I don't know if cars are a passion with Jagdish Khattar, but food and publicity are not. So when I invite the head of India's largest car company to lunch with Business Standard, he demurs. "My batch-mates already think I get too much publicity." Batch-mates? Khattar left the IAS when he joined Maruti Udyog some nine years ago, but clearly he is still part of the brotherhood.

Corporate chieftains outrank secretaries to the government, I tell him. It seems to work. So where would he like to eat? Come and share my food in the office, he counters with the kind of offer you expect from someone in the Planning Commission. I try to entice him with the new joints in town.

How about Masala Art, the new fusion place at the Taj Palace? Okay, he says, but makes it clear that he's being dragged out of the way as it's all of 15 minutes from his downtown office. But it turns out that though the restaurant had a soft launch a week earlier, it's still to formally open (fortunately so, because the food is a disappointment). I debate suggesting Brix at the Grand Hyatt, which offers delectable fare but is even further out, and decide it would be futile.

The only interesting option that's close enough to the Maruti head office seems to be San Gimignano, the Italian addition to the Imperial's increasingly choice fare. Okay, Khattar says with the faint air of a man who wonders why food is so important.

He calls up on the morning of the appointed day to say he might be a few minutes late. The 1965 batch of the UP IAS is meeting in the defence secretary's office! But when I reach, on the dot of 1.15, he is already there in the open air section, surprisingly dapper in the Japanese-style company uniform, and smoking a Mild Seven. Japanese in his cigarettes too? May be I should have offered a sushi joint, I tell myself.

How about some wine? More reluctance. We settle on the cabernet sauvignon, which he barely sips through the meal, and is reluctant to explore the joys of the menu. No, no starters please.

Eventually he settles on a pasta in carbonara sauce (which he barely touches), while I opt for the grilled salmon. His trim figure is now easily explained, and in any case he walks 365 days a year, come rain or shine.

Somehow, the IAS seems a more inviting subject than Maruti, so I ask about his days in the government and why he decided to leave. It turns out that when the Mandal issue of extending reservations to the Other Backward Castes blew up in everyone's face a decade ago, Khattar was disillusioned about staying on, despite having had a very interesting career till then.

Looking around for options, he made a list of where people had got after they left the service, and the man who stood out as a post-service success story was, of course, another UP cadre man, the managing director of Maruti Udyog, R C Bhargava. Come and see me, Bhargava said when Khattar called. And by the time they met later in the day, Bhargava had already checked out on Khattar with three seniors in the service. From there to appointment as the heir apparent didn't take too long. It was a good insight into the workings of the brotherhood.

Once you've got him talking of his days in the government, conversation is no problem at all. He recalls his days as private secretary to Uma Shankar Dikshit when he was home minister. Before long, though, Indira Gandhi relegated Dikshit to being a minister without portfolio, and the minister told his private secretary: there's no work for you here, you better look around for another job. Khattar found a perch in the steel ministry, where he is proud of two achievements.

One, he opened up India's pig iron industry. How? By spotting a chink in the regulation that reserved steel-making for the public sector. Khattar argued that since pig iron wasn't steel, it could be thrown open to private enterprise. By such sleight of hand is reform achieved in India!

When he tried reform by the front door, it got nowhere of course. That was when he recommended that the steel ministry was doing nothing useful, and should be wound up. I'm not surprised that no one listened to him. For when I suggested the same thing to Naveen Patnaik, when he was steel minister before he went to Orissa, Patnaik was shocked at the idea.

But Khattar's happiest days were with the Tea Board in London, where he had been sent to market Indian tea. He found out very quickly that a lot of inferior tea from all over the world was being marketed as Indian tea, and even Darjeeling tea. When he complained, no one took heed; indeed, the duplicitous British establishment threw the book at him.

So he decided to take the battle to the open market, educating the English public that more Darjeeling tea was being sold in Britain than was produced in Darjeeling. He then roped in the cricket icons of the time — Sunil Gavaskar and Ian Botham — as advertising models for a press campaign on Indian tea that offered free sachets to anyone who wrote in asking for the genuine stuff, and before long he had won the day by listing the places where you could get real Indian tea.

"When we hired Amitabh and Abhishekh Bachchan for Maruti's recent campaign, I had done a similar thing long ago for Indian tea," he recalls. Except that the cricket models came much cheaper, of course!

Back in India, he was sent to head the Tea Board in Kolkata, where he quickly found himself in a crisis when tea prices shot through the roof. Indira Gandhi had just won an election on the issue of onion prices, and demanded action. Khattar was advised by wise friends in the government that, whatever he did, it should be something that could be rolled back quickly, not something that would become a permanent control item.

So he did the unthinkable: he banned the export of all CTC teas. I can only imagine the headlines of the time in the business press. Prices crashed, but the prime minister had been propitiated, and more importantly in Khattar's book, it was something that would not last. But he hadn't made himself popular with the city's tea crowd, naturally, and before long he was heading to another posting. Khattar recalls asking a Kolkata businessman many years later: "How much did you guys pay to have me transferred?"

London and Kolkata are very different from Uttar Pradesh. Put in charge of the UP Cement Corporation and posted in the wilds of eastern UP, he was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time because dual pricing was introduced in cement, opening up a partial free market. Profitability improved and someone in Lucknow thought he should head the state transport corporation.

Sanjay Singh of Amethi fame was the state transport minister, and his bete noir Bir Bahadur Singh was the chief minister. Sanjay was in a foul mood, he thought the chief minister had sent him to his political graveyard because no one could possibly handle the transport portfolio with credit.

He also thought Khattar was the CM's man, and the relationship got off to a bad start. But Khattar picked up courage and struck a deal: If the minister didn't want him, he would look for another posting. But if the minister would not interfere in matters like staff postings and transfers, Khattar would deliver the results that would make the minister happy.

Having extracted that promise, he went to the chief secretary and asked for a massive loan of Rs 39 crore to buy 1,000 buses — a 20 per cent addition to the fleet overnight. When asked how the bankrupt corporation would service such a loan in the midst of a recession, Khattar had his sums ready.

The transport corporation had 11,000 surplus workers, they could be deployed on the 1,000 new buses, and if he ran the buses round the clock he would make enough profits to repay the loan. Which, unbelievably, he did — the first time in 19 years that the corporation had made money.

Sanjay Singh was so delighted that he ran to the supreme boss in Delhi (Rajiv Gandhi) with the good news. Khattar got a congratulatory audience with Rajiv, as a result.

We've ordered capuccinos by now, and still haven't talked of Maruti. But it seemed to me that a man who could win with tea, cement and state transport, in places as far apart as London, Kolkata, Gorakhpur and Lucknow, wouldn't have had too much of a problem with selling quality cars.

I know that he is proud of his record score on the JD Power consumer surveys, where Maruti scored the rare honour of winning as a market leader, but I'm more keen to discuss Osamu Suzuki the man. It'll have to be another time, unfortunately.

We stroll out into the gentle afternoon sun, his gleaming black Baleno rolls up, and Khattar is off. It seems more obvious than ever that life in the corporate world is infinitely easier, and of course more comfortable, than surviving and doing well in the government — on a pittance of a salary. What's remarkable is that there was a time when so many capable and public spirited people chose the rocky path.