Two favorite quotes of British-Indian business magnate Sudhir Choudhrie are:

“Luck favors the prepared mind – but sometimes you just have to get lucky.”

“Life is something that happens to you while you are making plans.”

Well, Sudhir Choudhrie has been lucky and, at times, “life happened” to him while he was busy making complicated plans. Most often, however, Choudhrie did not rely on luck. A self-made billionaire, he started his life with two strikes against him: He had a genetic heart defect diagnosed at age eight. His father died tragically when Sudhir was a mere child.

It didn’t stop him from growing up, earning a degree in economics from the University of Delhi and then wasting no time starting his first business. He built an import operation from the ground up. It involved procuring television equipment in the U.K. and shipping it to a hungry market for that commodity in India.

Sudhir Choudhrie soon established the Magnum International Trading Company. Launched in 1975, that business still functions today. He went on to greatly diversify his business interests across an array of sectors. Choudhrie found success in everything from aviation and hospitality to PE investing and banking.

But there was a time when he confronted something he could not control. That was the necessity that he receive a heart transplant to save his life. He would need more than a bit of luck for a donor to come available in the limited time he had left on this earth.

That opportunity came through, albeit as the result of the tragic motorcycle death of another man. A heart came available for Sudhir when he was literally just an hour or two away from death.

Sudhir Choudhrie is eternally grateful to his donor and the brilliant doctors who kept him alive long enough to get a second chance at “the happenings” of life.

For More info: sudhirchoudhrie.medium.com/