Author: rahul

Speech on Late sitting – Narayana Murthy
Good article to read at least once.

Infosys Chairman – Mr.Narayana Murthy’s Speech on Late sitting :

I know people who work 12 hours a day, six days a week, or more. Some
people do so because of a work emergency where the long hours are only
temporary. Other people I know have put in these hours for years. I don’t
know if they are working all these hours, but I do know they are in the
office this long. Others put in long office hours because they are addicted
to the workplace. Whatever the reason for putting in overtime, working long
hours over the long term is harmful to the person and to the organization.

There are things managers can do to change this for everyone’s benefit.
Being in the office long hours, over long periods of time, makes way for
potential errors. My colleagues who are in the office long hours frequently
make mistakes caused by fatigue. Correcting these mistakes requires their
time as well as the time and energy of others. I have seen people work
Tuesday through Friday to correct mistakes made after 5 PM on
Monday.

Another problem is that people who are in the office for long hours are not
pleasant company. They often complain about other people (who aren’t
working as hard); they are irritable, or cranky, or even angry. Other
people avoid them. Such behaviour poses problems, where work goes much
better when people work together instead of avoiding one another.

As Managers, there are things we can do to help people leave the office.
First and foremost is to set the example and go home ourselves. I work with
a manager who chides people for working long hours. His words quickly lose
their meaning when he sends these chiding group e-mails with a time-stamp
of 2 AM, Sunday.

Second is to encourage people to put some balance in their lives. For
instance, here is a guideline I find helpful:

1) Wake up, eat a good breakfast, and go to work.

2) Work hard and smart for eight or nine hours.

3) Go home.

4) Read the comics, watch a funny movie, dig the dirt, play with your kids
etc..

5) Eat well and sleep well.

This is called recreating. Doing steps 1, 3, 4, and 5 enable step 2.
Working regular hours and recreating daily are simple concepts. They are
hard for some of us because that requires personal change. They are
possible since we all have the power to choose to do them.

In considering the issue of overtime, I am reminded of my eldest son. When
he was a toddler, If people were visiting the apartment, he would not fall
asleep no matter how long the visit, and no matter what time of day it
was.!
He would fight off sleep until the visitors left. It was as if he was
afraid that he would miss something. Once our visitors’ left, he would go
to sleep.

By this time, howeve r, he was over tired and would scream through half the
night with nightmares. He, my wife, and I, all paid the price for his fear
of missing out. Perhaps some people put in such long hours because they
don’t want to miss anything when they leave the office.

The trouble with this is that events will never stop happening. That is
life
! Things happen 24 hours a day.

Allowing for little rest is not ultimately practical. So, take a nap.
Things will happen while you’re asleep, but you will have the energy to
catch up when you wake.

Hence “LOVE YOUR JOB BUT NEVER FALL IN LOVE WITH YOUR COMPANY”

– Narayana Murthy

On Embracing a Religion called ‘Positivism’

=====================================================================
Prof R A Mashelkar, Director General, Council of Scientific and
Industrial Research (CSIR), New Delhi delivered the Convocation Address
at University of Delhi on 22nd February 2003. He said “Take our
space programme. The R&D budget of this programme was US $ 450 million
last year. The R&D budget for General Motors was around seven
billion dollars. What is it that our space programme has achieved?
Today, we design, develop, test and fabricate our own launches. We
have moved from one sophisticated launching vehicle to another.
We have moved from ASLV to PSLV to GSLV. We have done it without
any help from anyone, since, for love or for money, no one will
give us the technology in these strategic sectors. We have
launched 35 satellites so far, of which 17 are Indian launches, 23
are in orbit, 14 are geostationary. Not only do we launch our own
satellites today, but that of our foreign customers too and that
includes Germany and Korea. And all this is done for a budget that
is just 7% of a single company in the USA! Should we not be proud
of this feat?”. Excerpts.
=====================================================================

I am going to speak to you about the importance of the only ‘ism’
that I have believed in my life, and that is ‘positivism’.

