificent six volumes of Oriental Scenery, published between 1795 and 1808 and containing 144 hand-coloured aquatint views of India”; and David Roberts’s The Holy Land and Egypt & Nubia”. Sri Prakash summed up his very generous attitude to life: “The publication of this volume comprising a selection of some of the works in my library is an opportunity to celebrate, and share with readers, the artists, engravers, colourists and publishers who helped create some of these magnificent volumes. “It is only a selection but it does contain some of my favourite pieces and provides an insight into the diversity and versatility of col our plate books, and illustrated works more generally, which in part explains their appeal to a collector.
For me, it has been and continues to be a pleasure to build this library – both in the research necessary to do so and in being able to appreciate such aesthetically satisfying objects at first hand. It is also a matter of great satisfaction to me that I am able to share them with the world at large through the SPL Rare Books website where anyone can freely access in digitalised form the illustrations these volumes, portfolios and albums contain. It is a re source which has already proved useful to re searchers and which I hope will continue to do so as the collection expands further. “Meditations in Colour will, I hope, provide readers with a flavour of the larger collection and convey some of the magic and power that colour illustrations can wield.”
