Saibal Biswas

I mentioned Saibal in my January 2025 post titled Kanha, Paradise. I am proud to call Saibal my friend. That is not an expression I use lightly.

When he first came to see me, more than two decades ago (I am ashamed I cannot remember the exact year), he came as the representative of a multinational bank, on a business tour aimed at finding new customers upcountry. He was introduced by his junior, Sayan, who was a good friend of a then-beloved ex student, and had grown close to me. I was attracted by Saibal's manner of starting the conversation - so warm, so amiable, yet so professional. I was listening so closely to him, and he was behaving so much like a regular person, that it took me some time to notice that his right hand was missing. No one discussed or even mentioned the fact, and of course I am too reserved a person to put such questions to an almost-stranger.

Gradually our friendship deepened. There came a time when he came over again, to announce that he had quit his bank job and started up an investment company of his own, specializing in mutual funds (this was a time when MFs had just begun to catch the public attention), and I became, I think, one of his early clients. I remember him asking me 'Suvroda, do you want to get rich quick?' I was a little taken aback, then said smilingly that I had no such dream. He said, 'Good, then you will be the kind of customer I am looking for. If you can invest slowly but regularly, I promise to give you a good nest egg to retire comfortably on in two decades' time, give or take a few years'. And he seems to have kept his promise. Besides my own sustained hard work and saving habit, it is thanks to Saibal alone, outside my family that is, that I am today as safe financially as any middle class man in India can be.

His company has grown apace, just as have my savings. Last I checked, they have 7000 plus clients and are managing assets close to a thousand crore rupees (may that grow to 5000 in my lifetime!). Two decades are a long time, and lots of things, good and bad, happen to everybody within that kind of time span. I have been no exception. I have needed substantial sums of money urgently at least three times, and I have got literally perfect within-the-day service every time. Saibal's good friend and colleague Samrat has become the kind of 'relationship manager' that you can usually only dream of in this day and age. I only wonder how they can instantly and so satisfactorily respond to a relatively small-time client like me day in, day out, for years and years without fail. Talk about responsibility, efficiency and commitment...

Over the years, I got to know more and more about Saibal, in little bits and pieces at a time, and the more I learnt, the stronger my admiration for him became. He had had a decent urban educated middle class upbringing, albeit with the usual difficulties and disappointments. Then disaster struck. Shortly after he had settled down in that bank job and started courting a colleague, there was a freak road accident while he was travelling with some friends to a picnic spot in a bus, and his right hand was nearly severed. It was a miracle that he survived the journey back to a hospital in the city. The hand was amputated. 

There followed trauma, shock, deep, prolonged depression and disorientation. Then there came climbing back the long road to recovery and reconstruction of life. As he himself says, he had to re-learn everything from scratch, everything from how to write with his left hand to tying his shoelaces with a single hand. He freely acknowledges that for all his zest for life, his strength of mind, his fixity of purpose, that rehabilitation would have been very difficult if not impossible without the steadfast, patient, uncomplaining, deeply empathetic support of his gem of a wife (my pronaam, Kulbeer ma'am) and a few true friends and supportive, enthusiastic colleagues. Then came the worst part of the story: his job turned sour, not only because of the demands of profit-hungry, customer-indifferent bosses but because too many decision makers were hesitant about entrusting a 'handicapped' man with the kind of bigger responsibilities that he craved and knew he could handle. So, approaching his mid-thirties, he crossed the second giant challenge of his life: to quit his salaried job and plunge into the maelstrom of the business world. His team worked long and hard, intelligently and determinedly. The rest is history.

Now at long last Saibal has told his own story in a little book titled Hand of God: one hand, infinite dreams. For anyone teenaged or older, it is truly inspirational without the slightest exaggeration. As Saibal says (read the book), he has now made all the money he really needed, his son is doing very well and is the pride and joy of his life, he knows peace and rest. And yet, he is still crazy about wildlife and travelling and football, and is still running his business hands-on, though for him now money making is most firmly secondary to the satisfaction that comes from knowing that he has earned the trust of so many customers, and he is, as we speak, being of enormous help to many of them in their hour of need, whether they need money or sympathy or expert advice. He also has some ambition to join politics, because he believes we need activists in the ring, so to speak, who want to work hard in order to make life in India much more congenial for people with disabilities than he has found it to be for most of his working life. I wish him Godspeed, and though my remaining aims in life are far more private and humble, so that I could never be someone like him, I have no hesitation is declaring that he ranks very high among my living heroes. Thank you for having become so much more than my money manager, Saibal.

P.S.: Saibal also speaks on TV (I last heard him on CNBC) and writes financial advisory columns for newspapers like ABP. He has always been telling me 'Dada, it is not how much you invest but how long and how regularly you do so that matters more, so tell your grown up students to start young; put them in touch with me'. You can contact him at his company website.