Interview: Satish Modi on meeting Prince Charles and dealing with death

T I was born in a town called Modinagar, in Uttar Pradesh, which is named after the Modi family. My father (Rai Bahadur Gujarmal Modi) founded the town in a suburb of Delhi in 1932. When he arrived there was nothing. He started a sugar factory and one thing led to another and he set up a lot of industries (under the Modi Group), gave housing to 15,000 workers and, later, set up educational institutions and hospitals, so it became a complete town.

I have four brothers - I'm in the middle with two above and two below. I went to boarding school in India and studied engineering before joining the family textiles business. I lost my father when I was 28. My brothers and I faced a difficult task (in emulating his business success), but I was innovative. I set up India's first private airline in 1993 with Lufthansa. It was called ModiLuft. It was very glamorous - we had blond airhostesses - but it was also stressful. The government didn't allow us to print schedules because they thought we were competing with the national carrier (Air India). So we had to say, "Take a breakfast flight from Delhi to Bombay", or "Take a dinner flight". That's the price you pay for being a pioneer. We shut it down in 1996 and I restarted it in 2005 as SpiceJet.

Wealth can be troublesome. I have three children - two daughters and one son. In 1995, there was a kidnap threat on my son, who was 14, and they asked for US$2 million, although the kidnap was never carried out. The police suggested we relocate outside India so we moved to London and I've lived there ever since. In London, I set up the charity Arts for India (to promote education in India for underprivileged children through scholarships). I also set up a yarn factory in Manchester, with a local partner.

An incident in 2005 was a turning point for me. This is how fate strikes. The then Japanese prime minister (Junichiro Koizumi) was visiting India with 30 business leaders, as well as a Buddhist leader, Her Holiness Setsuko Nakanishi. They were at the Oberoi hotel (in Mumbai) and couldn't find a conference room in which to meet. I knew about a small private club in the hotel and suggested to the manager they make the space available between the lunch and dinner sittings. The Buddhist leader wanted to thank me. As I entered the hall - I'm six foot one, she was just four foot one - we made eye contact and she started crying, tears rolling down her cheeks. She took my hands and declared to everyone, "I know this man from a previous life." I didn't feel it, but she was on a higher plane and could see it. I believed her. You can't just cry like that, it was a real emotion. Then she sang a prayer for me and invited me to Japan.

SpiceJet was launching in Japan, so I went to visit. My business partners really laid out the red carpet for me, with a reception and limousine. I went to Kyoto to meet Nakanishi, although we were never on our own because I couldn't speak Japanese. Again she saw me and was under a kind of spell, crying. She ordered a vegetarian meal and we discussed religion and life. She invited me the next morning to her house, above which is a Buddhist chapel, where we went to pray together. Before I left, I asked, "How will we communicate?" She replied, "Through dreams." I started having profound dreams, so I decided to capture them and my thoughts in a book.