As I stand before you, my mind goes back to a morning in this very
campus a few years ago. I was invited to be the chief guest in a
function that was held in this university. I recollect that there was
some turbulence in the university on account of some issues. Such
things, of course, do happen in universities from time to time.
However, the mood that morning appeared to be unusually gloomy. One
distinguished individual introduced me to the audience. He ended his
introduction by saying ‘ – and as we know, we are all in a coma, and
Dr. Mashelkar is going to tell us what to do’. I was quite stunned by
these remarks. As I walked to the microphone, I wondered as to how
could one address an assembly of people, who feel that they are all in
a state of ‘coma’.

I began my speech by thanking the speaker. I then said ‘perhaps I
heard it wrong’. Perhaps what the Professor meant was not that ‘we are
in coma’ but that ‘we are at a coma’. Then I said ‘being at a coma is
not a bad news. We introduce a coma, when we have written a part of
the sentence, but not completed the sentence. We can take a pause at
the coma, look back on what we have written and write the rest of the
sentence’.

I went on to say ‘having come midway, it is up to us to decide the
direction in which we want to go. It is up to us to design the future
in the way we want. Indeed, it is up to us to write the remaining
part of the sentence in the way we want. And who knows, the way we
complete the sentence will set the mood and tone for the next
sentence, and yet another. Several such inspiring sentences will form
a para. Putting several such paras, a chapter will be completed. And
who knows, it could be a golden chapter after all’. I still remember
the applause that followed when I finished. I could see the change of
mood from despair to one of hope. Many people told me that the whole
conference went on with an unusual upbeat mood.

Why do I narrate this story?It has nothing to do with this
university. It has to do with a nationwide phenomenon of self-doubt.
Indeed, one sees a great deal of cynicism, negativism and pessimism
around us. A feeling of diffidence and gloom, a feeling of
desperation is engulfing us. When we see a glass that is half full,
we are beginning to endlessly discuss the half empty part of it.
When there is darkness, we are endlessly discussing the curse of the
darkness. We are not going out in search of a candle to light the room
and remove the darkness. I strongly believe, my young friends, that we
must bring a new hope, a new sunshine to our great nation embracing a
new religion of ‘positivism’.

I want to emphasize today, perhaps by being overly anecdotal, that
amidst bad news, which is inevitable in any nation of our size and
history, there is a plenty of good news around. Why do I say this?

I, for one, believe that Indian gains in the post-independent India
are sizeable. We have functioned as a nation in spite of the
cultural, social, political, economic and religious diversities and
integration of states. We have a vibrant democracy, an independent
judiciary, and a diversified and widespread industry. We manufacture
everything, from pins to missiles. IT has shown the way as India’s
Tomorrow. But the future of India is not in IT as in ‘Information
Technology’. It is in IT as in ‘Indian Talent’. This talent is in
demand all over the world. Products of our higher educations systems,
be they IITs or IIMs, lead the world. We have lacked economic or
military clout, yet we have contributed significantly to the
establishment of an equitable world order. There is much that we can
be proud of.

Sometimes, we do not even realize the value of what we have
achieved. Let us first see India’s unity in diversity. We have 18
major languages, 1600 minor languages and dialects, 6400 castes and
sub-castes, 52 major tribes, 6 main ethnic groups and 28 states and
yet we have remained one country! We are the largest functioning
democracy in the world. We had 619 million voters in 1999 national
elections, making India’s election the largest in the world. And they
were fair elections too. How many countries can boast of such a feat?

Look at our constitution; it enshrines the fundamental rights of
citizens in sovereign India irrespective of caste, creed and religion
of its people. Look at our free press. We have over 5000 dailies,
16,000 weeklies, and more than 6,000 fortnightlies in all Indian
languages. How many countries can boast of a freedom of thought,
freedom of expression and freedom of action in the way we have in
India?

We tend to give up on India very easily. For example, we say India
is too large and therefore unmanageable and chaotic. But we can
create a beautiful order in this chaos, whenever we want. Look at the
Kumbh Mela held last year in Allahabad. At a point in time, there were
2 crore people, who congregated in that city on a single day. The way
it was managed was an example for the rest of the world. We are not
afraid of managing large systems. Look at our Indian railways. It has
trains which cover 1,00,000 km. with 7000 stations, and with 11,000
freight and passenger trains plying around this vast country every
day. They carry over a million passengers a day. We have the largest
railway in the world – an unparalleled engine that facilitates unity
in diversity by moving India around the clock, day after day, and
throughout the year. We take these systems for granted, but just see
how difficult it is to run these systems in a nation, which is one
sixth of the humanity. You think of the value of such an achievement
and then your heart will swell with pride.

