Flew too high? Jet's Goyal through the eyes of those who worked with him

In his trademark one-liner style, Naresh Goyal would often tell dissenting managers that theirs 'was not a Catholic marriage'

Sandeep Malhotra was a young man on the verge of becoming a father in 1988 when Naresh Goyal interviewed him. “He spoke to me in a mix of Punjabi and English,” recalls Malhotra. A former native of Sangrur, Punjab, Goyal unselfconsciously wielded his unpolished English and easy Punjabi with his North Indian colleagues. Of course, this was before he was dubbed suave entrepreneur and 16th richest man on the Forbes list in 2005.

“He is a diminutive man and, in those days, unless you were told this was Goyal, you would probably not recognise him,” says Malhotra. In 1988, Goyal,