Making Strides, On Track And Off

Edelweiss Group's Rashesh and Vidya Shah on the shared interests and complementarities that have brought them success as business and life partners

- Amit Ranjan Rai And Vikram Johri

It was a mergers and acquisitions project that first drew them close. They were batch mates, both from Mumbai, pursuing an MBA from IIM Ahmedabad in 1987-89. In the first year, they barely knew each other. During the term breaks, they would board the same trains to Mumbai and back, but hardly interact. It was in the second year that they started interacting more often and came to know each other better.

Quite sure about her career path, Vidya Shah, née Desai, chose finance as her specialisation in the second year. Rashesh Shah opted for marketing as he wanted to explore a career in advertising. But after his summer training at Lintas, his interest in advertising waned. He felt he was better cut out for finance and decided to go for it.

Finance got the two, who by now were quite comfortable with each other, to take on a course project together — the one on mergers and acquisitions. In those days (the late 1980s), M&A was a fairly new concept in India. There were hardly any Indian companies using M&A as a growth strategy. The project focused on studying M&A as a growth opportunity for companies and how investment banks can offer M&A services to corporates.

Rashesh and Vidya travelled together to Mumbai a few times as part of the research. It was largely during this project that they discovered they had a lot in common, their interests were similar, they could chat with ease on almost anything, and they quite liked being with each other.

Around January 26, 1989, before leaving for holidays, knowing quite well they had a liking for each other, Rashesh pulled the trigger and asked Vidya if they could take their relationship beyond friendship. She agreed.