Mumbai, April 28 -- Arnavaz Anu Aga, the octogenarian matriarch of Thermax Ltd's promoter family, never planned to run the engineering company her father, A. S. Bhathena, started in 1966. Bhathena had found a worthy successor in his son-in-law Rohinton Aga, who took over as the chairman and managing director of Thermax in 1981 and led it to its public market debut in 1995. But Rohinton's sudden demise in 1996 forced Anu to hold the reins of the enterprise.

With no experience in heading a large corporation, nor deep understanding of engineering, Anu Aga's earnest efforts to steady the ship yielded little result in the face of the macroeconomic headwinds of the 1997 Asian financial crisis. The shares of the newly listed company more than h...