Remembering RJ: There was no moderation in his existence

I spent last morning speaking to individuals on what he meant to them.

• If you went to his office, he never looked you in the eye. He usually responded with ‘Kya haal? Baith! Bol, kya kar sakta hoon? Haan, aur bajaar kaisay lag raha hain?’ and all this without taking his eyes of the trading screen.
• Rakesh’s trading profits went into his investment corpus. He transformed what he derived from the fleeting into the sustainable. That was how his fortune was built.
• Rakesh didn’t just invest. He also traded in those invested stocks with a long (purchase) bias, selling a trading quantum (as distinct from the invested quantum) when the stocks rose disproportionately and buying back when they declined. In this way, he made money both ways – passively and actively – while always reducing his purchase price.
• Bhayya bet on the addressable market size, company’s competitive advantage, the stock’s safety margin and bet size. He brought into McDowell when the company accounted for 40% of the liquor market and the entire Indian organized market was valued at Rs2000 crore. All he knew was that the overall valuation was so ridiculous that he would emerge with a multi-bagger. He didn’t need to know anything else.
• If Rakesh was optimistic on a stock, he brought disproportionately. There was no moderation in his existence.
• He was referred to as India’s Warren Buffet – with a difference: Warren worked from a clean desk with no paper, read for five hours a day and hardly got phone calls. Rakesh insisted on a Bloomberg screen inside the ICU!
• He received all his calls on his speakerphone. He never asked you to leave the room. The visitor heard everything irrespective of whether he was discussing earnings estimates or the evening dinner with his wife. An executive visiting him overheard him buying and asked ‘Accha lagta hain?’ He said yes. He had no qualms sharing his perspective. His response: ‘Neither my nor his buying is going to move the stock.’
• ·An employee of his left for a large industrial firm but suffered a personal mishap. This entailed a long leave that the new firm was not willing to accommodate. Rakesh got him back, restored his salary and asked him to take as much time off to get his bearings back.
• When it was pointed out that 99% of his time was spent earning 0.5% of the company’s income (through day trading), he countered by saying that trading taught him ‘margin of safety’ that gave him a sense of the right valuation.
• When S&P sought to take a stake in (where Rakesh held a 14% share), it needed a higher ownership to make up the numbers. It approached Rakesh to sell. He was initially disinterested. However, he agreed to sell a small portion only because he realised that S&P’s ownership could facilitate knowledge transfer. What he ‘lost’ by way of stake sale was more than made up by the increased market valuation.
• He had an elephantine memory. He could tell an MD, ‘But 12 years ago, you were generating an RoCE in the range of 18-20%, so why are you earning less now?’ Most MDs would be caught off guard. They dreaded him.
• One of the best stories about Rakesh is that his mother once provoked him. ‘You are earning so well, can’t we live a bit better?’ Rakesh sold some CRISIL shares and bought a large apartment in South Mumbai. He would say later, ‘What I sold for less than Rs30 crore is now worth Rs750 crore.’
• He was uncouth, foul mouthed, loud, rude, but brilliant. Someone encountered him at a watering hole in Mumbai and his guests insisted on a selfie. So, the man walked up to Rakesh with the request. He exploded. Half an hour later, he sent word that he had changed his mind. He spent the next 30 minutes talking on a range of subjects and the entire staff and guests converged to listen to him. He was like that: volatile in real-time but amenable in retrospect.
• ‘God has given me a lot. Now may he give me the power to give,’ he was heard to have said.

(Mudar Patherya is the CEO of Trisys)