Below is the transcript of a speech delivered by
Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree
Consulting to the Class of 2006 at the Indian
Institute of Management, Bangalore on "Defining
Success". Hope you enjoy reading this as much as I
did
- truly inspiring.
Defining Success
Subroto Bagchi
"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 iswhat 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 Kisan" 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, in-human 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.
Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and
Godspeed.
Go, kiss the world.
