RIP, Raghu Pillai

A few days ago I woke up to the newspaper giving me some sad news: that Raghu Pillai, a former senior colleague of mine who I admired, had died of a cardiac arrest in Chennai.

Raghu was a terrific guy – big, hearty, confident, precise in his words and an achiever. I had the opportunity to get to know him (all too briefly) when I did a short stint at Spencer & Co. Ltd, an RPG Enterprise, where he was a fairly senior guy running a lot of their most visible retail formats – Music World, Health & Glow, Food World etc. With his imposing personality, deep voice, loud sense of humor, cigar and half sleeved shirts, he was quite a toughie, but a classy and even nice one.

I left Spencers, and on and off kept hearing about his movements. His leaving Spencers was a big ticket news item. And then I wasn’t sure what he did but I heard he had joined Mukesh Ambani’s retail venture as its Head. Wow! That was a BIG ticket news item.

In between, I had the opportunity to interact with his wife Janaki, who ran the Ability Foundation for differently abled people. As Head of the HR Shared Services Centre of Standard Chartered Bank, I also managed recruitment for SCOPE International, and so worked with her to hire some of her wards. On and off, we used to chat about Raghu then, and that used to be my source of info about what was going on in his life.

Once I joined Caliber Point, since he was also doing the Mumbai-Chennai weekly trips like me, we often ran into each other in the airport. Raghu was truly a big man by now in Corporate India, but was still very approachable and cordial. Would always chat politely and catch up on small talk with anyone who came up to him. On occasion, we ended up seated besides each other in the flight and while he would use the opportunity to doze quietly (I recall him being usually tired and using every flying opportunity to catch up on sleep), we did speak about hs work, and I remember being in awe of the scale of the issues he was dealing with, and the magnitude of change and impact he was managing.

I didn’t realise he had left Reliance a few months ago to join the Future Group. Another big news item, it must have been, for sure. And by now, everybody in organised retail in India knew Raghu one way or the other. He truly towered over the retail industry like a colossus. But yesterday, he made big news for all the wrong reasons.

What was the hurry?

RIP Raghu. You made a difference.

R U Srinivas worked with Raghu at RPG Retail and is now the Chief Executive Officer of Caliber Point