Even as you read this column, let me lead you to a little secret. The page on which this column’s printed, in fact, the whole of this paper, has been designed with a publishing software called QuarkXPress. Most publications around the world use Quark as a tool to make pages before they are fired into the press. QuarkXPress first went into commercial use in 1987, a year after an Iranian-born American businessman bought into the company founded by a geek named Tim Gill. Today, Denver-based Quark Inc, the company, is entirely owned by Ebrahimi. A Punjab-born Indian Kamar Aulakh runs its day-to-day operations. Very soon, Quark Inc will launch its latest version, QuarkXPress 7, promises to bring an entire array of next-gen tools for publishers. The news for all newspapers using Quark is: 80% of this software has been developed out of Mohali where 90% of Quark engineers are employed.
Predictably, Ebrahimi makes millions selling his software the world over. What’s less known is that he’s been pumping those millions into billions worth of real estate in Germany, France, Denmark, the UK, the US, Japan and now, India.
In India, Mr Ebrahimi will soon start building a dream city in Punjab, spread over 5,000 acres, bringing state-of-the-art construction technology to the country for the first time ever. Quark City will boast India’s biggest shopping mall, a host of technology campuses ranging from IT to biotech and the works, and housing apartments each worth a crore. To make things happen, the Punjab government has eased archaic building restrictions. It also plans to give the SEZ status to Quark City. The package is so attractive that it is already being touted as the Quark Model. And if leaks from the Punjab government are to be believed, a host of Indian IT majors, including TCS, Wipro and Infy are already gunning for similar sops. If you haven’t already heard of Farhad Ebrahimi and his mega plans for Punjab, I’m sure you’ll wake up to him pretty soon. What’s made Farhad Ebrahimi what he is today?
Dreams. Period.
Ebrahimi, the son of a landlord from a minority group, grew up in the Shah’s Iran. He went early to the US in 1959 with $1,200 in his pocket. The day after he landed in America, he took to cleaning toilets. With the money he earned, Ebrahimi went to the campus to major in engineering and later graduated in cybernetics. He worked on a host of technology start-ups, but also put his money in retail and real estate, first, in the ’60s, as a franchisee of Jack In The Box and then, through the ’70s, as a housing magnet in Denver, Colorado, where he built 600 apartments. Along the way, Farhad the Iranian lad came to be known as Fred the tycoon.
Today, besides his housing and software interests, Fred claims ownership of some 30-40 companies worldwide, but can’t name most of them. The big ones, of course, are a venture capital firm called the Mithra Group puts money into biotech start-ups, an investment company Rostam Holdings, the software arm Quark Inc, and now, Quark City. He is also a majority owner of the world’s largest macadamia nuts plantation in Hawaii and owns a chocolate company in Switzerland. He has a stake in HSBC, but his biggest holdings are in pharma giants Pfizer and Merck. He has also picked up Dr Reddy’s through the ADR route but won’t say exactly how much because he is not bound to reveal his holdings that are below the 5% disclosure norm. He has also taken the ADR route to pick up sizeable stakes in well- known Indian IT firms but won’t tell how much of which. Meanwhile, Farhad ‘Fred’ Ebrahimi has made it to the Forbes list of the world’s 400 richest men and women.
Been there, done that. So, what gets Fred to India? To Punjab, I ask. Why not Iran? That’s when his eyes well up. Between ’74 and ’78, Farhad helped set up a college of computer applications in Iran. Came the ’79 Islamic revolution and bang, the mullahs blew up the campus. They put several of his cousins to death, and his father, an influential in Shah’s government died soon thereafter from a heart attack. Farhad left Iran for good though his mother still lives in Teheran.
Life was good in the US, Quark made money from ’87 through ’99 when Fred bought out Tim Gill and set up shop with a small start-up in Mohali to tap India’s emerging knowledge prowess. The rest is history. And much of that history was written post-9/11. After 40-plus years in the US of A, living off one of its new economy success stories, Fred Ebrahimi says he feels like an alien. “I feel alienated from both sides. As an American, I feel we are becoming isolationist. As a middle-easterner, I don’t think we have done enough for the world to see us as anything other than a bunch of terrorists. Americans are better than most other nations in accepting someone from abroad. But they never accept you 100%.”
Welcome to India, Farhad. Welcome to the Home of the World.
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