"I remember the day he came for the interview — his father stood at that door carrying him on his shoulders," recalls Venkatesh Naidoo, CEO, Tata Tetley. "He told me, ‘I can’t walk and I can’t talk properly, but I can work.’ We had no choice but to take him on as a trainee. In less than two years he had proven himself so well that he actually started demanding a higher position, purely on merit."

Between nine in the morning — when his father carries him into office — and five in the evening, you will find Paresh in his wheelchair, busy helping the production team prepare MIS reports by feeding production data into the system. Watching him at work, meticulously keying in each figure with a single finger on his right hand, is at once an inspiring and a humbling experience.

"Each day, he saves the company a lot of money that would otherwise have gone waste in time and output loss," says Naidoo.

"It does get a little monotonous at times, but with my physical disability I did not expect to come even this far," says Paresh. But before you start imagining that this is where he plans to stay on, he quickly adds, "By the time I retire, I want to have reached a decision-making level in the company."

That shouldn’t be difficult, given his sheer grit. "He has tremendous determination," says Ragini Menon of Raksha, a school for children with multiple disabilities. It is at Raksha that Paresh learnt to accept his disability and where, with constant counseling and encouragement, he decided to appear for the SSC exams – a turning point in his life. He went on to finish his B Com, which he followed up with a course in computers.

Right now he is perfecting the art of words with a diploma in creative writing from the London-based Writer’s Bureau. Not that he is new to the business of writing. He regularly contributes articles on movies, art, food or any issue on which he feels the need to express his opinion, to leading newspapers like The Hindu and The Indian Express.

And if Paresh feels very strongly about something, he doesn’t spare people within the company either. So when Tetley products were recently launched in the country and the company aired the first of a series of TV commercials, he was quick to shoot off a mail saying the ad 'reeked of a colonial hangover'. 

However, Paresh sees the Tetley takeover itself as 'reverse colonialism', a first step towards India becoming an economic superpower, a process, he says with pride, triggered by the Tata Group. "I joined this company because of the Tata name," 
he declares. 

For a person who spent a large part of his childhood undergoing speech therapy, Paresh is impressive in his articulateness and clarity. Menon attributes this way with words to Paresh's extensive reading, a habit cultivated from his days at Raksha. She recalls how he used to borrow books from her personal library, always surprising her by asking for books that boys his age would not usually read. Of late he has been reading Indian authors in English. "Some of them are good, but most of them are average," is how he sums up their contribution 
to literature.

Movies are another passion with Paresh, who dreams of studying at the Film and Television Institute of India. Someday he wants to write a script based on Arthur Hailey’s Final Diagnosis, which he would love to have Mani Ratnam direct. "He loves going to the movies and writing reviews," says Charandas Palicha, his father.

But the real love of his life is cricket. Paresh reminisces how he would listen intently to the commentary on radio to find out how his all-time favourite, Kapil Dev, was performing. Of the current crop, he bets on Sourav Ganguly and Sachin Tendulkar. While on cricket, he shares a secret with you: his first, most cherished dream — even before he dreamt of becoming a marketing man — was to become a cricketer.

At the moment, though, he is trying to increase his speed at keying in the production figures. "It takes me three to five minutes, while my colleagues take just two minutes," he says. "I try to be near perfect in everything I do."

Somehow, you are not surprised that he should say something like this. By now you have an idea of the stuff he is made of, his will to beat all odds. even as he retains his great sense of humour and that brilliant, childlike smile. Once again, Naidoo captures the spirit and achievement of this man: "In our little world, Paresh is a Stephen Hawking."