By Patrick Jonas

THE sun was dipping into the western horizon when I turned into the quietness of Ridout Road. Cruising past beautiful bungalows nestled amongst majestic trees, it was hard to believe that barely five minutes ago I had been wrestling with cheek-by-jowl traffic in the Orchard Road area.

As I stepped out of the car into the courtyard of Mr Rohet Tolani's home, the sun's rays were struggling to peek through the dense foliage in the neighbourhood.

The chirping of birds broke the silence of the evening. One cannot ask for a better setting for a home.

Something which Mr Tolani and his charming wife Arshna admitted later as we chatted over tea.

Mr Tolani's company, along with its sister concern in Mumbai, operates 10 ships. Though they are two companies, they operate as one. The Indian firm takes care of manning the ships and their maintenance while the Singapore firm takes care of employing the ships.

Mr Tolani moved here in 2004 and is a fan of Singapore - his wife reveals that he sings its praises to almost everyone who asks him about the country.

In five years, he says, he was able to set up a rewarding business and at the same time have an enjoyable social and family life. He credits this to the environment.

'We all benefit from our environment. And we sometimes confuse what the environment is doing for us with our own achievement,' he says.

The graduate from the Indian Institute of Technology Mumbai and an MBA holder from Carnegie Mellon considers his move to Singapore one of the best decisions he has made. So much so, he even traded his American passport for a Singapore IC. In January this year, he became a Singapore citizen.

Mr Tolani was recently in the news for setting up the Rohet Tolani Distinguished Professorship in International Business at Carnegie Mellon. This is done by making a big donation - usually in the region of US$3 million to US$4 million - but he did not want to reveal the amount.

He did explain his reason for doing it though: 'I did my MBA in Carnegie in the 1970s and I thought I got a great education there. And when a place imparts that kind of education, you want to do something in return. These institutions can retain their quality only if people keep investing in them and who is to invest in them? Who else other than people who have benefited from them?'

Investing in education is not new to the Tolani clan, not as a business but as philanthropy.

The Tolanis moved to India from the Sindh region of what is now Pakistan after partition in 1947 with hardly anything and settled in Mumbai.

But they placed a high priority on education. Mr Tolani's father, who studied in Cornell around that time, returned after his graduation to set up a construction business.

He started small but soon became a specialist in building earthern dams in Maharashtra and Gujarat for irrigation projects. That was when his grandfather suggested that they give something back to society through education. So the family chose Adipur, a town in the Kutch region of Gujarat where most of the refugees from Sindh had settled after partition, and started with a polytechnic.

This has since grown to four institutions, including a pharmacy college and an institution which offers an MBA programme.

The family ventured into shipping in the 1960s and set up a maritime academy near Pune as part of their philanthropic work.

Mr Tolani spent 12 years in Mumbai, taking care of the family business, before he moved here to set up the Singapore company. But prior to that, he worked and lived in the United States, where he met Arshna.

They got married in 1988.

Mrs Tolani, who was born in Guyana to parents of Indian origin, did her schooling in Canada.

After marriage, she worked for a while with the United Nations in New York. She is now happy taking care of the home and spends her spare time doing yoga and even gives informal yoga lessons when time permits.

The Tolanis have two children.

Son Jivesh, 18, is at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the US doing an engineering degree. Daughter Yuvika, 16, is a student at the Singapore American School and dabbles in theatre and art.

Mention must be made of the family dog Pasha too. After all, it was the strong desire of Mrs Tolani and the children to have a dog that led to the decision to buy a house instead of an apartment. And the hunt for the right house took 13 months, during which time the family lived in a service apartment.

Eventually they rented one in Bishopsgate till, out of the blue, the present house came along.

'This is like an English countryside. A magical place. We are thoroughly spoilt by this place and are very fortunate,' says Mr Tolani, who used to play golf but has given it up due to a bad back. When he has a house in a location like this, who would want to spend time on a golf course?