Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters (14 page)

For me, the experience of heading an organization that has been home to some of the most dynamic working women in this country, was a journey of learning. Maybe growing up in a family with almost no women made me gender neutral in the way I looked at women in the work place. I think in the quest for seeming politically right, we have built a lot of biases into our workplaces, without realizing it. A lot of times this is because we perceive a situation different from the way the women see it.

A lot of times a woman, I suspect, is given a different set of responsibilities not because she cannot do it, but because of someone’s belief that it is not right or fair for her to be asked to do it!

My first lesson in understanding that a woman looks at this differently came in 1996 at ICICI. I was the Chief Executive Officer at that point and it worried me when women employees would take late night flights back home or if they worked late into the night at office. At one of the meetings with the team, which included a sizeable number of women, I raised this concern and asked them about how secure they felt. All I got in return were blank stares; none of them even responded to my query. I realized then that it was best to alleviate our own anxieties about the perceived risk instead of limiting what the women colleagues were capable of doing.

Women have different approach to risk and their jobs and we (society or men in the organization) unnecessarily build stereotypes around them.

At ICICI, we did nothing special to get the equations right. We were gender neutral from the recruitment stage itself. But the honest truth is that not every man has the same mind and so the balance gets skewed occasionally. Somewhere we let biases get in and the only way to avoid this is by being constantly alert and to not let that happen. The answer lies within us, not outside.

At ICICI, once the merit process was put in place, there was never any question of gender inequality. We had a merit and performance-based ranking of employees which was reviewed every year and people got responsibilities that they were capable of taking on. When this is done, you get to a situation where you are not conscious of a gender mix at the table at all and that is when you can say your organization has truly become gender neutral. It took us about three to four years to reach there, but it was well worth it. Despite the debate about the need for affirmative action at the work place, I am convinced that a ‘no affirmative action’ policy is the best way, but we have to make sure we too have a neutral mind while doing so.

Often, quick affirmative action is very risky and holds the danger of creating a hostile situation for the women colleagues at the work place. In the long run, I can say only merit works.

Ajnya, when I see you with your children, I often recall my own childhood. Sometimes I may differ with you about your rather strict ways of parenting, but I also know that it is right for you to be firm with the children. It is only the grandfather in me that makes me question that.

Growing up, you have had your grandparents and your parents push you to take on leadership qualities and in many ways you did, displaying a fondness for experimenting with various things, such as learning Japanese, when it was not fashionable to do so. Your mother has a strong mind of her own but she has chosen to take on a supportive role in our family. She raised you and your brother and maybe you take after her. She made it her full-time job raising our children and you are doing it now. I see how supportive you are with everything that your husband and children do. And I admire the way you facilitate everything by having a very clear demarcation of responsibility in running the house.

Ajnya, you have learnt a lot of things about life from just watching your parents and your grandparents and I hope you realize that your children will learn their attitudes by watching their parents handle life. Children pick up from the parents their attitude towards the immediate family and their relationship to the larger community around them. How you treat the people around you will have enormous bearing on the minds of your own children and I know you will remember this at all times. The same applies for ethics and integrity too. Children look at their parents for pointers on this and what they see becomes embedded in their subconscious.

I would like to end with this thought that parents expose their children to several aspects of life and are unable to expose them to other aspects for various reasons. I think parents will do the greatest service to children if learning from seeing is encouraged. Lead your life as you would want your children to lead their life and watch them become maturer for it.

In the end, I want to say that I could have regretted that you did not follow a career path but I actually look at your decision to concentrate on your family with a tremendous sense of admiration. Nothing is more powerful or more worthy of pride than the sense of somebody’s conviction and the courage to follow one’s own heart. I’m proud of you.

Lovingly,
Dad

Mallika Sarabhai

allika Sarabhai is a multifaceted woman, a restless, vibrant soul unwilling to be caged in by boundaries and societal restrictions. Her interests are many. She is dancer, choreographer, social activist, writer, publisher, and commentator. But more than anything else, she is a human being whose heart beats and feels for the women of our country, the unsung majority who live in rural India and silently suffer the indignities that an uncaring society heaps on them. Over the years, she has worked relentlessly opposing crimes against women through her dance-dramas, mobile dance troupes, traveling through rural India spreading the word against female foeticide, child marriage, and maternal mortality, among others.

