Rakesh Rao: What’s life without marriage?
Friday April 16 2021
Rakesh Rao, Crown Paints Kenya Group CEO during the interview at the Nairobi Serena Hotel on April 14. PHOTO | DIANA NGILA | NMG
By JACKSON BIKO
Summary
Mr Rao is the Group CEO of Crown Paints, a company that was established in 1958 and currently has 1,000 staff members scattered in Uganda, Tanzania and Rwanda.
He has been the CEO for the past 15 years and has had a decent run; Crown Paint is listed on the Nairobi Securities Exchange, and it sells over three million litres of paint in a year.
Rakesh Rao discourages you from wearing black. It’s an “unhappy” colour, he says. He talks about ‘colour energy’ and ‘colour therapy’ with relish, how colour affects how people interact with us but also how it changes how we think and feel. He likes blue because blue is the colour of water and water makes everybody happy, he says. “Think of showers and the sea and waterfalls. Water is blue.”