Mohammad Abdul Majeed

I had two options — either commit suicide or flee the city. I could not kill myself, and leaving the city was not acceptable to me. So standing firm with complete fearlessness was the only alternative. I first started repaying those from whom I had borrowed... Everyone at home promised each other that until the entire debt was repaid, we would not wear new clothes.

The trader who walked away from a settled path #

Majeed came up in Hyderabad’s Old City textile trade, working stalls across the Nampally and Old City markets alongside a family that had done business there for generations. Textiles were the known path — a trade with customers, suppliers, and a rhythm already worked out by people he was related to. In 1989, he left it, not for a better version of the same trade, but for food, a field with no family footing to fall back on. It read, to relatives who had built a livelihood on cloth, as a young man discarding a sure thing for a whim. Majeed’s own account of the years that followed frames it differently: the textile trade was inherited certainty, and he wanted to build something that was actually his, even if that meant starting with nothing that carried his family’s name or credibility behind it.

What he built next nearly ended him. In the early-to-mid 1990s — sources genuinely disagree on the exact year, and no single account resolves the conflict — Majeed staked ₹35 lakh of his own capital on a bakery and sweets venture, betting everything on automated machines and a workforce of a hundred. It was not a modest first attempt; it was a full commitment, the kind of capital outlay that leaves no comfortable retreat if the business fails. For a stretch, it worked. Daily takings reached roughly ₹1 lakh a day, a real business finding its footing in a competitive city trade.

Then a newspaper falsely reported eleven deaths from food poisoning at the business he ran. There had been no deaths. The report was wrong. It did not matter. In a trade built on daily customer trust — people walking in for bread and sweets they expect to be safe — a single false headline is enough to end that trust overnight, regardless of whether it is ever corrected. Trade collapsed within days, from ₹1 lakh a day to ₹4,000–5,000. No apology, no retraction, and no compensation could put back what the story had taken.

The choice with no good options #

What followed was not a business problem to be solved with a better supplier or a marketing campaign. It was a personal reckoning over whether continuing was even worth it. Majeed has described the calculus in his own words: commit suicide, or leave the city and never look back. Both were unacceptable to him. What remained — his phrase — was standing firm with complete fearlessness, because no other alternative existed. There was no plan at that point, only the refusal of the two exits everyone else might have taken.

Standing firm had a literal cost. Majeed sold all seven houses that made up his share of the family inheritance to begin repaying what he owed. It is the single figure from this period he states most precisely and most often — seven houses, his own account, the strongest-sourced number in the whole story. A blog with weaker sourcing renders the same episode as six buildings and a car; Majeed’s own figure is the one that carries across every telling he has given, and it is the one that stands here. Selling an inheritance is rarely just a financial transaction — it is undoing what a family built across generations, house by house, to answer debts a single false story created in days.

Even that liquidation didn’t resolve the crisis in one stroke. The lowest point came later: ten rupees in his pocket, his daughter Muzeema feverish at 104°F and untreated because there was nothing left to pay a doctor with. No house left to sell, no more capital to raise, nothing between him and the two choices he had already ruled out. That night is where the decision actually got made — not the sale of the houses, which was already behind him, but the choice, with everything gone and no cushion left at all, to keep going anyway.

Recovery took eight to ten years, by Majeed’s own telling, and the family enforced its own discipline through it: no new clothes for anyone until every debt was cleared. It was not a business plan. It was a household vow, made and kept for the better part of a decade, and it held. When he talks about that period now, he ties his endurance to responsibility rather than ambition — six children depending on him, staff and customers who had trusted him with their money and their custom, and no version of giving up that didn’t abandon all of them at once. The debt did not disappear because the family wished it away; it disappeared because the family spent years living smaller than they had to, on purpose, until the ledger cleared.

Starting over, on his own name #

On 27 July 1997, in Shalibanda, in the Old City, Majeed opened Pista House — the bakery and sweets shop he staked his own name on directly, rather than trading anonymously the way a stall in the family’s old textile business never had to. No more letting the product speak for itself without a name attached to it that a future rumor could target again; whatever came of it, from now on it would carry his name and no one else’s. Within a year or two of opening, the haleem — a slow-cooked stew of wheat, lentils, and meat, central to Hyderabad’s Ramzan table — his family had always made at home became a branded product carrying the Pista House name in its own right. It was a modest, hard-won start, not a triumphant launch — but it held, and it grew into the business the rest of his life would be built around.

