‘I choked up’: Kumar Mangalam Birla, Peyush Bansal, and more get surprise tributes at ET Awards

Mumbai: What made the 25th ET Awards extra sweet for the winners was that their big moment was made all the more special when their family and friends were invited on stage to toast them.

Lenskart founder Peyush Bansal, winner of Entrepreneur of the Year award, could scarcely hide his surprise when host Cyrus Sahukar invited his wife, Nidhi Bansal, to share nuggets from her 20/20 vision into his life.



Nidhi talked about Bansal's innate restlessness to make things happen. She highlighted Bansal's respect for his team members, pointing out how he chose to share his big moment with Sunita Parshuram and Vibha Shukla, two Lenskart employees from Goa and Kanpur.

"Attending every parental session at school, you have made many moms look with agony at their missing husbands," she said, drawing laughs from the crowd.

When Vishakha Mulye, CEO of Aditya Birla Capital, came on stage to receive her Businesswoman of the Year award, her friend-a colleague from their ICICI Bank days-the MD and CEO of IDFC First Bank, V Vaidyanathan, shared stories of her formative years being moulded by legendary banker KV Kamath.

"The trick about Vishakha-she will always start with a yes, always make you happy, always smiling, but in the end she will get her way. Mr Birla, you are watching this, she will always say yes, she will have her way," he teased, addressing her boss Kumar Mangalam Birla, himself an awardee this time around.


With Fareed Zakaria, ET's Global Indian of the Year, unable to make it to the award ceremony with action-packed days in the US, it was his niece Malika Noor Mehta who came on stage to accept the award.

She recalled how her Fareed Mamu made her feel at home in the US when she moved to study there as a 14-year-old. "Just through the process of osmosis, I learned so much about politics, policies, humanitarian issues, business and much more just by being in his presence."

Kumar Mangalam Birla, ET Business Leader of the Year, was toasted by daughter Ananya Birla who recalled how her dad's eyes were shining when he told them about getting the Award.

"My dad absolutely loves The Economic Times. All of us in the family immediately cleared our calendar, I bet papa had already started deciding what he was going to wear," she said.

She recalled how many people had written him off when he took over the reins at the family business at a young age, when his father passed away.

All of that left dad Kumar Mangalam Birla overjoyed and a bit emotional too, "It was very different, I loved the part where they wanted the family to say something. It was the biggest scale so far, so quite a surprise and quite lovely. I had an absolutely great evening. I was blank after Ananya spoke about me, and I did choke."

Mallika Srinivasan, CMD of TAFE, and wife of Venu Srinivasan of TVS Group who won the Lifetime Achievement award, eloquently talked about how her husband has always gone to great lengths to ensure the welfare of the employees on the shop floor. "Until today no one has ever asked me to talk about him," she smiled fondly.