Hariram Sastri

Hariram Sastri (sometimes Shastri) is a multimillionaire Malayali industrialist, who heads the New Delhi-based 11,000-crore, $5bn petrochemicals enterprise Vinmar International. Vinmar and its subsidiary charity Pratham funds education efforts reaching over 10,000 Indian villages, and targeting 100,000 with much of this work overseen by Sastri's billionaire Indian-American partner, V. Goradia.

Sastri is a noted collector of Indian art, even launching a dedicated auction house, Triveda, with his reported wife, Britannia Industries heiress Nina Pillai, (to whom he reportedly proposed with an eleven-carat diamond ring ) to facilitate the sale of Indian artworks, including pieces by Jamini Roy, Gaganendranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, F. N. Souza, Jagdish Swaminathan, Anjolie Ela Menon, and M. F. Husain. Triveda later exhibited the debut collection by Aslam Shaikh.

He is the grand-nephew and heir of V. K. Krishna Menon (and therefore grandnephew of Rama Varma XIX, Maharaja of Cochin, and great-great-grandson to both the last Koothali Nair and the Porlathiri Raja of Kadathanad.) As Menon's heir, he received the Order of the Companions of O. R. Tambo from South African President Kgalema Motlanthe in 2008.