High Noon

I once jokingly called him High Noon, as an adjective, not a greeting. I say that because Lord Gulam Noon was always high on something positive, whether it was his celebrated, eponymous food business, playing the role of the moderate, enlightened Muslim in the UK, engaged in charity, as a member of the Prince's Trust and the London Chamber of Commerce, or watching or discussing cricket, a sport that was his magnificent obsession.

I remember a dinner in his elegant apartment in London where he and I started talking about Sachin Tendulkar and an upcoming tour of England by the Indian team, and we got so engrossed because of his knowledge and interest in the game, that he only realised halfway through the evening that he had ignored the other guests. He was an Anglophile but in the best sense of the word, and was always in a dilemma when India toured since he traditionally backed the English team. As long as Sachin was in the Indian team, he happily switched loyalties.

We always called him Noon, even his wife Mohini, addressed him as 'Noon'. She used to be Mohini Kent, a journalist I knew way back when she was writing for a magazine I edited (India Today Plus) and I met Noon through her in London, much before he was knighted and started being referred to as Lord Noon. I met him again during his frequent visits to India, including after his harrowing experience of being trapped in the Taj hotel during 26/11. He was just finishing his memoirs called Noon With a View and held it back to add a chapter on his experience and the fact that the first call he received when he finally emerged shaken and stirred but unscathed, was from British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

I knew about his charity work in India, educating rural girls, and the state of the art hospital he set up in the place of his birth, in rural Rajasthan, where he returned every year, after a spell in his favourite suite at the Taj in Mumbai. Noon was a Bombay boy, and being the son of a shopkeeper selling sweets, imbibed some business instincts but took it a huge step further when he migrated to London and opened a sweet shop in Southall, the origin of his rise to riches and fame.

Southall, the Indian enclave in London, was where he set up his factory making Indian curries and kababs. It would earn him the title of Britain's 'Curry King' but for those who knew him, there was so much more to him than his entrepreneurship. He was extremely s?o?ft spoken but could get aggressive when it came to his fearless outbursts against Islamic extremism, and his belief that if you immigrated to a country like England, you assimilated, spoke and wrote English, and obeyed the laws of the land.

What stood out for me was his reputation for fairness and integrity. He once told me a story of the time his factory burnt down in 1994, and the head of one of the supermarket chains he supplied his frozen meals to, Lord Sainsbury, offered to loan him the money to rebuild because he wanted Noon Foods back in his stores. It also spoke of Noon's reputation (somewhat tarnished by a cash-for-peerage scandal that he was named in, but never proved). The factory was back in operation in a record ten weeks and not one of his 800 employees was denied their salaries.

What London will miss about him was his whole hearted involvement in promoting inter-faith engagement, rallying his Muslim brethren against extremism, and, of course, supplying them with Britain's favourite food.

RIP