India has the reputation of being a thinking nation for a
millennia. Indian minds are great minds. But what about our mindsets?
That is a matter of concern. Our mindsets are not positive. We are
perennially in a state of self-doubt. We continuously ask ourselves,
have we performed? Are we good enough? Let me take only one example
of our Indian Science and Technology (S&T). We keep on asking as to
whether Indian S&T has delivered. We do not realize that India has
achieved so much for so little. Our overall S&T budget last year was
less than 3 billion US dollars. Do you know that Pfizer’s R&D budget
was over 5 billion dollars last year? For a national budget that was
smaller than the budget of a single company, India has achieved so
much.

Take our space programme. The R&D budget of this programme was US
$ 450 million last year. The R&D budget for General Motors was around
7 billion dollars. What is it that our space programme has achieved?
Today, we design, develop, test and fabricate our own launches. We
have moved from one sophisticated launching vehicle to another. We
have moved from ASLV to PSLV to GSLV. We have done it without any help
from anyone, since for love or for money, no one will give us the
technology in these strategic sectors. We have launched 35 satellites
so far, of which 17 are Indian launches, 23 are in orbit, 14 are
geo-stationary. Not only do we launch our own satellites today but
that of our foreign customers too and that includes Germany and Korea.
And all this is done for a budget that is just 7% of a single company
in USA! Should we not be proud of this feat?

But it is not only the ability to launch our satellites that I am
proud of. It is in our ability to be counted as the best that I take
particular pride in. I remember being a part of a Committee that
reviewed CSIR of South Africa in 1997. I remember going to their
satellite tracking center outside Pretoria. I asked them ‘tell me,
which is the best satellite image that you get? They took me to a
corner and showed to me the imagery, which they claimed had the finest
resolution. Then I discovered that those pictures were taken from the
satellite IRS – 1C. My friends, I am proud to say that I in IRS – 1C
stood for India. Should we not be proud that a developing nation such
as India was producing the finest satellite imagery in the world?
Should we not be proud when Tina Cory, the Director of Application and
Training of Eosat, which is a US based satellite imagery marketing
firm recently said ‘IRS series of remote sensing satellites is a
‘jewel in the crown’. Should we not be proud, when those who know the
market, say that our IRS may actually achieve 30 percent of the global
market?

Let me move beyond science and technology and again come back to
the theme that India does so much for so little. Only 50% of our
children go to school, only 30% of them go up to 10th standard, and
only 40% of them pass. That makes it 6% – as against, say Korea for
which the corresponding figure is about 70%. So, with 6%, we are
talking about a tip of the iceberg. But what does that tip of the
iceberg deliver? Last year, we exported 9.7 billion dollars worth of
software. Do you know how many contributed to this export? Only
50,000 software engineers. That is 0.05% of our population, and it
contributed to almost 10% of our exports. The positive way of looking
at it is that if the tip of the iceberg can deliver so much, can you
imagine, what would happen, if the entire iceberg was lifted?

But once again those self-doubts and defeatism hold us back. Sheer
statistics stares us in the face. Various estimates indicate that in
the primary school age group almost 80 million children are either not
enrolled in schools or are in schools but are not learning. This
constitutes 50% of our potentially school going children. Should we
give up? Or can we solve this problem? Pratham, a very innovative
India education initiative launched by the corporate world, believes
that this problem can be solved in a minimum time frame and that too
by spending Rs 100 to educate one child per year. Since its beginning
in the slums of Mumbai, Pratham movement has responded to this
challenge by serving over a million primary school children across the
country. They have launched the ‘Read India’ movement that is striving
to get all our children to read and comprehend in a couple of months.
If this movement, which has already covered 26 centres across 9 states
in India, can spread to the entire nation, what a miracle can happen?
Can we not transform India by using such innovative initiatives, which
will cost so little? Yes, we can, but only if we feel positive about
the prospects of achieving this gigantic task.

