Much of what I know of animal nutrition owes itself to Dr. Venkateswarlu Rao, a most interesting, if eccentric, character.
Dr. Rao owned a company in Chennai (that still exists), specialising in providing nutritional supplement to the poultry industry. I had prospected his company, found it interesting and got my fund to invest a tidy sum of money in it. It was not a bad decision, for the company’s business seemed profitable, its bank was very happy with it and the market was attractive and growing.
The problem was not the company. It was Dr. Rao.
He was (and possibly still is) a man with a colossal ego, with three favourite subjects for prime-time discussion : his achievements, his brilliance and his (outstanding) future. These subjects gripped him and he would analyse himself with delight, much as an archaeologist would dance around mummies. He, in a sentence, could not actually believe that he was real.
His bank manager, Dr. Rao would proclaim, blanched at the thought of losing his client and possibly had his picture up on the wall with the pantheon.. His competitors slept with their lights on at night, his customers stood in serpentine queues to buy his products and joint venture partners crowded every flight into Chennai. His employees, he would freely admit, were rather vacuous in the head, yet the company average for intelligence exceeded the ordinary by miles, thanks to one brilliant man (he would add the last bit with much modesty). Such encomium to himself was often substantiated by examples in graphic detail. Somewhere along this rather tiresome monologue that I was subject to every time I visited, there would be some information for me on the market and the current issues he faced (nothing, of course, was a challenge to this eminent personality). I must add that the man was very good at his business - most such men are – yet the self-praise was way out of proportion.
In keeping with this personality, he had a large house in Chennai, with statues and fountains (and statues-cum-fountains), a couple of nasty guard dogs, many servants and a couple of imported cars that underlined his perceived stature, and was a member of the city’s golf club, where he remained a rather petulant novice, for golf has an abrupt way of deflating self-esteem.
Notably, he liked me a great deal due to my hearing of his achievement list every time we met. I would nod politely as he spoke and pay the odd compliment if I sensed he was fishing for one. If this put him in a good mood, a discussion on the business would begin. When he visited us in Bangalore, he would be escorted right to a conference room for a few minutes with a VP or even possibly the CEO. The hope, of course, was that the hours I spent would translate one day into a satisfactory return on investment for my company.
The company expanded its capacity as a result of our investment and grew well for the next three years to about Rs. 25 crores, yet the stock markets had changed in the period, making it very hard for small companies to raise public funds or provide us a market exit for our initial investment. Dr.Rao had little desire to let go of his baby in any way (this is hardly uncommon amongst Indian entrepreneurs). He approached us for a buy-back of our shareholding in early 1997. It was a time of change in the fund : we had a new CEO who came with strong preset ideas, including a dim view of the animal feeds business. After many happy years at TDICI, I had got a job elsewhere and was leaving, so a colleague of mine, Ramki, less used to the remarkable Dr. Rao, was assigned to the task of negotiating with him.
Ramki was (and remains) a gentle, self-effacing soul and I made one rather silly error in handing over in not telling him my partly successful, if utterly tiring, method of dealing with Gods-Gift-To-Mankind Rao.
Within a few days of my departure from TDICI, there was a distress call from Dr. Rao. Could I please get involved again, he pleaded. His tone now changed to anger : the new fellow (Ramki, of course) and his boss (TDICI’s new CEO) were both hopeless, most arrogant and had had the temerity, the cheek, the bloody gall, to make him, the Dr. Rao who was the gold standard for animal nutrition, sit in the reception before a meeting. During the meeting, his company apparently was referred to as a ‘small’ player in the animal feeds business, in the course of conversation. This was, of course, factually true: the company was a small player, but facts are most irrelevant to such people anyways.
I politely declined to be involved and made some noises in sympathy, itching to put the phone down and get on with life. Dr. Rao’s anger though, was unflinching, and he had to let it all out. Subsequently, I am given to understand, he did make life difficult for the fund during the exit discussions, but all's well that ends well, if philosophy is a sop to use on such occasions.
Ramki developed his first wrinkles then. You will be surprised to read then that he remains a dear friend and has most likely forgiven the stress I put him through.
A final point : What struck me as most remarkable is an oft-ignored aspect of a person’s display – his signature. Dr. Rao’s was a lengthy sign-off that took about a tenth of a page’s surface area and had stylish peaks as he wrote his name and a long line in the middle, followed by a flourish in the end. Could his personality be one with his signature, I wondered. Or, to put it differently, was it possible for a reader to deduce a person’s personality by the signature? Over subsequent years, I have tried to study this in considerable depth and must have looked at a thousand signatures. My conclusion is that the signature often tells us little, but there are many occasions, possibly five times out of ten, when it stands out and exposes a person’s personality very accurately.
