"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 canimagine. 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 'his jeep' but the government's 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  Father's  office.  As small children, we were taught not to call him by
his  name. We had to use the suffix 'dada' 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, 'Raju Uncle' â€" very
different  from  many of their friends who refer to their family drivers as
'my  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 Mother's 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 Statesman's 'muffosil' edition -
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 enamoured 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  father's  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  University's  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 mother's 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 life's 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  life's 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 flewback to
attend to him - he remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from
neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is a cockroac 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 tending
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  a  ill-paid,  unrecognized
government servant's 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."

Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting

http://www.mindtree.com/subrotobagchi

Cheers ....

Suresh[Microsoft MVP .Net,India]