[dylug] Vision and Success ?

hi , 
came across something intresting . worth reading. 
 
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Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer,
MindTree Consulting to the Class of 2006 at the Indian
Institute of Management, Bangalore on defining
success. July 2nd 2004 

 
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 can imagine. 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’ – 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 enamored 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 flew back to attend to
him – he remained for a few days in critical stage,
bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung Hospital is
a cockroach 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
attending 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. 

		
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