Wishesh Magazine March 2016

nri profile
40
By the time he was 14, his
father’s business collapsed,
boarding school got too
expensive and Renjen was
asked to return home to
continue his studies. “So I’d
go to school in the morning,
come back and then put in
my time,” at his father’s plant,
Renjen recalled during the
interview. “And I did that for
many, many years, four, five
years.”
With cash tight, Renjen
apparently had very little
choice once it came to
choosing colleges. “My father
couldn’t afford to send me to
any other college, so I went to
the college in my local city,”
he said in another interview.
After graduating with a degree
in economic science, Renjen
chanced upon a newspaper
advert for Usha International,
manufacturers of stitching
machines and different home
appliances. He arrived in
Delhi on a local bus, sporting
jeans and without a tie, but
landed his first job at the
company. His early years at
an elite boarding school would
have undoubtedly given him
an edge.
In 1984, Renjen won a Rotary
Foundation Scholarship that
offered him a ticket to the
US—and a place at Willamette
University’s Atkinson school
of Management.
While I was in school, a local
magazine picked the 10 best
students, and they picked me and
profiled me in the magazine
Till then, he had never
travelled outside the country,
or even flown on an airplane.
“I had this scholarship, two
pairs of tight jeans and a
couple of hundred extra
dollars and I showed up
in Oregon, and visited the
college there,” Renjen said.
Renjen’s call to attend the
private liberal arts institution in
Salem, Oregon was conjointly
influenced by family; he had
an aunt who lived in the
city, who helped him in the
transition into what would
become a permanent move to
the United States.
At B-school, Renjen would
sit at the front of class and
record each lecture on a tape
recorder. Inexperienced with
the American accent, the
boy from Rohtak thought it
would be good to listen to the
lectures twice over to catch
each word spoken by his
professors.
Clear that he needed to apply
his newly-acquired Master in
Business Administration to an
American firm, Renjen then
went out on an employment
hunt that took him from Booz
Allen Hamilton to Citibank.
Eventually, though, he settled
on Touche Ross—which
incorporated with Deloitte
Haskins & Sells in 1989—and
Renjen never left.
“While I was in school, a
local magazine picked the
10 best students, and they
picked me and profiled me
in the magazine,” Renjen
remembered in an interview
last year. That magazine was
picked up by Deloitte (Touche
Ross) partner on a flight, who
scanned Renjen’s profile and
then asked an assistant to call
him in for an interview.
Lured by the promise of a
consulting job—a profession
that he knew precious very
little about—Renjen rode a
Greyhound bus to Seattle
city. And (again) without a
suit, he went through round
after round of interviews, to
eventually land the job. (That
sort of sartorial inadequacy
during a B-school student’s
wardrobe would be frowned
upon currently. Thirty
WWW.WISHESH.COM | MARCH 2016