We can now go through a further bout of self-doubt. One can say,
we can deal with 80 million young children. But what about 200 million
adults that cannot read and write. We reinforce our doubts by saying
that illiteracy today is reducing only at the rate of 1.5% per annum.
We can then point to the constraints of trained teachers, and the use
of conventional methods of learning from alphabets to words, which
requires 200 hours of instruction. We then come to the conclusion that
we will need 20 years to attain a literacy level of 95%. By this time,
other nations would have moved ahead. We, therefore, convince
ourselves that nothing can be done.

But then there are some, who are born optimists. That includes,
the great doyen of Indian IT industry, F.C Kohli. He has developed a
Computer-based Functional Literacy (CBFL) method. It focuses on the
reading ability. It is based on the theories of cognition, language
and communication. In this method, the scripted graphic patterns,
icons and images are recognized through a combination of auditory and
visual experiences by using computers. The method emphasizes on
learning words rather than alphabets. While the method focuses on
reading, it acts as a trigger for people to learn to write on their
own.

Based on this method, Kohli’s team has developed innovative
methodologies using IT and computers to build reading capability.
This experiment was first conducted in Medak village near Hyderabad.
Without a trained teacher, the women started reading the newspaper in
Telugu in 8 to 10 weeks. Thereafter, Kohli’s team carried out more
experiments at 80 centres, and with over 1000 adult participants. The
results were spectacular.

Kohli is an engineer. He is pragmatic. He believes in action, in
deliverables. His team developed these lessons to run on Intel 486s
and earlier versions of Pentium PCs modified to display multimedia.
There are around 200 million of such PCs in the world that are
obsolete. They have been discarded. By using these PCs, the cost of
making one person literate would be less than Rs.100. With CBFL,
Kohli says he can increase literacy to 90 to 95% within 3 to 5 years,
instead of 20 years. Should we not believe Kohli? Should we not give
a chance to his team? Should we not remove the darkness of our
illiteracy by lighting such innovative candles? Yes, we can. Provided
we think positively. Provided, we believe it can be done.

Again, those with persistent self-doubts will say that all this a
dream. It is going to take time. What do we do with the submerged part
of the iceberg that is not visible today. It is amazing to discover
as to how that part of the human capital that resides in this
submerged part is also so resilient, so valuable and so innovative.

Let me give you a startling example. What do global giants like
General Electric and Motorola have in common with a humble tiffin
delivery network comprising 3500 dabbawallas, who deliver 1.5 lakh
lunch boxes to citizens in Mumbai each day? The dabbawallas have the
six sigma rating or an efficiency rating of 99.999999, which means one
error in one million transactions. This rating has been given to them
by Forbes Global, the famous American business weekly. Now, these are
largely illiterate dabbawallas. Their secret lies in a coding system
devised over the years. Each dabba is marked in an indelible ink with
an alphanumeric code of about 10 characters. In terms of price and
the reliability of delivery, say compared to a Federal Express System,
dabbawallas remain unbeatable. Their business models have become a
class room study in some management institutes. By giving this one
example, all that I am trying to convey is that the innovative
potential of the people does not plummet to zero, when the people are
illiterate or semi-literate. They necessarily have to innovate to
survive and to succeed. There is a plenty of cheer there too. We must
be prepared to discover it and salute it.

Let me drive this point further. National Innovation Foundation
(NIF) was set up three years ago under my Chairmanship to acknowledge
the genius of that submerged part of the iceberg. Essentially, we
were looking at the innovations done by grass root innovators, be they
farmers, slum dwellers, artisans, school dropouts and so on. We set
up a national innovation competition two years ago. To begin with, in
the first year, there were less than one thousand entries, which
increased to sixteen thousand in the second year! Our President Dr.
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam gave away the prizes for the winners. Many of them
were illiterate or semi-literates. The winners during the last year
included an eighth standard dropout, who developed a complex robot.
The winners included a farmer, who developed a cardamom variety, which
today has over 80% share of the market in Kerala. The winners
included again an illiterate individual, who had developed a disease
resistant pigeon pea variety, which became a big winner. My friends,
these disadvantaged individuals had shown to us as to what they can do
by working in laboratories of life by using their powers of
observation, analysis and synthesis. It is time that we sing a song
for these heroes and salute this part of India, which is as vast as it
is innovative.

