Thank God It's Friday (TGIF) is not the most appropriate place for a business lunch, least of all a Lunch With BS. But I chose it on the assumption that it would suit Anu Aga, being round the corner from Thermax's office in Delhi which she was visiting for the day.

My misgivings increased when I walked in a little ahead of the appointment. TGIF's overpriced fare does not encourage regular visits, so I had forgotten the somewhat in-your-face ambience — all loud music and ersatz American decor — and was cringing at the thought of entertaining a corporate chief in such surroundings.

The embarrassment, it turned, was only mine. Ms Aga, arriving unfashionably on the dot, was unfazed by the strident sound effects and the aggressive youthfulness of the ambience. "No problem," she replied to my apology, waving aside the wine list, with its tantalisingly named "mocktails" and cocktails, in favour of mineral water.

As for the meal, our helpful young waiter didn't get a chance to display his knowledge of the fare because Aga didn't want anything on the laboriously compiled menu: "Just chicken, grilled, no oil, and some boiled vegetables, no butter or salt, can you manage that?" she asked him, explaining to me in an aside, "I eat very lightly."

Aga proved different from her public persona. Thermax, the low-profile Pune-based engineering company that she chairs, has a reputation for formidable respectability. Its best-known products, boilers and chillers, are far from sexy, though they are considered environmentally friendly.

Aga has been as low profile as her company, taking over the chairmanship when her husband Rohinton Aga died in 1996. Rohinton Aga was considered a hard act to follow, not least because Anu Aga had not been closely involved in the business till then. A graduate from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, she had mostly been involved in HRD.

But Anu Aga managed to prove the sceptics wrong, not quite with Katharine Graham-style dramatics but with an unspectacular if realistic reliance on professional management, a move that has made Thermax a model of corporate governance.

Over the past decade, it was Thermax rather than Aga that has been in focus. She is, of course, well known in Mumbai circles but less so on the national firmament. It was only earlier this year that the energetic manner with which she mobilised corporate opinion in Mumbai and Pune in condemning the riots in Gujarat brought her sharply into the limelight.

All in all, I had expected a forbidding Grey Eminence, an impression heightened by photographs showing a sensible hair-cut and minimal make-up and her few succinct public statements. Aga turned out to be just the opposite, displaying a forthright friendliness and lack of gravitas that put the inappropriateness of the meeting place out of my mind. She had, she said, recently returned from a holiday in Malaysia, a present from her daughter and son-in-law for her sixtieth birthday. I said she didn't look 60. "Of course I do, look at all my grey hair."

Her informality did not, however, preclude a certain prudence. She had come well prepared, handing me an annual report and a glossy profile of the company, "Just so that you have some background," she explained. She had also read up back issues of Lunch with BS, including a recent one with her good friend Rajendra Pawar.

The excellent Malaysian holiday was not the only thing that had put Aga in good cheer. Thermax had turned in good results in a year that corporate India recorded among its worst, turning a Rs 13.22-crore loss in fiscal 2001 into a Rs 24.01 crore after-tax profit in the financial year to March 2002.

Aga was particularly happy because this turnaround represented the second successive year of operational profits. In 1999-2000, Thermax had managed to show profit only courtesy its treasury income; operational losses were a hefty Rs 21 crore. "I screamed and shouted at the time, saying it was no point making a profit when our core business was making a loss," she remembered. The poor performance, however, did not prompt Thermax to only follow the tried and tested route of cost cutting. As Aga pointed out, "Only cutting costs is not a sustainable strategy. What we needed to do was change our mind-set."

The first step on that transformation was to pull Thermax out of a bewildering number of unrelated businesses — infotech, bottled water, fans, transmitters, surface coatings — all legacies of the era when licensing restrictions made diversification an expedient strategy. For instance, the water business — Thermax was in commercial distribution, "a difficult ball game" — was sold to Kinley, the Coca Cola brand.

The crash organisational diet was followed by a restructuring of operations. For the first time, Thermax began to position itself as an "eco-energy company" offering cost-efficient integrated solutions for such processes as water and effluent treatment and waste heat generation, leveraging its indigenous R&D base. Internally, the company also began to draw on the benefits of an integrated purchase system that such streamlining offered.

