Print this as a PDF. Please do not share outside your membership.
Radhika Gupta is the Managing Director & Chief Executive Officer at Edelweiss Mutual Fund. Radhika started her career with McKinsey and later switched to Wall Street, joining AQR Capital. She then moved to India in 2009 to start Forefront Capital Management, the first registered hedge fund in India, which was acquired by Edelweiss Financial Services Limited in 2014. Radhika is a graduate in Management and Technology programs from the University of Pennsylvania, with joint degrees in Economics from Wharton in addition to Computer Science Engineering from Moore School.
Radhika was born to a diplomat father who was an Indian Foreign Service official. With her family, she moved across continents. She was born in Pakistan, where she had complications at birth, and ended up with a broken neck which she describes is a “weird tilt” to her head.
While researching about Radhika for this conversation, I went back again and again to this beautiful thought from Haruki Murakami’s book Kafka on the Shore, where he wrote and I quote –
“Sometimes fate is like a small sandstorm that keeps changing directions. You change direction but the sandstorm chases you. You turn again, but the storm adjusts. Over and over you play this out, like some ominous dance with death just before dawn. Why? Because this storm isn’t something that blew in from far away, something that has nothing to do with you. This storm is you. Something inside of you. So all you can do is give in to it, step right inside the storm, closing your eyes and plugging up your ears so the sand doesn’t get in, and walk through it, step by step. There’s no sun there, no moon, no direction, no sense of time. Just fine white sand swirling up into the sky like pulverized bones. That’s the kind of sandstorm you need to imagine.
And you really will have to make it through that violent, metaphysical, symbolic storm. But once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure, in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain. When you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”
This content is reserved for Mastermind Members. To access, please login below with your membership credentials.
If you are not a member, please consider joining the Mastermind Membership to access my most comprehensive value investing course, plus practical, time-tested ideas in investing, human behaviour, business analysis, and decision making, and get onto the path of becoming a better version of yourself.