An inspiring Speech By Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting
"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
Bengal
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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]