The Lovely Sweets shop in Jalandhar Cantt in its current, polished avatar. (Photogaph by Narendra Bisht)
At LPU, meanwhile, the high volumes mantra clearly applies still, even if the margins are way beyond those for the laddoos. Its 24,000 students (a scale of operation criticised by others in the education business as unmanageable) pay around Rs 1 lakh each annually, and the Mittals are using the fees to complete their campus—which will have its own shopping mall. And since they can see mithais going out of fashion as gifts, they are also all set to unveil ‘Imaginations by Lovely’, a mall exclusively for marriage and celebrations catering.
Yet each morning, Ramesh still carries out the ritual of personally opening the Sadar Bazaar sweet shop at 8 am. And while there’s a fleet of cars to travel in, Mercs and Beemers among them, the family of 17 still lives in the old house in Sadar Bazaar they bought in 1972. Success, for Ramesh, is all about “staying united and working very hard”. He is dead on. The clan works together as a single entity, and is the heart of its diverse businesses. Where no one returns from work before 10 pm!
Hope you get closer to Mittals past life and story behind brand name i.e. LPU.