Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters (5 page)

Capt. Gopinath is a man of remarkable humility, a man who does not hesitate to say sorry if he has goofed up or inconvenienced anyone. There are few men of his stature and achievements who would even think of apologizing for keeping somebody waiting. He kept up a steady update via text messages, telling me about his whereabouts and expected time of arrival. It is not difficult to imagine where the airline that he started, got its work and service ethic from!

Despite the fact that he set up an airline business whose market capital touched US$1.1 billion in just four years of its launch, Capt. Gopinath is a remarkably grounded man, very much connected to the way the masses in India live. As I listened aptly, fascinated by the story of the humble village school teacher’s son from Karnataka who joined the army, reinvented himself as farmer, and then a serial entrepreneur, we gorged on a plateful of samosas and a sumptuous Indian spread of fiery, spirited Indian curries. Capt. is as feisty and spirited as the Indian curries that he has a fondness for.

Capt. is also a self-made man with a piercing intelligence, greatly interested in the lives of those who touch him. He is also startlingly well-read. To be in his company is to be exposed to the thoughts and quotes of some of the world’s greatest minds. He reads voraciously, a habit whose seeds were sown in his childhood when his father home-schooled him and read to him about the lives of great leaders.

When I met him that evening, he was in the midst of hectic negotiations to restart Air Deccan, the airline that he had sold to another private airline. That deal had disappointed him because he felt the buyer had not done justice to his brand and kept up the spirit of the enterprise that he has started.

I asked him if it did not scare him to take on such a humungous responsibility when, in fact, he had burnt his hands a couple of time in business, wiping away a bulk of the wealth he had created.

This is what he had to say to me: ‘For dreaming, he (Capt.’s father) read to me about Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Tilak, and he showed me the less fortunate people around me so that I always counted my blessings. He never gave me the opportunity to be envious of those more privileged. It was because of this that when I found myself living hand-to-mouth in a tent, I never felt poor. I had the arrogance of the wealth of nature around me. I never felt poor because I was so drunk with the possibilities of my life and never noticed what I did not have in my life.’

The village schoolmaster would have been proud of his son, if he had been around to see what he has made out of his life. Among other things, the Founder, Chairman, and Managing Director of Deccan 360, has been knighted with ‘Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur’, the highest civilian award conferred by the French government.

To me, it is very fitting that a man who attributes his entire being to what his father taught him as a child, should write this charming, very candid letter to his two daughters.

Dear Krithika, Pallavi,

None of the stuff that I write in this letter will be new to you or surprise you because this is the stuff that I have always based my life on. You have grown up with me, have gone through the ups and downs of my life, and have seen that at every stage, I have done whatever it is on hand at that point with complete sincerity. We have had great wealth and enjoyed a life of plenty and we have also lived a spartan life in our farm when I decided to become a farmer and grow coconuts, areca nuts, and silkworms. And I know that every time I decided to do something new, your lives were disturbed by it, but you did it willingly and have enjoyed every step of the adventure and learnt along the way.

My dear daughters, as two young, talented women, I want you to know that the most important thing is for you to be intensely passionate about everything that you do. Don’t be like a passenger on a train but be its driver. Be completely committed to pursuing your dreams but at the same time, let that not be an exercise in self-indulgence. Understand that everything that you have today is the product of your ancestors’ labour. The comfortable life that you are able to lead has been made possible by their hard work and perseverance. So, while you are passionate about your own interests, let it be in consonance with the society. While it furthers your own fulfilment, it should also further the society’s well-being.

I believe that passion and work are inseparable; they can’t exist in isolation from each other. From knowing to doing is a journey in itself and if you lack the latter, any amount of talent is worth nothing. Make your life a journey of adventure. But if you are too much a person of society, you can’t create since to be able to create, you need reflection and isolation. On the other hand, if you are completely isolated, you become a sponge on society, living off it instead of giving back to it. So you must know how to strive a perfect balance between the two.

Dear children, my father used to say that everything is rooted in action and that it is always better to lose yourself in action than in despair. The action in your life itself will then be the reward. The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson once famously said: ‘I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel’s sake. The great affair is to move.’ My children, every moment, everything that you do—small, big, significant—must be enjoyed. Happiness and wealth is a consequence of your actions, your ventures.

You should never be idle. Whatever you want to be in life, even if it were to become a cobbler, be the best one. Be obsessed with whatever it is that you want to do.

Nobody owes you a free lunch. Inculcate an entrepreneurial spirit and learn to stand on your own feet. In a marriage today, you are more likely to survive if you have your own passions, hobbies and interests. Mutually respect each other. Keep yourself both interested and interesting. Find salvation in your work. We all have to work for a living, but regardless of what else you do, engage in physical labour every day. When I left the army, I soiled my hands every day in my farm, did hard physical work, milked cows, and mixed manure. Though over a period of time I took a divorce from that lifestyle, I know that the bricklayer, the welder, the mason, the waiter—these are the true sons of the soil.

It is important to find good, meaningful work because it is integral to our happiness. Regardless of love, family, friendship, and other things in life, you will never be happy if you don’t have work. Make sure that the work must be one that enlarges the well-being of the community around you. Remember that your love for work should not be in conflict with the love for the community in which you have been raised.