Mallika herself grew up in a family of very strong women including her danseuse mother, Mrinalini Sarabhai, her aunt, freedom fighter Capt. Lakshmi Sehgal, and her great grandmother, a feisty woman who once single-handedly mollified and made friends with a rampaging mob working in the fields of the zamindaars, who attacked her home during the Moplah Rebellion in Kerala’s Malabar region in 1921. The Nair widow waited for the mobs to arrive, cooked a meal for them, and sent them home, mollified.

The biggest influence on Mallika’s life was and continues to be her father, eminent physicist and the father of India’s space programme, Dr.Vikram Sarabhai from whom she got the gift of enduring positivity. At his insistence she did a business management degree from IIM, Ahmedabad so that she would help him set up great institutions that would exist without material considerations such as income and profit. He never lived to see his daughter give shape to his vision but over the last three years, Darpana, an organization that her mother founded, has been steered by Mallika who has made it a hub for catalyzing social change through art.

Mallika is remembered for her inspiring role as Draupadi, in Peter Brook’s ‘The Mahabharata’ which ran for five years, first in French and then English, performed in France, North America, Australia, Japan, and Scotland. She has, since then, made several hard-hitting solo theatrical works, including
Shakti: The Power of Women
, all of which talk about the inherent strength of women.

This poem was written to her unborn baby some two decades ago. Anahita is now part of Darpana and a keen dancer herself, who accompanies her mother, and sometimes her grandmother too, on stage.

FOR ANAHITA

A lullaby

The mother hums while rocking a cradle. She stops, peers in and sings:

Don’t sleep yet my little girl
For I have a story to tell.
A long one perhaps, a hard one too
But a good one that you will tell your bitiya.

There is a world around—
A world of fools and knaves
Of frightened men and mindless women.

They see us first as women
Not people, not humans, not normal;
Girls, women, bitches, whores,
Other’s wealth, burdens.
Soon to be gotten rid of.

They’ll say you’re a curse
An unproductive mouth to feed.
They’ll try to starve you, burn you,
Keep you out of school.
They’ll try to keep you scared
And away from knowledge and power.

But they don’t know the secret
That I shall tell to you.
The world had changed around them too
But they don’t see it, so blind with fear

But you must know that you CAN
You can work, and fight, and talk
And dance, and learn, and sing.
All by yourself
Without their help
Without their permission
Or blessings, or guidance.

And then, if you wish, you can stretch out a hand
And take a partner who understands.

Don’t listen to their limitations
You can fly, you can jump
You can run, you can write
Because you are a woman
In a world where we can stand alone.

They will fight, hurl stones and abuse
For you will be the light that breaks their power
They will starve you, try and throw you down,
But you will know of the light inside
That gives you truth, and strength and courage
And above all
A joy that they could never give
And never withhold

For I am telling you a secret, bitiya
That you shall pass on to all the bitiyas
The future is ours
Filled with joy
Take the light of the women of history
And the few brave women of today
To light the lamps
A million lamps
For tomorrow’s women who are free.

Narayana Murthy

or most Indians, Narayana Murthy, co-founder of the information technology company Infosys Ltd, is a wise elder statesman, a man who is respected for his knowledge, and is revered by both his industry peers and his business associates.

And yet, Murthy has a delightfully gentle and vulnerable side to him too as he reveals in this humorous, touching, and astonishingly honest letter to his daughter Akshata, herself mother to two little children. Murthy wrote to me just a few days ago saying Akshata gave birth to her second child, daughter Anoushka, on October 25.

‘It is quite a well-known fact that when a daughter gets married, a father has mixed feelings about it. He hates the fact there is somebody else in his daughter’s life with whom she shares her affection—a smart, confident, younger man who gets the attention that was his alone. I, too, was a little sad and jealous when you told us you had found your life partner, but when I met Rishi and found him to be all that you had raved about—brilliant, handsome, and, most importantly, honest—I understood why you let your heart be stolen,’ Murthy confesses in this charming epistle to his daughter.