Starting with a family, which had a dealership of Bajaj Auto’s scooters, to becoming the owner of a household name in consumer appliances who could afford to have Bollywood superstar Shah Rukh Khan as the brand ambassador, Venugopal Dhoot’s is a story of an aggressive small town businessman’s pursuit to be on the top. Now arrested in connection with the ICICI Bank loan fraud case, Dhoot, during his heyday, was not the one to simply sit on small achievements such as Videocon becoming the largest television set manufacturer in India.
 
The eldest son of late Nandlal Madhavlal Dhoot, who founded the Videocon Group in 1984, Venugopal was largely responsible for driving the conglomerate to diversify into various verticals, such as oil and gas, real estate and retail, beyond its successful consumer electronics and home appliances business.

Dhoot, the safari-suited businessman, was born into an agricultural family in Ahmednagar (Maharashtra), where his father had a cotton ginning mill and operated a wholesale grain trade. In 1982, when the public broadcaster Doordarshan began transmitting colour television programmes in India, it opened a new segment. Here the Dhoot family tried their luck in the uncharted territory of manufacturing conventional tube-based colour TV sets.