What we really require is a self-confidence. It is rather
ironical that when we are losing faith in ourselves, the rest of the
world is looking to us for inspiration. As a member of Indo-German
Consultative Committee, I remember a presentation by a senior German
member on demography in Bonn. He expressed a concern that one third
of Germany in the next 10 to 15 years will be more than 60 years old.
There was a question from the audience. Germany and Japan became
economic powerhouses because they excelled in technological
innovations. But then innovation is the domain of the young. How
could a predominantly old Germany survive when it becomes old? The
reply came quickly. It was asserted that in the twenty first century
Germany will start looking at a young nation, which will continue to
remain young, and therefore, innovative. That nation, the speaker
asserted, was none other than India. And this is already happening.

One hundred major companies from USA, Europe and Japan have set up
their research, design and development laboratories in India in the
last five years. Intel’s design of superchip to GE’s design of
aircraft engines gets done in India today. As legendary Jack Welch,
the CEO of General Electric (GE) said during the inauguration of GE’s
1000 Ph.D. R&D Centre in Bangalore ‘India is a developing country but
it is a developed country as far as its intellectual capital is
concerned. We get the best intellectual capital here – thanks to the
amazing quality of Indian mind’. It is amusing, at least to me, that
the confidence in the supremacy of Indian minds that the others have,
we do not seem to have ourselves.

We are a peculiar nation. There is nothing that we cannot do if
we want to. Let me give you some examples. We all get concerned about
the dirt and the filth that we see all around us. But we also
demonstrate that, if we want, we can be as clean and as beautiful as
the rest of the world. When S.R. Rao entered Surat, it was a city that
had acquired the dubious distinction of being one of the dirtiest city
in the world, thanks to the episode of plague. With
self-determination, the city became one of the most beautiful cities
in India within no time. In 19 months, the morbidity rate in Surat
came down by 75% and the doctors had a fall in business by 66%!

We are, again, a peculiar country. When we are challenged, we are
denied a technology, we perform. Let us remind ourselves about how
India reacted to the denial of the supercomputers in the late
eighties. Cray XMP-1205 was something that we needed for weather
forecasting. It was not available for a variety of reasons – one need
not go into the details. But Indian scientists were challenged. They
met the challenge by using massively parallel processing computing
technology to create a supercomputer. In less than three years that
C-DAC was given, and within less than $ 10 million that C-DAC was
given, the PARAM supercomputer was delivered. I remember reading the
Washington Post, which said: “Angry India does it”. Our problem seems
to be that we are not permanently angry!

Our mindsets have become such that before we begin something, we
are convinced that it cannot be done. But there are those innovators,
who do not know that things cannot be done. They make the seemingly
impossible possible, even in India. Indeed, there are several ideas
that have worked in India. Mr. Arun Shorie, when he was the Minister
handling the Ministry of Personnel, Public Grievances and Pensions,
had organized an inspirational series of talks on “ideas that have
worked’.

In this series, several people spoke. N.R. Narayana Murthy spoke
of how by putting together Rs.10,000 and starting in his small 700
square feet apartment, he built Infosys. Its market capitalization, at
one point of time, was more than Rs. 60,000 crores. Infosys has become
a pride of the nation today. Mukesh Ambani of Reliance spoke about
building the largest green field refinery complex at Jamnagar with an
investment of five billion US dollars in a record time of 36 months at
a capital cost that was 50% lower than similar refineries and
commissioning it in 3 months as against the international norms of 6
to 18 months. There were others like Dr. Kurien talking about our
white revolution and making India a global leader in milk production
in the world. E. Sreedharan spoke about building the 760 km Konkan
Railway project in one of the most difficult terrains ever encountered
in the history of railway construction by using the most sophisticated
technology. Chandrababu Naidu spoke about his assuming the role of
CEO of Andhra Pradesh. He has converted Hyderabad into Cyberabad
within no time. It is a world class city today. Ratan Tata spoke about
building the car ‘Indica’ by using 700 engineers, who had no
experience of designing an automobile, and at a development cost,
which was one tenth of the international cost. I myself spoke about
transforming some of our national laboratories from the ‘reverse
engineering mode’ or ‘copying mode’ to ‘forward engineering mode’.
CSIR today exports our knowledge even to leading multinationals in USA
and Europe, whose budgets are bigger than India’s R&D budgets. And
there were others who spoke from different fields, whose ideas had
worked right here in India. My friends, no matter where we all came
from, it was repeatedly shown that if we had a vision and an ambition,
if we could raise the aspirations of the people and if we provided
them with the right ambience, things could be made to happen in India.

