Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters (2 page)

With my deepest love,
Your daughter,
Kiran

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
CMD, Biocon Ltd
Bangalore, 2013

Ajay Piramal

jay Piramal is a man of many interests. An animal lover, wildlife photographer, and a whimsical writer, Piramal is also the man who almost single-handedly charted one of corporate India’s most lucrative deals when he sold Piramal Healthcare’s domestic formulations business to the US-based Abbott Labs for a stunning US$ 3.7 billion in 2010, catapulting him into the league of the country’s top 50 billionaires.

It is easy to get intimidated by his reputation and by the stillness of his top floor office at Piramal Towers in central Mumbai, where priceless art and verses from ancient scriptures, engraved in granite, compete for space.

The man himself is disarmingly humble and down-toearth. Though he initially had to be persuaded to speak about his life, once he got talking, there was no stopping him. His tales were so enthralling that I went back not once but three times, to know the real person behind the veneer of his public persona.

At the age of 29, Piramal found himself at the crossroads of life, shouldering the responsibility of managing a flagging textiles business while ensuring the well-being of his own family and that of his brother who tragically passed away after suffering from cancer, leaving behind a young widow and two little children.

Many in the industry predicted that the business would not survive owing to his lack of experience, but the relatively ‘inexperienced’ Piramal took the challenge head-on and the last few decades, has seen it grow into a formidable US$ 2 billion conglomerate with presence in manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, real estate, finance, and telecom.

The astute businessman lives his life and manages his business drawing inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita. He quotes extensively from it, which is not surprising considering the fact that every weekend, he and his wife attend a class on the teachings of the dharmic scriptures conducted by his guru.

A great believer in the power of sharing one’s privileges, his philanthropic enterprise, The Ajay G. Piramal Foundation runs multiple programmes for the rural poor in his home state of Rajasthan. He is also the Chairman of Pratham India, India’s largest non-governmental organization in the education sector, reaching out to over 33 million children through its ‘Read India’ campaign.

Piramal finds great inspiration in Rabindranath Tagore’s words:

Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
But to be fearless in facing them.

Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain,
But for the heart to conquer it.

Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield,
But to my own strength.

Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
But hope for the patience to win my freedom.

Grant me that I may not be a coward,
Feeling your mercy in my success alone.

But let me find the grasp of your hand
In my failure.

Piramal’s letter to his daughter Nandini, an executive director at the group’s flagship company, Piramal Healthcare, gives a fascinating insight into his own journey to finding unbelievable success and mental bliss.

Dear Nandini,

A long time ago, when I was a young man of 24, my father, whom I was very close to, passed away unexpectedly, leaving the family without its anchor. He was the head of our family in every sense of the way. We depended on him for guidance and emotional sustenance and his death left us rudderless and the family business, without a leader. Somehow, we recouped with the help of your uncle, my brother Ashok, who became the new father figure in our lives and took over the family business. It was a difficult time. Soon after dad’s demise, the family itself went through a difficult division of assets and I chose to remain with Ashok in the textile business which constituted 90 percent of our business interests while my other brother decided to move away.

On January 1, 1982, just days after the division, our business was hit by a trade union strike. This was the infamous Datta Samant textile strike that paralyzed Mumbai’s thriving textile industry and our business went into limbo for the eighteen months that the strike lasted. Our valuations took a severe drubbing and while we were still coming to grips with the losses, my beloved brother, who was just 35 years of age at the time, was diagnosed with cancer. He suffered from the disease for over a year before passing away in 1984. I was 29-years-old then.

Suddenly, at 29, I found myself all alone, faced with the prospect of shouldering the responsibility of not just running the family business which was in shambles but also of being in charge of two families—mine and my brother’s. He had left behind a young wife and three children, the youngest of who was merely 3-years-old. Life seemed like a huge burden, an impossible task, and there were a lot of people who wondered how I could handle all this since I was an inexperienced young man. They thought the business would fold up without a leader, in no time.

But it was my faith and the spiritual teachings of my father that carried me through this difficult phase. He had a great belief in God and in a superior force above, which he believed, watches us at all times. So even though the world thought I was inexperienced, I knew that both my father and my brother had complete faith and confidence in me and that helped instilling a self-belief.

Your mother, Swati, too was no different. She always gave me the support and strength to face challenges and had the ability to look at the brighter side of things, even in the most difficult of circumstances.

How else can you explain the fact that just a couple of months before my brother passed away, we acquired Gujarat Glass, a move into a completely uncharted territory for us? My brother and Swati encouraged me to follow up that acquisition even when he was seriously ill because they believed that it was important to diversify our business so we would not be vulnerable to factors over which we had no control. And so, even though we were steeped in debt at that point, we made the acquisition in order to de-risk ourselves. Twenty years later, our textile business constituted less than 5 percent of our total business. We had succeeded in completely changing the complexion of the group.

