• He wakes up at 3.45 every morning and goes on a road trip. Yet this is as far from a midnight rendezvous as it gets — Nand Kishore Pansari’s destination is temples, via temples and more temples.

• After visiting around seven temples every morning — including Ram Mandir, Bhootnath and Hanuman mandir in Raja Katra — Nandu, as he is fondly known, heads home by 8am. A simple meal, session with the newspapers and quick rest follows, after which he slips into uniform (a cream safari suit) and heads to office, which is Poddar Court’s Raymond Shop. He stays put there till 9.30pm, when he winds everything up and heads home to family.

• The Pansaris are the quintessential Sooraj Barjatya family. His parents, wife, three sons, their wives and one child each, all 13 of them, live together in their Lovelock Place bungalow. His eldest son Mahesh looks after the construction business, second son Piyush handles the outstation Raymond Shops and youngest Sidhartha is involved in the Crossword bookstores and shopping mall segment.

• But his prime pride is the 21-year-old Raymond Shop, which due to his perseverance, has retained its position of best Raymond store in the country and top seller of fabric in the country for the past 12 years. “Raymond hosts an international best performance awards ceremony every three years and we have been winning multiple prime awards in the last four award functions,” smiles the 64-year-old. Last year at the Raymond Top Dealers Conference in Singapore, he bagged awards for the highest selling store, highest selling suiting store and highest selling shirting store.

• His career graph is inspiring for any entrepreneur. He started from a tiny 100-sq-ft cloth shop with Rs 5,000 as working capital that grew to a modest 2,000-sq-ft Raymond Shop and finally transformed into an 11,000-sq-ft sprawling three-level showroom.

• His client profile in the shop is steadily changing. He says that unlike earlier years when Marwaris made up most of his customer base, these days most of his buyers are from other communities. “We also get a lot of corporate customers,” he smiles. At the moment, Pansari is excited about a new Raymond concept. “Once you choose the cloth and give your measurements, we send your photographs to Bangalore. They stitch the suits and send them back to us. It is a little more costly but the quality makes it worth it,” explains Pansari.

• For him, charity begins at home, which in his case means the Raymond Shop. “Small things matter, whether it is feeding pigeons or cows. No one should leave empty-handed from my place,” he says. He also encourages employing college students as part-timers. “They can earn a decent pocket money and be independent that way,” says Pansari. Add that to a chance to learn the lessons of a lifetime from a man who has shown Calcutta how to do business, and it is not a bad deal at all.