Coffee with BS: Manipal group's Ranjan Pai on charting an ambitious course

Pai is charting an ambitious course for his group in his characteristic self-assured and understated manner, writes Anjuli Bhargava

It was at 18, when he failed to make the entrance cutoff for Manipal medical college and had to instead go to Davanagere in Karnataka to study medicine, that Ranjan Pai realised everything in life wasn’t going to be handed out on a platter. It was only when he did well in his first year of MBBS that his father, a stickler for performance, allowed his only son to transfer to his medical college in Manipal.

This invaluable lesson, learnt 30 years ago, stayed with Pai as he transformed the medical college he inherited from his father into a mini