He came to Britain as a 16-year- ol

He came to Britain as a 16-year- old with a handful of qualification, £5 in his pocket and a burning ambition to leave his childhood in Kenya behind him. Vijay Patel was brought up in one room with his brother, Bhikhu, as his schoolteacher mother struggled to raise her family after her husband died. Thirty-five years later, Vijay, 51, and his brother own a pharmaceutical company which employs more than 600 people and does £200 million worth of business each year. Together they are worth £254 million- and now they have been jointly named Entrepreneur of the Year’ It is an inspirational tale. (1)__F __ He says: ‘We are very pleased and very surprised to have been
given this kind of recognition. It has really been about a will to succeed and a determination to distance ourselves from the difficulties of our early life.’ He also praises his mother. ‘ She is an incredible lady. She taught us hard work, honesty, and punctuality and we have based our lives on those qualities.’ Vijay’s father was a timber merchant who lived with his wife in the village of Eidoret, 200 miles north of Nairobi, and died when Vijay was six. At the age of 16, Vijay and his brother, who was
two years older, kissed their mother goodbye and promised to bring her to Britain when they made their fortunes. ‘It was 1967 and I had little more than my qualifications and a few pounds in my pocket,’ says Vijay. (2)___A___ And so he set about trying to achieve just that. Typically, Vijay looks on the bright side. ‘When you start from zero, things can’t get any worse.’
According to him, in those circumstances, ‘You have only one way to go, and that’s up if there is a hunger in your belly for success.’ The pair of them certainly had that. ‘ My brother and I were determined to better ourselves and Britain was the land of opportunity,’ he says Vijay enrolled at a college in north London, and did courses in physics, chemistry and biology, washing dishes in a restaurant at night to earn his keep. He gained a degree at the College of Pharmacy in Leicester. After graduating, he opened a chemist’s shop in 1975- he was 24. He made it his business to know all his customers names, their children and what conditions they suffered from. ‘The idea was that when people had something wrong in them, they went straight to Mr. Patel,’ he says. By 1982, he owned six shops and sales had doubled. From there it was a short step from buying
medicines for his own shops (he now has 21) to supplying other pharmacies, then hospitals and wholesalers. (3)____H____
Brother Bhikhu, an architect by training, joined Vijay in 1982 to add some ‘financial discipline’ to the company. Vijay says: ‘My brother and I have built this business together. I simply couldn’t have done it without him. We know each other inside out.’ (4) __B___Vijay is keen to continue putting something back into the country he has made his own. ‘We hope we are model citizens and would like to remain so,’ he says. ‘My brother and I have enormous ambition and drive, but we were also lucky enough to live in a country that never stood in our way,’he says. (5)__D___ His message for young people is to do the same:’ Identify your aim, and do not let anything deter you from achieving that goal.’