What would we really require for transforming India? Let me give
you a lesson I drew from a recent incident. I was involved in the
process of interview for the Chief Innovation Officer of National
Innovation Foundation. I found that the individual that I was
interviewing had experience in branding a product. I said ‘I want to
brand my India. How would you do that?’ He was puzzled. He had
branded a soap, a refrigerator, but he wondered as to how he could
brand a nation? I said ‘I will make it easy for you. Let me tell you
as to how other nations brand themselves. For instance, US brands
itself as a land of opportunity!’ He immediately replied, ‘I will
brand India as a land of ideas’. Now here is the issue. India is a
land of ideas but it is USA that is a land of opportunities. That is
why our young people with aspirations go to USA, which provides them
an opportunity to reach their own potential. I read some statistics
on the other day that 2% of Indians, which are non-resident Indians,
who work in those ‘lands of opportunity’ outside, generate an economic
output which is almost the same as India’s economic output, which 98%
of us generate from within India. Our challenge, my young friends, is
to make India a land of opportunity. That again requires a positivism
and a faith in ourselves.

As I said, Indian talent will reign supreme in the twenty first
century. But it is not Indian talent alone that the world would be
seeking, it will also be seeking the Indian way of life. With sharp
demographic imbalances, the aged population in the western world would
increase phenomenally. This will mean that the social security demands
will increase. It is estimated that in some nations, this may be as
much as 20 to 30% of their GDP. Someone said recently to me that the
only way to deal with these problems is by emulating India, namely by
adopting its joint family system. As you know, our joint families
give a value of belonging and sharing that is almost epic in scope.
That model is what the rest of world is seeking. The world wants to go
back to nature, back to yoga, back to Ayurveda, back to spiritualism.
It is all “an Indian way of life”.

But cynics will still have their doubts. The rest of the world
will go the Indian way. But what about India? Will globalization not
destroy India? Will we not lose our identity? Let me reemphasize that
Indian civilization has accommodated new elements from outside over
the entire course of its history. Indian society has shown a great
capacity to accommodate diverse and contradictory elements without
losing its identity. Therefore, the fears about the impact of
globalization in terms of losing our identity are unwarranted. Our
challenge today is to maintain this traditional record for diversity
while finding more room for quality and individual freedom. My young
friends, you will have to meet this challenge with determination.

Let me end this address by going back to my opening statement
about ‘being in coma’ and ‘being at coma’. For India, which is an
ancient civilization, one century can only be a chapter in its
history. I do believe that the chapter on the 21st century India is
going to be our crucial chapter. It will set the mood and tone for our
future in the coming millennium. My young friends, it is up to you to
write this chapter. You can make it a golden chapter if you believe
in yourself. All that you need is an attitudinal change towards life
and work. A shift from a culture of drift to a culture of dynamism,
from a culture of idle prattle to a culture of thought and work, from
diffidence to confidence and from despair to hope. Our very best
wishes are with you for a spectacular climb on that limitless ladder
of excellence in any field that you choose to get in. Please do go
beyond that coma, complete the sentence, then a para, then a chapter.
We give you the charge to write this golden chapter of the twenty
first century India.

Guy Kawasaki is one of founders of Apple Computer who helped create the Macintosh computer.
——–

“Hindsight”
by
Guy Kawasaki

Palo Alto High School Baccalaureate Speech 6/11/95

Speaking to you today marks a milestone in my life. I am 40
years old. 22 years ago, when I was in your seat, I never,
ever thought I wouldbe 40 years old.

The implications of being your speaker frightens me. For one
thing, when a 40 year old geeser spoke at my baccalaureate
ceremony, he was about the last person I’d believe. I have
no intention of giving you the boring speech that you are
dreading. This speech will be short, sweet, and not boring.

I am going to talk about hindsights today. Hindsights that
I’ve accumulated in the 20 years from where you are to where
I am. Don’t blindly believe me. Don’t take what I say as
“truth.” Just listen.

Perhaps my experience can help you out a tiny bit.

I will present them ala David Letterman. Yes, 40-year old
people can still stay up past 11.

#10: Live off your parents as long as possible.

