Why this conversation, and why now

Part 2 of 19 in The Patient Owner: Charlie Munger’s Ideas, as Rakesh Jhunjhunwala Might Have Taught Them to an Indian Investor← Part 1Part 3 →

This chapter introduces the series 'The Patient Owner' by explaining the unique approach to value investing inspired by Rakesh Jhunjhunwala and Charlie Munger. It discusses the challenges faced by Indian investors and the adaptation of Munger's principles to the Indian context.

I did not learn value investing from a textbook. I learnt it the way a junior doctor learns a ward: by standing next to someone who had already made the expensive mistakes, and by being allowed to ask why. Rakesh Jhunjhunwala was that person for me. He was called India’s Warren Buffett, which was a journalist’s convenience and only half true. Buffett had a partner who supplied the latticework. Rakesh had to be both men — the buyer of Titan, and the man who could tell you why a balance sheet is like a bikini.

Charlie Munger died in 2023, a year after Rakesh. The Almanack that collects Munger’s speeches is a classic of worldly wisdom, written for a reader who already lives inside American institutions, American accounting, and American distance from the promoter. An Indian investor does not live there. Our special risks have names: pledged shares, related-party warmth, a regulator who arrives late, a story stock that lists on a Wednesday and is a case study by Friday, and a household that still treats gold, property and a fixed deposit as the serious money.

So I have rewritten the spirit of that almanack as a series of evenings. Rakesh is across the table. I am asking the questions a doctor asks: what is the diagnosis, what would falsify it, what is the base rate, whose incentive is hiding in the treatment plan? He answers as the Big Bull, not as a professor. The chapters follow Munger’s map — worldly wisdom, inversion, competence, misjudgment, checklists — and then leave the map, because India is not Omaha, and because Rakesh did not live to meet the machine that now drafts research notes in four seconds.

The last long chapter asks a question he cannot answer, so I have answered it in his manner. If he were still alive, how would he have used artificial intelligence? Not as a tipster. As a junior who never sleeps, never flatters a promoter, and is dangerous precisely because it sounds sure. That chapter is for the angel who reads a pitch deck at midnight and feels the pull of a fluent story.

Read it as a conversation, not as scripture. Argue with him. He would have preferred that.

Dr Aniruddha Malpani

Mumbai