Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters (16 page)

Be successful. Success to me is bringing a smile to the faces of people when you enter a room. Becoming so requires you to be caring of other people. I know this is your fundamental strength. Put the interest of the society ahead of your own family’s interest, and the interest of your family ahead of your own personal interest. That is the only way, my child, that we can make this a better world for our children and grandchildren.

I appreciate your penchant for following the golden rule—Do unto others what you want others to do unto you—to ensure fairness in everything we do. Many times people ask me how I want to be remembered. My answer has always been that I want to be remembered as a fair person, not a good person. To put yourself in someone’s shoes to understand their feelings.’

There is a joke in our family that the only person I am scared of, who can rein me in, is my daughter. Throughout my career—at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad, while working in Paris at Patni Computer Systems and finally at Infosys, I really did not have a boss. In the first three places, since I worked hard to deliver whatever I agreed on time, within budget, and with the requisite quality, my bosses left me alone. Since I founded Infosys, I had no boss! So, the only boss I have known is you! Who else can order me around about my eating habits, my sleep patterns, my incessant traveling, and my refusal to go for regular medical check-ups? Rohan is my buddy, but you are the one who instills discipline in my life.

Take care, my child!

Lovingly, Appa

While this book was under publication, Murthy became grandfather a second time and Akshata is now mother to two little daughters, Krishnaa and Anoushka.

Pradeep Bhargava

radeep Bhargava, Director at Cummins India and Chairman of the Confederation of Indian Industry’s (CII) Western Region, is a man who believes in doing things differently. In a corporate set-up where top honchos have an abundance of perks and privileges, this was the man who set up a precedent to do as much of his work as possible, by himself. Much to the astonishment and consternation of his staff at Cummins Generator Technologies where he was the Managing Director, he decided to eat in the staff canteen where he served himself and washed his own plates, after keeping the leftover food aside. After each meal, the leftovers in the canteen got weighed and a chart was put up with the total leftover food weighed so that the staff would know the quantity of food wasted every day. The leftover food was then used for vermiculture within the factory. In effect, it was a symbolic message for conservation and also a strong message to his staff about the importance of not wasting food when thousands of children in the world die of starvation.

In a career that has seen him work in the public as well as private sector, with stints also at UNDP and the World Bank, Bhargava has always been steered by an inner calling that saw him rise above the profile of his job to do something for the community around him. The inspiration for this came from his father, a Public Health Engineer with the Rajasthan Government. Pradeep remembers that spark of joy in his father’s eyes every time he was able to do something for the people, such as providing safe drinking water supply to the community. The young boy grew up idolizing his father and his thoughts and in the years since then, he has done his own bit for the community such as helping Pune city, his adopted home, free of the scourge of debilitating load shedding and power outages through a unique private and public sector partnership.

Bhargava is also the brain behind CII’s Finishing School project, a unique venture that he started off in collaboration with Pune’s Symbiosis College wherein scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students in the third year of engineering colleges got trained in a variety of soft skills and business etiquette in order to develop their personality and make them more employable. ‘They already had the required vocational skills; what we did was to make them more confident individuals who could compete with their more urbane, sophisticated city counterparts. These kids had been denied opportunities and put on the back foot for so long that we needed to help them believe that they could do it.’ The Finishing College experiment is now being replicated by CII’s branches in other parts of the country. Pradeep is also closely involved in the academic world where he has helped educational institutions in their development and curriculum, besides being engaged with Institutes such as TMTC, YASHDA, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, and Symbiosis Institutes, as a visiting faculty.

Now in his retirement phase but with a plateful of assignments to keep him busy, Bhargava’s biggest lesson was learnt nearly two decades ago, when he lay in a pool of blood in his house, after being assaulted by robbers who had broken in. In the days that he spent in the intensive care unit of a hospital, lonely and scared, Bhargava realized the ultimate truth that seems to escape most of us: That we are completely replaceable at our workplaces but there is never a back-up for us at home.

‘I did make it to the hospital and pulled through the crisis but in those days of uncertainty and loneliness in the ICU, I realized that the most important thing in my life was my family. I realized that it was not the next promotion or designation that mattered in life. In some ways, perhaps, all these years since then have been a ‘bonus‘ for me, but that episode helped shape what is truly important in life and how we should not get consumed by so many trivialities and pettiness in everyday life,’ Bhargava writes to his daughter Pooja, a young professional in an IT firm and mother to a young son.

Dearest Pooja,

It’s been a long time since you and I had one of our famous ‘man to man’ talks, the kind you would nudge me into having during your teenage years when there was something that you needed to share with me. A lot has happened in our lives since then. You found your life partner and are now a young mother. I too got busy in my career and have spent these years fully immersed in my Corporate ‘Grahastha’ mode and I sometimes wonder if I could have spent more time with my family.