When I spoke at this ceremony two years ago, this was the
most popular hindsight-except from the point of view of the
parents. Thus, I knew I was on the right track.

I was a diligent Oriental in high school and college. I took
college-level classes and earned college-level credits. I
rushed through college in 3 1/2 years. I never traveled or
took time off because I thought it wouldn’t prepare me for
work and it would delay my graduation.

Frankly, I blew it.

You are going to work the rest of your lives, so don’t be in
a rush to start. Stretch out your college education. Now is
the time to suck life into your lungs-before you have a
mortgage, kids, and car payments.

Take whole semester off to travel overseas. Take jobs and
internships that pay less money or no money. Investigate
your passions on your parent’s nickel. Or dime. Or
quarter. Or dollar. Your goal should be to extend college to
at least six years.

Delay, as long as possible, the inevitable entry into the
workplace and a lifetime of servitude to bozos who know less
than you do, but who make more money. Also, you shouldn’t
deprive your parents of the pleasure of supporting you.

#9: Pursue joy, not happiness.

This is probably the hardest lesson of all to learn. It
probably seems to you that the goal in life is to be
“happy.” Oh, you maybe have to sacrifice and study and work
hard, but, by and large, happiness should be predictable.

Nice house. Nice car. Nice material things. Take my word
for it, happiness is temporary and fleeting. Joy, by
contrast, is unpredictable. It comes from pursuing
interests and passions that do not obviously result in
happiness.

Pursuing joy, not happiness will translate into one thing
over the next few years for you: Study what you love. This
may also not be popular with parents. When I went to
college, I was “marketing driven.”

It’s also an Oriental thing.

I looked at what fields had the greatest job opportunities
and prepared myself for them. This was brain dead. There are
so many ways to make a living in the world, it doesn’t
matter that you’ve taken all the “right” courses. I don’t
think one person on the original Macintosh team had a
classic “computer science” degree.

You parents have a responsibility in this area. Don’t force
your kids to follow in your footsteps or to live your
dreams. My father was a senator in Hawaii. His dream was to
be a lawyer, but he only had a high school education. He
wanted me to be a lawyer.

For him, I went to law school. For me, I quit after two
weeks. I view this a terrific validation of my inherent
intelligence.

#8: Challenge the known and embrace the unknown.

One of the biggest mistakes you can make in life is to
accept the known and resist the unknown. You should, in
fact, do exactly the opposite: challenge the known and
embrace the unknown.

Let me tell you a short story about ice. In the late 1800s
there was a thriving ice industry in the
Northeast. Companies would cut blocks of ice from frozen
lakes and ponds and sell them around the world. The largest
single shipment was 200 tons that was shipped to India. 100
tons got there unmelted, but this was enough to make a
profit.

These ice harvesters, however, were put out of business by
companies that invented mechanical ice makers. It was no
longer necessary to cut and ship ice because companies could
make it in any city during any season.

These ice makers, however, were put out of business by
refrigerator companies. If it was convenient to make ice at
a manufacturing plant, imagine how much better it was to
make ice and create cold storage in everyone’s home.

You would think that the ice harvesters would see the
advantages of ice making and adopt this technology. However,
all they could think about was the known: better saws, better
storage, better transportation.

Then you would think that the ice makers would see the
advantages of refrigerators and adopt this technology. The
truth is that the ice harvesters couldn’t embrace the
unknown and jump their curve to the next curve.

Challenge the known and embrace the unknown, or you’ll be
like the ice harvester and ice makers.

#7: Learn to speak a foreign language, play a musical
instrument, and play non-contact sports.

Learn a foreign language. I studied Latin in high school
because I thought it would help me increase my
vocabulary. It did, but trust me when I tell you it’s very
difficult to have a conversation in Latin today other than
at the Vatican. And despite all my efforts, the Pope has yet
to call for my advice.

Learn to play a musical instrument. My only connection to
music today is that I was named after Guy Lombardo. Trust
me: it’s better than being named after Guy’s brother,
Carmen. Playing a musical instrument could be with me now
and stay with me forever. Instead, I have to buy CDs at
Tower.

I played football. I loved football. Football is macho. I
was a middle linebacker–arguably, one of the most macho
positions in a macho game.

But you should also learn to play a non-contact sport like
basketball or tennis. That is, a sport you can play when
you’re over the hill.

