Rakesh and I have always been separated, just by a bit — separated a few years by age, within that age, separated by just about three days by birth dates. And only a few metres by our residences.
But today, the rest of the world and Rakesh have been separated by a vast, unbridgeable chasm. We won't ever be able to traverse this and enjoy the raucous laughter, the bonhomie, and the back-slapping that hanging out with Rakesh entailed.
I have known Rakesh or RJ, for well over 25 years. I recall our evening mind-numbing drinking sessions at Geoffrey's, then a much favoured financial services watering hole in South Mumbai.
I would always be the first to leave, unable to keep up with his thinking much less his drinking.
I remember meeting him at a birthday party of a mutual friend, sometime in early 2000, at the height of the raging tech bull market. He corralled me into a corner, and shouted in his trademark falsetto, "Sala, Shankar, tere to mandi kyun lagta hai.”
The party went silent. Like two alpha males, we marked out our positions in the imaginary boxing ring. The sense of anticipation in the crowd reached a fever pitch. Who would win? Points or knockout? Crowd obviously favoured RJ, given his weight advantage over me.
And then, the fighters pulled the ultimate surprise: we embraced and did slow dance, shocking the party out of its drunken stupor.
My last physical meeting with RJ was at a wedding party. He ribbed me saying that I was blocking the sea view from his new mansion (my building is exactly in front of his). And I lobbed back, saying he was taking daily revenge by sending clouds of dust every day my way from his construction!
That was my relationship with RJ. We put on this occasional show fight to get the TV channels excited, much like a fixed WWE fight, with fake head butts and soft elbows.
Of course, we occasionally did differ in our views on the immediate market direction. But that's the point: markets are all about differing opinions, melded into a single Buy or Sell trade in that particular micro-second of time.
Differing opinions aren't synonymous with having differences. Half the wealth one makes in Investing is about this jousting. And who better to joust with than RJ?
His wealth was the size of Alaska. But it's his heart that was the size of Greenland. He was the original "dil ka saaf insaan". Generous to a fault. Willing to help out people in distress.
Investors leave a legacy behind that can't be measured solely in monetary wealth. Their legacy should be measured by their “Idea Wealth”.
Did they leave behind new thinking? Did they leave behind new ideas? Ultimately, did they leave behind new hope?
RJ gave Indian investors that elusive last mentioned elixir: New Hope.
A market ravaged by the Harshad Mehta aftermath of the 90s, then the collapse of the tech boom in the 2000s.... left Indian investors despondent.
Stock markets, in the era right up to 2003 or so, were viewed by expert and inexpert Indian investors as a giant casino, where the game was rigged to benefit a handful at the expense of many.
To put it in perspective: the Sensex was around 4,000 in the 1992 bull run. A full 11 years later, it was the same.
The size of most mutual fund AUMs used to be pitiful. Their fund managers, all still good friends, used to be the equivalent of salespersons trying to sell Bajaj scooters in the era of Hero Honda motorcycles. It was a depressing time, a lost decade, that felt more like a century.
It's in that marshland, that swamp that the modern RJ was born. He became the Pied Piper3—in a good way—of the India story.
"India is a runner without shoes. Imagine if it even gets a pair of canvas shoes. How far it can run,” he would scream on TV channels.
The more prosaic ones amongst us, and I am one of them, would laugh at this allegory. India, the original Kenyan barefoot marathoner, seemed about apt.
And it's been turning out that way since hasn't it?
Of course, in all fairness, the first guy to say this (something like this), was Harshad Mehta. "India is the most undervalued stock in the world market,” he said famously.
But RJ mainstreamed it, chiefly because he played by the book, and didn't sail close to the regulatory wind.
The Indian stock market needed a Dream Merchant. A real one.
RJ became that.
He's left us poorer in some ways. But richer in many others.
I remember Guru Dutt's maudlin lines, "bichhde sabhi baari baari".
But, I also remember the more uplifting lines, "Zindagi to bewafa hai, ek din thukrayegi. Maut mehbooba hai, apne saath lekar jayegi. Mar ke jeene ki ada jo duniya ko dikhlayega, woh Muqaddar ka Sikandar jaaneman kehlayega".
Au revoir, my friend RJ. The original Muqaddar ka Sikandar.
(Shankar Sharma, Founder, GQuant Investech)
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