When your career is in low ebb and you want to call it an off, hold on before you decide to quit. For you never know, you were sitting on a goldmine. And if you don't believe these words, then certainly you need to meet this man - Anil Agarwal, Executive Chairman of Vedanta Resources. Starting as a scrap collector, today he has become one of the major metal manufacturers. Yes, he too had faced numerous hurdles, but he persisted and stuck to his trade and vocation. And unlike other Chairmen who are savvy and English speaking, here is a man who has his grounding in the fields.

If you think he is over-smart, see what he has to say. "I always believe that you should not be over-smart," he once said in an interview. "Even if you tend to behave like a bit of a fool, it doesn't matter. This works." Take these words seriously as it might well help you own a billion-dollar company. After all this is what made Anil Agarwal, head of a diversified and integrated mining group with annual sales of $1.9 billion. As Anil's father was into making aluminum conductors, he often during his initial years, used to collect scrap from cable companies. For 10 years, he worked in the scrap business and ran a cable company that he bought from a loan from Syndicate Bank.

Those years, for Anil were really tough. But he anticipated the demand for copper wire in India's nascent telecommunications business. In 1983, Anil, who could not even speak English fluently, headed for the US to see if he could buy a copper cable manufacturing plant on the cheap. In halting English he started calling companies that had shut down. Finally, he found one in Decatur, Ill.

With a $1.5 million bank loan in hand, he bought the manufacturing equipment for $2 million and shipped it all back to India. In 1986, Sterlite Industries (India) Limited was born when Anil forayed into the business of jelly-field cables by putting up a factory at Rs 7 crore against the normal cost of Rs. 30-40 crore. By 1988, Sterlite was profitable and was first listed on the Bombay Stock Exchange. Over the next decade, the company made four more offerings, raising $320 million to develop an aluminum products plant and finance, and later expand a copper smelter. Revenues hit $314 million, and Anil's copper business became one of the nation's top two domestic producers.

In 1995, Sterlite acquired 80% of MALCO, an integrated aluminum producer in southern India. Two years later, Sterlite commissioned a copper smelter at Tuticorin, the first private sector smelter in India. The year 1999 saw Sterlite acquire the copper mines of Tasmania Pty Ltd and Thalanga Copper Mines Pty Ltd in Australia to source copper concentrate for Tuticorin. In 2001, the company acquired a 51 per cent interest in Balco, an integrated aluminum producer in central India, from the Government of India. Two years later Vedanta Resources was listed in the London Stock Exchange. But the journey is far from over. In line with its strategy to become one of the world's largest producers of basic metals, the $6.5-billion Vedanta group has earmarked around $2 billion to pick up mining assets in East Europe and Latin America. Anill believes that backward integration is the way forward for his group and he is continuously looking at acquiring mines to bring Vedanta as a fully integrated player in basic metals. Mining assets in resource-rich East Europe and Latin America will facilitate the group's endeavour to attain a capacity of a million tonne each in aluminium, copper and zinc. While the plans fall to its place, this enterprising man, who owns a £20 million home in Mayfair in central London, relaxes by doing yoga, cycling, watching Hindi films in the company of his kind of people who laugh loudly. "I can't have intellectual companions for relaxing. I want to be known as a man on the street," he says. Street smart, surely he is.