A must read........Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief
Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting to the Class of
2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore
on defining success. July 2nd 2004
I was the last child of a small-time government
servant, in a family of five brothers. My earliest
memory of my father is as that of a District
Employment Officer in Koraput, Orissa. It was and
remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There
was no electricity; no primary school nearby and water
did not flow out of a tap. As a result, I did not go
to school until the age of eight; I was home-schooled.
My father used to get transferred every year. The
family belongings fit into the back of a jeep  so the
family moved from place to place and, without any
trouble, my Mother would set up an establishment and
get us going. Raised by a widow who had come as a
refugee from the then East Bengal, she was a
matriculate when she married my Father. My parents set
the foundation of my life and the value system which
makes me what I am today and largely defines what
success means to me today.
As District Employment Officer, my father was given a
jeep by the government. There was no garage in the
Office, so the jeep was parked in our house. My father
refused to use it to commute to the office. He told us
that the jeep is an expensive resource given by the
government  he reiterated to us that it was not Âhis
jeep but the governments jeep. Insisting that he would
use it only to tour the interiors, he would walk to
his office on normal days. He also made sure that we
never sat in the government jeep  we could sit in it
only when it was stationary.
That was our early childhood lesson in governance  a
lesson that corporate managers learn the hard way,
some never do.
The driver of the jeep was treated with respect due to
any other member of my Fathers office. As small
children, we were taught not to call him by his name.
We had to use the suffix Âdada whenever we were to
refer to him in public or private. When I grew up to
own a car and a driver by the name of Raju was
appointed I repeated the lesson to my two small
daughters. They have, as a result, grown up to call
Raju, ÂRaju Uncle" very different from many of their
friends who refer to their family drivers as Âmy
driver. When I hear that term from a school- or
college-going person, I cringe.
To me, the lesson was significant you treat small
people with more respect than how you treat big
people. It is more important to respect your
subordinates than your superiors.
Our day used to start with the family huddling around
my Mothers chulha an earthen fire place she would
build at each place of posting where she would cook
for the family. There was no gas, nor electrical
stoves. The morning routine started with tea. As the
brew was served, Father would ask us to read aloud the
editorial page of The Statesmans Âmuffosil edition Â
delivered one day late. We did not understand much of
what we were reading. But the ritual was meant for us
to know that the world was larger than Koraput
district and the English I speak today, despite having
studied in an Oriya medium school, has to do with that
routine. After reading the newspaper aloud, we were
told to fold it neatly. Father taught us a simple
lesson. He used to say, You should leave your
newspaper and your toilet, the way you expect to find
it.
That lesson was about showing consideration to others.
Business begins and ends with that simple precept.
Being small children, we were always enamored with
advertisements in the newspaper for transistor radios
 we did not have one. We saw other people having
radios in their homes and each time there was an
advertisement of Philips, Murphy or Bush radios, we
would ask Father when we could get one. Each time, my
Father would reply that we did not need one because he
already had five radios  alluding to his five sons.
We also did not have a house of our own and would
occasionally ask Father as to when, like others, we
would live in our own house. He would give a similar
reply, We do not need a house of our own. I already
own five houses. His replies did not gladden our
hearts in that instant.
Nonetheless, we learnt that it is important not to
measure personal success and sense of well being
through material possessions.
Government houses seldom came with fences. Mother and
I collected twigs and built a small fence. After
lunch, my Mother would never sleep. She would take her
kitchen utensils and with those she and I would dig
the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. We planted
flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. My
mother brought ash from her chulha and mixed it in the
earth and we planted the seedlings all over again.
This time, they bloomed. At that time, my fathers
transfer order came. A few neighbors told my mother
why she was taking so much pain to beautify a
government house, why she was planting seeds that
would only benefit the next occupant. My mother
replied that it did not matter to her that she would
not see the flowers in full bloom. She said, I have to
create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am given a
new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I
had inherited.
That was my first lesson in success. It is not about
what you create for yourself, it is what you leave
behind that defines success.
My mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when
I was very small. At that time, the eldest among my
brothers got a teaching job at the University in
Bhubaneswar and had to prepare for the civil services
examination. So, it was decided that my Mother would
move to cook for him and, as her appendage, I had to
move too. For the first time in my life, I saw
electricity in homes and water coming out of a tap. It
was around 1965 and the country was going to war with
Pakistan. My mother was having problems reading and in
any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya
script. So, in addition to my daily chores, my job was
to read her the local newspaper  end to end. That
created in me a sense of connectedness with a larger
world. I began taking interest in many different
things. While reading out news about the war, I felt
that I was fighting the war myself. She and I
discussed the daily news and built a bond with the
larger universe. In it, we became part of a larger
reality.
Till date, I measure my success in terms of that sense
of larger connectedness.
Meanwhile, the war raged and India was fighting on
both fronts. Lal Bahadur Shastri, the then Prime
Minster, coined the term Jai Jawan, Jai Kishan and
galvanized the nation in to patriotic fervor. Other
than reading out the newspaper to my mother, I had no
clue about how I could be part of the action. So,
after reading her the newspaper, every day I would
land up near the Universitys water tank, which served
the community. I would spend hours under it, imagining
that there could be spies who would come to poison the
water and I had to watch for them. I would daydream
about catching one and how the next day, I would be
featured in the newspaper. Unfortunately for me, the
spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar
and I never got a chance to catch one in action. Yet,
that act unlocked my imagination.
Imagination is everything. If we can imagine a future,
we can create it, if we can create that future, others
will live in it. That is the essence of success.
