Hands-on CEO’s numb thumb tale: When Eicher Motor’s Siddhartha Lal almost lost his thumb

Those who know his business style say that a hands-on approach is a way of being for Eicher Motor’s Siddhartha Lal. To test a new launch, Lal took a bunch of the country’s best motorcyclists to Shimla last month. From there, it was a 144-km ride upwards to around Spiti and the weather report warned that it was going to rain.
Lal and company were prepared. The motorcycles are made for adventures like these. But the weather went rogue. "When we started, it was a bright, sunny day. But along the way, it started pouring. It didn’t stop for eight hours," says the chief executive of ficer of the company that makes Royal Enfield.



Then the rain became sleet and sleet became snow and snow became a blizzard. "It was coming sideways and it was worse than what we had expected," says Lal. And that’s when he lost sensation in a thumb. "I honestly thought that I was going to lose my left thumb," he says. "It was so cold that I just couldn’t feel anything for a very long time. I stopped and put it over a candle to heat it up and I started again. And, again I thought I was going to lose it," he says.

In the end, it took Lal’s thumb a week to return to normal. But the wait seemed as long as the two years of R&D taken to come out with their latest adventure tourer.