Our order arrived. Aga's frugal repast, which she pronounced was just what she wanted, made my Grilled Chicken Ceasar Salad look like an extravagance. In the event, her meal proved easier to negotiate than mine — forking up large lettuce leaves liberally slathered with mayo is not conducive to taking notes. "Just use your hands," Aga said when she noticed my discomfort. The discussion now turned to the other equally significant part of Thermax's metamorphosis — the board revamp. From seven executive directors, Thermax's new board now had a managing director in P M Kulkarni, four outside directors and three family representatives (the family owns 64 per cent of the company, which went public about seven years ago).

The crucial part of this exercise was the family's decision to follow a strictly hands-off approach. For instance, son-in-law Pheroz Pudumjee used to oversee the international operations, a function he relinquished after he became non-executive director, the other being her only daughter, Meher. Henceforth, operational decisions were to be taken by the six-member Executive Council Aga says this transition period was "like going through the valley of death", more so because it also involved two voluntary retirement schemes. "You tend to get attached to people, but I realised there was no room for sentimentality," she said.

The VRSs, she explained, were contrary to her role as she had perceived it till then. "I had defined my role as creating employment. I had never had to do something like this. As long as we were a private limited company, we were known as benevolent employers. Now, I had to clear those cobwebs from my own mind."

The radical overhaul at Thermax was not the only valley of death that Aga has had to negotiate in the last decade. There have been personal ones too, when she lost her only son in a car accident a year after her husband's death. Aga is matter of fact about both tragedies but it is clear that coming to terms with them have been hard work.

How did she cope? Work, of course, and what is evidently an extremely closely knit family. She shows me photographs of her Malaysian holiday and pulls out one of two little girls. "Guess which one is my grand-daughter," she urges. I guess wrong. "No, not her, it's the other one, the naughty one," she says, turning indulgent grandmother for a second.

The journey from tragedy has involved some deep introspection too. "I think a lot about death," she said, "and I am not afraid of it anymore, I can confront it." She is keen to talk about it, laughingly recalling how her offer to lecture on coping with death at a chamber of commerce gathering produced some consternation.

Aga is no faddist, but she also admits to having found solace in Vipasana, the increasingly popular if rather challenging retreat into silence and meditation (not to speak of a frighteningly meagre diet). I mentioned that it had been recommended for asthmatics but the austerity regime was too off-putting. "If you're looking for some kind of cure, forget it. What it does do is help you come to terms with yourself," she said. "Today, I am happier than I ever have been." Later this year, she plans to travel to Coimbatore to attend a session called "Encounter the Enlightened" a course run by Jaggi Vasudeva.

We skipped dessert in favour of coffee and I asked her about her other interests. She exercises everyday cycling round her compound in Pune, which probably explains why she is so spry. She also found solace in reading, both business books and best-sellers. I asked her whether she had read any of Rohintan Mistry's books, on the assumption that its Parsi settings would be of particular interest to her. But no, she hadn't. The traditional Parsi angst about its diminishing numbers didn't seem to be a major concern for her ("Yes, they're not many of us left," she comments).

"Someone gave me one of his books — I have a bad memory for names — it's a fat book," she struggled to recall. "A Fine Balance?" I supplied. "Yes, that's it, but no I haven't read it."

Which businessman did she admire the most? A brief pause, then she names Ravi Venkatesan, executive chairman of Cummins India and an independent director on the Thermax board. Also, Narayanamurthy and "of course, my husband". She recalled how Rohinton Aga had "jumped for joy" when the economy was liberalised in 1992, pronouncing that it was the best thing that had happened to Indian industry. So did she subscribe to the views of the famous Bombay Club? "No, not at all," though she's friendly with Rahul Bajaj, its energetic if unofficial spokesman.

The bill arrived and Aga grinned as I paid. "I was strictly told not to pay," she says, clearly having been briefed on the protocol of Lunch with BS, "although I remember that that didn't happen with Rajendra Pawar." It was just as well we weren't on Thermax hospitality, for this meal was un-memorable and, now that the conversation was over, TGIF's ambience started to intrude again. Outside, I asked if she would be able to find her way back. "Of course," a brief hand-shake and she walks off to attend an open house with the employees of Delhi office, part of an annual all-India exercise. If she's thinking of death it isn't evident in her brisk walk.