We made that acquisition in June and my brother passed away in August, leaving me with a crucial life lesson: Life has to go on, no matter how big the loss or how deep the suffering from life’s unexpected surprises are.

Looking back now, I can see how lucky I was to have people in my life who had enough faith in me to let me make mistakes and grow from them. None of us can learn without making a few mistakes of our own.

I also learnt that what we look upon as really hopeless, bad times, are merely temporary phases which will also pass and life will be smooth again. I learnt courage from my brother who valiantly fought cancer, never giving up once or complaining about his lot in life. Never once did he say: ‘Why me?’ I learnt from him to always be optimistic. He also taught me that the difficult phases in life are moments in passing and that a situation that you think you will not be able to survive will not seem so bad when you look back at it. We as humans have the power to overcome our circumstances, all we need, is the courage to take firm decisions and stick to them.

That phase of my life also taught me other crucial life lessons which I have strived to follow over the years. I realized the importance of prioritizing things. I decided that my family came first, our health second, and work third. I learnt to love unconditionally and selflessly, without expecting anything in return. For me, the love that a mother has for her child is the purest form of love. Sadly, most of the times as parents, we go on to expect our children to give back to us in some form for the love we showered on them in their childhood. Love given in expectance of something in return is a transaction. You are a mother of a little daughter now and remember this as you raise her, Nandini.

Much as it may sound like a discourse, Nandini, there is great inner peace and joy to be gained from sacrificing for our loved ones. Both you and your husband have careers and aspirations of your own, which I am happy about. But let me caution you that if a marriage has to succeed, you will have to sacrifice more than your husband. And now that you are the mother of a child, you have a greater responsibility to shoulder and must have to sacrifice a little bit more than your husband. Believe me, giving is infinitely more satisfying than taking.

Dear Nandini, I want to remind you of your growing up years and of the support you found in your family in fulfilling all your dreams. When you expressed your desire to go abroad to pursue your undergraduate studies, we gladly sent you off because we believed in you. It was not an easy thing to do for us, though. Fifteen years ago, it was a big thing for a traditional Marwari girl to go out of the country to study, but we respected your need to do it. And when you returned after honing your skills at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, you got a place in the family business earned from your own merit.

You moved in to steer a significant portion of it. I must say you are doing a sterling job out of it. I believe in letting you learn from your own mistakes just as my father allowed me to do and I am hoping you will let your child explore this world on her own too.

But I want to tell you that while work has to be an important aspect of your life, what is also important is for you to strive to make a difference in the lives of the people around you with the work that you do. I cannot emphasize the virtue of giving back to the society which made you who you are.

Nandini, life will have its ups and downs. Suffering is a part of life, but how you face those adversities is what will set you apart from the rest. Strive to tackle your challenges, the hurdles in your life, with equanimity. It is this ability that will shape the person you become and determine the course that your life takes.

Believe in God because that is what will keep you on the straight path. No matter what your situation in life is, ultimately you have to believe in a higher power who will sort things out for you in times of need. What helped me during the worst phases of my life was my very strong belief that whatever happens, happens for a reason. I really do believe that and surrender myself in the hands of God during such times. I truly believe that this also makes a person stronger and fearless.

I know that you’re too young to understand most of this, but I am sure that faith and spirituality will come to you as the years pass by and you have seen life the way I have. Faith takes time, but I am confident it will grow as you mature.

But even if you don’t have as much faith right now, I am glad to see what a high level of integrity and morals you subscribe to, sometimes more than I have been able to adopt myself. You see life in black and white while I am able to see the shades of grey that life’s countless situations bring.

I am glad you are inherently a good human being, someone who will not intentionally harm anyone and someone who will not do something if she is not convinced whether it is the right thing to do.

As you go along the journey of life, I can’t underline enough for you the value of nurturing compassion as a virtue. Have compassion towards the people around you and don’t judge them at face value—there are so many reasons behind why people behave the way they do or become who they are. Who are we to judge them?

I believe, too, that each of us has to have the courage to do what we think is right at each stage of our life.

I have always believed in the power of gratitude. Dear Nandini, I want you to be grateful for everything God has given you. A grateful person is a happy person. I am grateful for what my God, my family, my children, and my friends do for me. I have experienced the peace that comes from being grateful. Gratitude also makes us humble. Nandini, you have a lot of things—great wealth, great education—so you have every reason not to be humble. It is important to remember, then, to be grateful and humble and also to remember that there is a reason why you were born in this family. You could be one of the hundred thousand others in this city. Be grateful for the parents you have, your husband, your little child, for your family, and your friends. Gratitude and humility are virtues mentioned even in our scriptures which say that to be a true devotee, you have to be humble.