By 2010, Majeed’s role in Hyderabad’s food trade had shifted from operator to standard-bearer. As president of the Hyderabad Haleem Makers Association, he received the certificate confirming Hyderabadi Haleem’s Geographical Indication status — India’s first GI tag ever granted to a non-vegetarian dish — from the Controller General of Patents on 4 August. Speaking about the criteria at the time, Majeed described haleem preparation as a lengthy process that begins at dawn and runs until dusk, with the timing of mixing ingredients determining the taste — the kind of granular, hands-on knowledge that only someone who has stood over the pot for decades could state with that confidence. It closed a loop that had opened with ten rupees and a sick child: the man who had nearly lost everything now defined, publicly and officially, what counted as authentic in his own craft. Seven years later, at Thailand’s THAIFEX food expo, the trader’s son who once worked family textile stalls represented his product on an international stage — the same instinct that took him from Old City markets to a bakery counter in 1989, now running in the opposite direction, outward instead of away.

A different kind of crisis leadership #

Majeed’s response to disruption changed as his standing changed. In 2020, as COVID-19 spread through India, he led the Hyderabad Haleem Makers Association in a unanimous vote to halt haleem production entirely through the Ramzan season — sacrificing the trade’s single most important seasonal product voluntarily, for public health, rather than under external duress. It was a mirror image of the crisis that had defined his early career: this time the loss was chosen, not forced on him by a rumor he had no way to fight, and it was a loss he had the standing to ask an entire trade association to accept alongside him, not just absorb alone the way he had in the 1990s.

Recognition kept accumulating alongside the responsibility. In October 2022, Union Minister Piyush Goyal presented Majeed with India’s Most Popular GI award, voted by the public over rivals including Rasgulla, Bikaneri Bhujiya and Ratlami Sev — a consumer-facing validation layered on top of the legal GI status he had helped secure over a decade earlier. The award recognized not a company’s marketing spend but a public’s own preference, cast in votes rather than dictated by a press release, for a dish now inseparable from Majeed’s name.

Three years later, in November 2025, that same visibility cut the other way. Income Tax investigators raided Pista House alongside two other Hyderabad haleem houses, deploying roughly fifty teams across thirty premises over two days; among the properties searched was Majeed’s own residence, listed as the brand’s owner. Three decades on from the night he had ten rupees and a feverish daughter, his personal and business standing are still, by law and by consequence, one and the same thing — the same fact that once let a false newspaper report destroy his livelihood now means regulatory scrutiny of the business lands, quite literally, at his own front door.

What the ten rupees taught him #

Majeed is now approaching three decades as Pista House’s active founder and chairman, with his sons Mohammed Abdul Mohsi and Mohddis Ali running day-to-day operations and marketing while he remains the brand’s public face — not a figurehead kept on for sentiment, but the person still recognized, three decades later, as the one who defines what the craft should look like. Even as production has scaled to reported five-figure daily kilo volumes during Ramadan and the LPG shortages of 2026 forced a return to the older wood-fired method the GI criteria always preferred, the questions that shaped the business trace back to one man’s decisions in a much smaller kitchen, made with far less room to be wrong.

Ask him what carried him through the years with no good options, and his own account is unsentimental: he had people depending on him — family, staff, customers — and no version of quitting that didn’t fail all of them. That, more than any single business decision, is the thread connecting a trader’s son who once worked Old City textile stalls to the man who now stands, publicly, for what Hyderabadi haleem is supposed to be.

There is no dramatic reinvention in how Majeed describes any of it, no single insight that unlocked the recovery. It reads, in his own retelling, as a long accumulation of ordinary refusals — refusing to give up the trade, refusing to let the debt sit unpaid, refusing to let his children go without once there was enough to spare again. The ten rupees are long spent. What they bought him — the discipline to stay when leaving would have been easier — is still, by his own telling, the asset the whole business was built on top of.

Last updated: September 5, 2026

Researched 23 sources in English, TE, Urdu.