Dr. Rao owned a company in Chennai (that still exists), specialising in providing nutritional supplement to the poultry industry. I had prospected his company, found it interesting and got my fund to invest a tidy sum of money in it. It was not a bad decision, for the company’s business seemed profitable, its bank was very happy with it and the market was attractive and growing.
The problem was not the company. It was Dr. Rao.
He was (and possibly still is) a man with a colossal ego, with three favourite subjects for prime-time discussion : his achievements, his brilliance and his (outstanding) future. These subjects gripped him and he would analyse himself with delight, much as an archaeologist would dance around mummies. He, in a sentence, could not actually believe that he was real.
His bank manager, Dr. Rao would proclaim, blanched at the thought of losing his client and possibly had his picture up on the wall with the pantheon.. His competitors slept with their lights on at night, his customers stood in serpentine queues to buy his products and joint venture partners crowded every flight into Chennai. His employees, he would freely admit, were rather vacuous in the head, yet the company average for intelligence exceeded the ordinary by miles, thanks to one brilliant man (he would add the last bit with much modesty). Such encomium to himself was often substantiated by examples in graphic detail. Somewhere along this rather tiresome monologue that I was subject to every time I visited, there would be some information for me on the market and the current issues he faced (nothing, of course, was a challenge to this eminent personality). I must add that the man was very good at his business - most such men are – yet the self-praise was way out of proportion.
In keeping with this personality, he had a large house in Chennai, with statues and fountains (and statues-cum-fountains), a couple of nasty guard dogs, many servants and a couple of imported cars that underlined his perceived stature, and was a member of the city’s golf club, where he remained a rather petulant novice, for golf has an abrupt way of deflating self-esteem.
Notably, he liked me a great deal due to my hearing of his achievement list every time we met. I would nod politely as he spoke and pay the odd compliment if I sensed he was fishing for one. If this put him in a good mood, a discussion on the business would begin. When he visited us in Bangalore, he would be escorted right to a conference room for a few minutes with a VP or even possibly the CEO. The hope, of course, was that the hours I spent would translate one day into a satisfactory return on investment for my company.
The company expanded its capacity as a result of our investment and grew well for the next three years to about Rs. 25 crores, yet the stock markets had changed in the period, making it very hard for small companies to raise public funds or provide us a market exit for our initial investment. Dr.Rao had little desire to let go of his baby in any way (this is hardly uncommon amongst Indian entrepreneurs). He approached us for a buy-back of our shareholding in early 1997. It was a time of change in the fund : we had a new CEO who came with strong preset ideas, including a dim view of the animal feeds business. After many happy years at TDICI, I had got a job elsewhere and was leaving, so a colleague of mine, Ramki, less used to the remarkable Dr. Rao, was assigned to the task of negotiating with him.
Ramki was (and remains) a gentle, self-effacing soul and I made one rather silly error in handing over in not telling him my partly successful, if utterly tiring, method of dealing with Gods-Gift-To-Mankind Rao.
Within a few days of my departure from TDICI, there was a distress call from Dr. Rao. Could I please get involved again, he pleaded. His tone now changed to anger : the new fellow (Ramki, of course) and his boss (TDICI’s new CEO) were both hopeless, most arrogant and had had the temerity, the cheek, the bloody gall, to make him, the Dr. Rao who was the gold standard for animal nutrition, sit in the reception before a meeting. During the meeting, his company apparently was referred to as a ‘small’ player in the animal feeds business, in the course of conversation. This was, of course, factually true: the company was a small player, but facts are most irrelevant to such people anyways.
I politely declined to be involved and made some noises in sympathy, itching to put the phone down and get on with life. Dr. Rao’s anger though, was unflinching, and he had to let it all out. Subsequently, I am given to understand, he did make life difficult for the fund during the exit discussions, but all's well that ends well, if philosophy is a sop to use on such occasions.
Ramki developed his first wrinkles then. You will be surprised to read then that he remains a dear friend and has most likely forgiven the stress I put him through.
A final point : What struck me as most remarkable is an oft-ignored aspect of a person’s display – his signature. Dr. Rao’s was a lengthy sign-off that took about a tenth of a page’s surface area and had stylish peaks as he wrote his name and a long line in the middle, followed by a flourish in the end. Could his personality be one with his signature, I wondered. Or, to put it differently, was it possible for a reader to deduce a person’s personality by the signature? Over subsequent years, I have tried to study this in considerable depth and must have looked at a thousand signatures. My conclusion is that the signature often tells us little, but there are many occasions, possibly five times out of ten, when it stands out and exposes a person’s personality very accurately.
