Cramoisi Art is the group's auction house. It handles Indian art — valuing it, cataloguing it, and putting it in front of the people who will keep it.

It was started in 2017, the first art auction house in Gujarat. The state had collectors, dealers and galleries long before that. What it did not have was a house — somewhere a work is researched and catalogued, its condition set down, an estimate published, and the sale conducted in the open with the same information in front of everyone in the room.

Most of that is unglamorous, and most of it happens before anyone raises a hand. Establish what a thing is. Establish what condition it is in. Write it down accurately. Then put a figure on it that will hold when somebody disagrees. The auction itself is the short part.

An auction house is an unusual thing for a construction group to own. It is here for the same reason the schools and the newspapers are.

Its mark carries three words — appreciate, appraise, acquire — and they are the order the business works in rather than a slogan about it. Appreciating is the long part: knowing a hand, a period, what a market has done before. Appraising is where the house puts its name to a number. Acquiring is the last of the three and the least interesting.