After 40 plus years of an exciting professional career, I’m now moving to my ‘Vanaprastha’ phase and I think the time is perfect for us to have one of our ‘ man to mans’. It has been a memorable journey for me, one that started with a career in the public sector, took me to UNDP and World Bank, and finally put me through the hierarchies of the private sector and corporate world in India. But while I continue to carry a corporate visiting card, I have chosen to spend my time and energy on engagements I truly enjoy and am getting used to a retired life where compulsions are few and freedom is high. It is clearly a good time to capture the learning through a bit of ‘rewind and replay’ and even attempt to ‘fast forward’ to what could be a fulfilling direction for the remaining days of my life. And who can be a better person than you to share my journey and learning with!

Dear bitiya, to begin with, I would like to tell you something that is on top of my mind, always. I know you have heard this before but I still would love to tell you this: You and your brother Amit have been the best things that have happened to us—your mother and I. All the designations and achievements in my career pale into insignificance when compared to the joy I experience when I see you both now, grown up into splendid people with courage and conviction of your own.

As I rewind, I would like to first capture the learning on the professional front. And possibly try and answer the question all of us ask ourselves in our introspective moments: ‘If I were to start my life once again, would I steer it differently?’

Pooja, all of us base our lives on that one person who inspires you so much that you want to follow in his or her footsteps. My idol was my father. Such was his impact on my mind that even after passing out of the prestigious IIM, Ahmedabad with a gold medal, when I could have had a picking of the best jobs around, I chose to work with Bharat Sarkar and continued doing that for eleven long years. My father spent his entire working life with the Government of Rajasthan where, as Chief Engineer of the Public Health Engineering Department, he made a huge difference in the lives of people. I grew up seeing the twinkle in his eyes when he steered schemes to provide drinking water to people in the parched desert state. What joy and fulfilment! I had the same zeal and dream. And honestly, if I were to graduate from IIM, Ahmedabad today and if there was an iconic and charming leader like Dr Vikram Sarabhai, who recruited many of us in 1971 from IIM, Ahmedabad, into Atomic Energy and Space Research Organizations, I would still opt to work for him and the cause. It was all about doing something on a larger societal canvas, and I then felt that it would be easier if I were to work for State enterprise. It was only after life started unfolding, that I realized that you don’t necessarily have to be a ‘public-servant’ for serving a public cause. But the experience and exposure of the public sector was valuable and extremely useful when I entered the public space later in life while working for private enterprises. How can it not have? I have had the privilege and opportunity of working with some of the country’s tallest visionaries such as Dr Vikram Sarabhai and Prof MGK Menon who made a big difference in my professional upbringing and values.

A decade later, I entered the private sector and have spent the last 27 years as Managing Director in some of the country’s well-known corporate houses (Kalyani-Sharp, General Electric, and now Cummins India), gaining a span of expertize in setting up and running companies, mergers, acquisitions… in a variety of markets and sectors ranging from industrial to consumer goods, both for domestic and international business. But you know that your father was no ‘race horse’ and has had his share of discomfort being on the race track. But in some ways, I have to acknowledge that my designations and empowering superiors gave me the opportunity of serving common cause by pulling ‘tongas’ in public life. These regular detours onto the side roads were my greatest joys while I was driving on the corporate expressway.

The urge of going beyond corporate expectations and roles was always there in some corner of my heart and it drove me to take up activities that brought me closer to civic society. It came not from any disenchantment with corporate life but from a positive desire to go beyond. Honestly, I thoroughly enjoyed my corporate role—its passion and pressures, highs and lows, adrenalin of growth and pains of decline, creating jobs and wealth, and engaging in its own contribution to society and environment. The Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) was an excellent platform which gave me an opportunity to deliver and seek fulfilment from a space which individual corporates normally don’t focus on. CII has been the best enabler for me, and I learnt so much through my association with some outstanding and caring corporate leaders in this country.

Gudiya, let me start by sharing a journey which has made a deep impact on my persona and in the lives of lakhs of fellow beings around us. Almost a decade ago, Pune city, which had been our home for many years, started experiencing crippling power shortage (affecting the entire State of Maharashtra) resulting in extended load shedding every day. I remember the public outrage when the state government threw up its hands and said the power shortages would continue for the next few years. It struck me then that instead of whining or blaming the government, all of us had the choice of taking control of the situation and resolving the problem. I took upon myself what everyone considered the unrealistic responsibility of making the city of Pune free of load shedding. It was a formidable task considering that I had no framework to work upon and the government had nothing to offer. On the CII platform, we worked on a unique and innovative solution by which industrial units in the city cooperated and used their captive gensets for their needs during peak hours, thereby releasing grid capacity for the citizens who then did not have load shedding. A new framework involving Regulator, State Utility Company, Government, Industry, NGOs and consumers was evolved. Details are not important here, but after three years of stubborn struggle, the city of Pune became load shedding free on 6 June, 2006 and has stayed so since then. It was almost a miracle and it was done not by dependence on the State but by a citizen-industry movement. We have to go beyond analysing problems and offering advice… we need to be a part of the solution. The e-mails and calls I still get from unknown faces and names, thanking me for resolving a daily pain in their lives, are the best reward I can ever aspire for. For me, it was also reiteration of the belief that it is possible for each one of us to bring positive change with commitment and persistence.