Over the next few years, my mothers eyesight dimmed
but in me she created a larger vision, a vision with
which I continue to see the world and, I sense,
through my eyes, she was seeing too. As the next few
years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was
operated for cataract. I remember, when she returned
after her operation and she saw my face clearly for
the first time, she was astonished. She said, Oh my
God, I did not know you were so fair. I remain mighty
pleased with that adulation even till date. Within
weeks of getting her sight back, she developed a
corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both
eyes. That was 1969. She died in 2002. In all those 32
years of living with blindness, she never complained
about her fate even once. Curious to know what she saw
with blind eyes, I asked her once if she sees
darkness. She replied, No, I do not see darkness. I
only see light even with my eyes closed. Until she was
eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga
everyday, swept her own room and washed her own
clothes.
To me, success is about the sense of independence; it
is about not seeing the world but seeing the light.
Over the many intervening years, I grew up, studied,
joined the industry and began to carve my lifes own
journey. I began my life as a clerk in a government
office, went on to become a Management Trainee with
the DCM group and eventually found my lifes calling
with the IT industry when fourth generation computers
came to India in 1981. Life took me places  I worked
with outstanding people, challenging assignments and
traveled all over the world. In 1992, while I was
posted in the US, I learnt that my father, living a
retired life with my eldest brother, had suffered a
third degree burn injury and was admitted in the
Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. I flew back to attend to
him  he remained for a few days in critical stage,
bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is
a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The
overworked, under-resourced sisters in the burn ward
are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life
at its worst. One morning, while attending to my
Father, I realized that the blood bottle was empty and
fearing that air would go into his vein, I asked the
attending nurse to change it. She bluntly told me to
do it myself. In that horrible theater of death, I was
in pain and frustration and anger. Finally when she
relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and
murmured to her, Why have you not gone home yet? Here
was a man on his deathbed but more concerned about the
overworked nurse than his own state. I was stunned at
his stoic self.
There I learnt that there is no limit to how concerned
you can be for another human being and what is the
limit of inclusion you can create. My father died the
next day.
He was a man whose success was defined by his
principles, his frugality, his universalism and his
sense of inclusion. Above all, he taught me that
success is your ability to rise above your discomfort,
whatever may be your current state. You can, if you
want, raise your consciousness above your immediate
surroundings. Success is not about building material
comforts  the transistor that he never could buy or
the house that he never owned. His success was about
the legacy he left, the memetic continuity of his
ideals that grew beyond the smallness of an ill-paid,
unrecognized government servants world.
My father was a fervent believer in the British Raj.
He sincerely doubted the capability of the
post-independence Indian political parties to govern
the country. To him, the lowering of the Union Jack
was a sad event. My Mother was the exact opposite.
When Subhash Bose quit the Indian National Congress
and came to Dacca, my mother, then a schoolgirl,
garlanded him. She learnt to spin khadi and joined an
underground movement that trained her in using daggers
and swords. Consequently, our household saw diversity
in the political outlook of the two. On major issues
concerning the world, the Old Man and the Old Lady had
differing opinions.
In them, we learnt the power of disagreements, of
dialogue and the essence of living with diversity in
thinking. Success is not about the ability to create a
definitive dogmatic end state; it is about the
unfolding of thought processes, of dialogue and
continuum.
Two years back, at the age of eighty-two, Mother had a
paralytic stroke and was lying in a government
hospital in Bhubaneswar. I flew down from the US where
I was serving my second stint, to see her. I spent two
weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a
paralytic state. She was neither getting better nor
moving on. Eventually I had to return to work. While
leaving her behind, I kissed her face. In that
paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, Why are
you kissing me, go kiss the world. Her river was
nearing its journey, at the confluence of life and
death, this woman who came to India as a refugee,
raised by a widowed Mother, no more educated than high
school, married to an anonymous government servant
whose last salary was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of
her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity  was
telling me to go and kiss the world!
Success to me is about Vision. It is the ability to
rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about
imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people.
It is about building inclusion. It is about
connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about
personal tenacity. It is about giving back more to
life than you take out of it. It is about creating
extra-ordinary success with ordinary lives.
Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and
Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.
shraed by Saloni
------------------------------------------------------------------
YOUR WORTH READING, IS JUST A BLOG AWAY @
http://readingtimefolks.blogspot.com/
SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE FOR THIS MAILING LIST @
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/WorthReading
ALSO PLAYING AT A MAILING LIST NEAR YOU ::
QUOTATION OF THE DAY
--------------------
They inspire, they motivate and at times they tickle your funny bone. But they
never miss to touch your heart. Your daily supply of chosen gems from the world
of literature, ancient proverbs, poetry and sayings from great leaders.
Join the Quote A Day mailing list @
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/QuotationOfTheDay
Or simply Blog it @
http://quotationoftheday.blogspot.com/
JOKE OF THE DAY
----------------
As wise men say, a joke a day keeps the doctor away. So step into the health
zone by sharing a hearty laugh. A variety of jokes that are ludicrous and
trivial, witty and wacky, spontaneous and sportive. Wishing you a laugh riot.
Join the Joke of the Day mailing list @
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/JokeOfTheDay
Or simply go Blogging @
http://joketimefolks.blogspot.com/
18++
----
Indulge your dirty mind with some outright hilarious adult jokes. They could be
expletive or subtle but they are definitely rated - XXX. Statutory Warning -
18++ may be injurious if your mommy sees it, subscribe at your own risk.
Join the 18++ mailing list @
http://groups-beta.google.com/group/18PlusPlus
Or simply go Blogging @
http://18plusplus.blogspot.com/
