One would expect a film star with business interests across real estate, health ventures and tech to credit a banker or a business school for financial wisdom. Vivek Oberoi tells a different story. According to reports, Vivek, whose wealth is widely reported in entertainment and business press at roughly ₹1,200 crore, has said that much of his early thinking on money came from watching a paan seller near his school in Mumbai.
As a schoolboy, Oberoi would stop at the stall on the way home. The vendor ran the tiny counter with remarkable order. “He counted his coins every night, kept a little aside and never touched it,” Oberoi has said on stage. The actor insists the vendor refused credit unless he trusted the customer, jotted everything in a pocket notebook and never over-bought stock. This, Oberoi argues, shaped his habit of saving first and spending later.
There is something very Indian about that sort of financial education — no spreadsheets, no jargon, just daily graft and straight arithmetic. Many small shops across Mumbai run on similar logic, surviving downturns by keeping costs low and staying patient.
Vivek Oberoi has put money into a cancer-care initiative, hospitality projects in Goa, and several young ventures in sustainability and entertainment. Friends say he spends plenty of time going over numbers and asks blunt questions before writing cheques. None of that would surprise the paan seller who quietly demonstrated discipline decades ago.
In a business culture that often chases scale and buzzwords, Oberoi’s story lands differently. A paan stall is not glamorous, yet its rhythms are steady and honest. Sometimes, financial lessons arrive not in a seminar hall but under a tarpaulin roof beside a busy road, with clinking steel tins and a man who never wasted a rupee.
(Story for Esha Aphale)
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