When you both were in college, I gave you the freedom to choose the subjects of your choice. I’m sure you remember what I had told you then: ‘While you are free to discover your passions, I won’t appreciate idleness of the mind and body.’

Dear Pallavi, you went to the UK to do your masters in literature and while you were there, you were true to your word, working as a waitress in a restaurant to supplement the limited money I gave you. And you continued to do so for three years before leaving for Birmingham for a Masters in Media degree. Do you remember the day we were dining with the Chief Commercial Officer of Airbus, John Leahy and he offered you a one year global internship? You were confused and taken aback because your thesis was yet to be finished. I vividly remember telling you how it’s not important to have a degree but get the maximum experiences you can in your lifetime. And so you went and lived in France for a year, learning about another culture, another way of life. That internship enchanted you enough to make you want to do an MBA in Aerospace management. When I asked you to come back to India at that point, it was because I was starting my company, Deccan Air Cargo and Express Logistics, and I knew it would be a great way for you to learn about doing business in India—you saw the challenges, the joys and the frustrations of trying to float a start-up enterprise in this country.

Despite having studied abroad and having been exposed to the best education models, I am convinced that life has been the biggest teacher for you. You were both born on our farm at a time when your mother and I were extremely young and just learning to handle the responsibility of two girls. You would accompany me on my bullock cart to the farm and into the village, learning to enjoy the greenery and fresh air, prancing around without shoes, and attending the village school. At one point we even lived in a tent, out in the open.Later, when you were both still around 10 years of age, we shifted to Bangalore and you lived the urban experience.

My life itself has been my biggest adventure and you have had a ring-side view of it. After I resigned from the army, unable to cope with the ravages of war and its effect on my mind, I motorcycled through the length and breadth of the country and hitchhiked in the US. At 27, there was a kind of restlessness within me that I was unable to quell. I had led a full life, lived in the Himalayas for two years, experienced a war, and was longing to go back to my village. When I got there, I found the government had built a dam across the river and so my father’s small plot of land had been submerged by the waters. The compensatory land they had given my father was remote, about a hundred kilometres away. It had no water, no power, nor an approach road. But I did not find any of this intimidating. For me it was more romantic than anything else. I wanted to work with my hands on the soil, be alone, take long walks, read, raise cows, and grow crops. I was like a man possessed. Bitten by the farming bug, I went to Bangalore, bought a tent, a Doberman dog, enlisted the support of a village harijan boy to herd cattle, and went to the barren land to pitch my tent on my piece of land in the middle of nowhere. For two years I lived and breathed only that.

That has been the mantra of my life, dreaming and deciding the course that my life would take. That is how I joined the army, and subsequently Air Deccan airlines was born, and that is how I went back to farming. That is also how I founded the air cargo business a few years ago and I am now on course to restart Air Deccan.

Dear daughters, there is no recipe for success in life. Every day I get letters in the mail from people who want to know how I became successful. I just tell them to live their dream, whatever it may be, with passion and hunger. Have an inextinguishable optimism about yourself and things will fall in place. I never believed in failure and so I kept acquiring more businesses without fearing risk. In each of my ventures, that optimism propelled me and when things went wrong, I continued nevertheless, knowing I would survive. Things would ultimately reach back to near-normal. Hope always kept me afloat and alive and I always found a straw that I could grasp to survive.

It is the law of nature that at the height of our success the seed of decline is sown because suddenly you don’t want to take risks and lose what you have painstakingly built up. I believe each of us has to go through the cycle of success and failure.Your will is what will take you through life’s vagaries.

My father never sent me to school in childhood. The first time I went to school was in the fifth standard and I was never the worse for it because he taught me at home. Instead, he would take me to the fields and would show me the harijan way of labour. My father himself was a poor school teacher but he was better off than the harijans. He brought up seven to eight village children in the house who he would feed out of his small salary of Rs 90 per month. He never told me to emulate or aspire to be the village sahukar or the rich baniya, but he would show me the strength of character of the hard working peasant in the farm. He would point to the labour working in the slush in the fields and he would say: ‘They have nature’s bounty, free food, the blessing of being in the midst of nature’. He would read to me about the lives of Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Tilak, and he showed me the less fortunate people around me so that I always counted my blessings.He never gave me the opportunity to be envious of those more privileged. It was because of this that when I found myself living hand-to-mouth in a tent, I never felt poor. I had the arrogance of the wealth of nature around me. I never felt poor because I was drunk with the possibilities of my life and never noticed what I did not have.

As you set forth in life, I want to tell you that self-assurance and self-reliance are the most important things, especially for a woman. Believe in yourself and in the ability to stand up for what you feel is right. Don’t be apologetic for standing up for the values you believe in. Don’t follow the herd mentality; instead, visualize clearly what you want and ever so often, the light will shine through to you and make it clear to you what is the right thing you should be doing. Don’t conform to the norm just because everybody is doing or saying the same thing. A firm resolve to follow your heart’s unshakeable belief is an essential tool for a good life. You have only look at Sita, Rani Laxmibai, Chennama, Florence Nightingale—all those who had an overreaching allegiance to their own belief that ultimately led them on their paths.