India, Aug. 7 -- Chocolate is the smell of my childhood. I would wake up every morning to chocolate aromas wafting up to the top of Mumbai's Cumballa Hill where I lived. On Peddar Road, at the bottom of the hill, in a not-very-large white building, was the Cadbury factory, and the aromas it exuded defined much of my growing up. (It cannot be a coincidence that vanilla is still one of my favourite smells.)

As I grew older, the factory moved to the suburbs and the white building became the office. But they kept the bungalow next to it, where the managing director lived.

In my early years as a journalist, I was once sent to interview the British MD of Cadbury in that bungalow. He was kind enough to take an inexperienced journalist seriousl...