Perhaps it is a sign of the times that Kandahar, the Northwest Frontier theme restaurant at The Oberoi, is deserted for lunch on a recent Saturday. The restaurant’s empty tables, gleaming plates and wait staff, suitably ethnic in salwar suits and waistcoats, enjoy the spectacular view of a placid Arabian Sea under the bright Mumbai sun with not a paying soul for company.
Or perhaps one needlessly reads “economic meltdown” in every small thing nowadays. Motilal Oswal, the man, not the company, is not too reassuring later over lunch though. In 20 years of managing customers’ money—and seeing his fair share of domestic and international crises—Oswal confesses that this is probably the worst turmoil he has ever seen. “It will take a long time to come out of this mess,” he explains, “it is best if we all just wait and watch without panicking.”
Life lessons: Oswal is an obsessive reader of self-help books.
Despite Kandahar’s piped music being dialled down to low volume, having a conversation with Oswal is not easy. The plainly dressed, genial-looking man speaks only slightly above whisper volume—later I find out that my audio recorder sometimes just didn’t pick up his voice—and I often lean over, pointing my stronger right ear at him.
The first thing that strikes me about Oswal is the complete absence of bling. When you meet someone who runs a diversified financial services firm, with broking and wealth management divisions among other things, that clocked Rs137 crore in revenues last quarter—“an understandably poor one under the circumstances”—and one named after themselves no less, you expect to see, at the very least, a chunky ring. Or, maybe one of those diamond-studded iPhones.
Instead, Oswal wears a sober black-and-yellow T-shirt, corduroy pants, brown shoes and a Titan Edge watch. No jewellery. When he notices me look at his T-shirt he clarifies: “This is our company T-shirt. The staff wear casuals on Saturday, including me.”
Oswal’s story starts from the village of Padru in Barmer near the Indo-Pak border, where his father was a grain trader. Despite always having the option of joining the family business, Oswal decided to first get a complete education and see what options the world had in store for him. “If things went bad, I could always go back and trade grain, no?” he says.
It was while studying for chartered accountancy in Mumbai that Oswal met and befriended Raamdeo Agarwal, who stayed with him in the same hostel—Rajasthan Vidhyarthi Griha in Andheri. Agarwal, in Oswal’s words, was a hard-working fellow with a very bookish bent of mind. “He was always reading balance sheets and doing research and calculating numbers.” It was also around this time that Oswal discovered this “animal called the stock market”. Both friends immediately spotted an opportunity.