It will be as difficult when you’re 40 to get twenty two
guys together in a stadium to play football as it is to have
a conversation in Latin, but all the people who wore cute,
white tennis outfits can still play tennis. And all the
macho football players are sitting around watching
television and drinking beer.

#6: Continue to learn.

Learning is a process not an event. I thought learning would
be over when I got my degree. It’s not true. You should
never stop learning.

Indeed, it gets easier to learn once you’re out of school
because it’s easier to see the relevance of why you need to
learn. You are learning in a structured, dedicated
environment right now. On your parent’s nickel. But don’t
confuse school and learning. You can go to school and not
learn a thing. You can also learn a tremendous amount
without school.

#5: Learn to like yourself or change yourself until
you can like yourself.

I know a forty year old woman who was a drug addict. She is
a mother of three. She traced the start of her drug
addiction to smoking dope in high school. I’m not going to
lecture you about not taking drugs. Hey, I smoked dope in
high school. Unlike Bill Clinton, I inhaled. Also unlike
Bill Clinton, I exhaled.

This woman told me that she started taking drugs because she
hated herself when she was sober. She did not like drugs so
much as much as she hated herself. Drugs were not the cause
though she thought they were the solution.

She turned her life around only after she realized that she
was in a downward spiral. Fix your problem. Fix your
life. Then you won’t need to take drugs. Drugs are neither
the solution nor the problem.

Frankly, smoking, drugs, alcohol–and using an IBM PC–are
signs of stupidity. End of discussion.

#4: Don’t get married too soon.

I got married when I was 32. That’s about the right
age. Until you’re about that age, you may not know who you
are. You also may not know who you’re marrying.

I don’t know one person who got married too late. I know
many people who got married too young. If you do decide to
get married, just keep in mind that you need to accept the
person for what he or she is right now.

#3: Play to win and win to play.

Playing to win is one of the finest things you can do. It
enables you to fulfill your potential. It enables you to
improve the world and, conveniently, develop high
expectations for everyone else too.

And what if you lose? Just make sure you lose while trying
something grand. Avinash Dixit, an economics professor at
Princeton, and Barry Nalebuff, an economics and management
professor at the Yale School of Organization and Management,
say it this way: “If you are going to fail, you might as
well fail at a difficult task. Failure causes others to
downgrade their expectations of you in the
future. The seriousness of this problem depends on what you
attempt.”

In its purest form, winning becomes a means, not an end, to
improve yourself and your competition.

Winning is also a means to play again. The unexamined life
may not be worth living, but the unlived life is not worth
examining. The rewards of winning–money, power,
satisfaction, and self-confidence–should not be squandered.

Thus, in addition to playing to win, you have a second, more
important obligation: To compete again to the depth and
breadth and height that your soul can reach. Ultimately,
your greatest competition is yourself.

#2: Obey the absolutes.

Playing to win, however, does not mean playing dirty. As you
grow older and older, you will find that things change from
absolute to relative. When you were very young, it was
absolutely wrong to lie, cheat, or steal.

As you get older, and particularly when you enter the
workforce, you will be tempted by the “system” to think in
relative terms. “I made more money.” “I have a nicer car.”
“I went on a better vacation.” Worse, “I didn’t cheat as
much on my taxes as my partner.” “I just have a few
drinks. I don’t take cocaine.” “I don’t pad my expense
reports as much as others.”

This is completely wrong. Preserve and obey the absolutes as
much as you can. If you never lie, cheat, or steal, you
will never have to remember who you lied to, how you
cheated, and what you stole.

There absolutely are absolute rights and wrongs.

#1: Enjoy your family and friends before they are gone.

This is the most important hindsight. It doesn’t need much
explanation. I’ll just repeat it: Enjoy your family and
friends before they are gone.

Nothing-not money, power, or fame-can replace your family
and friends or bring them back once they are gone. Our
greatest joy has been our baby, and I predict that children
will bring you the greatest joy in your lives–especially if
they graduate from college in four years.

And now, I’m going to give you one extra hindsight because
I’ve probably cost your parents thousands of dollars today.
It’s something that I hate to admit to.

By and large, the older you get, the more you’re going to
realize that your parents were right. More and more-until
finally, you become your parents. I know you’re all saying,
“Yeah, right.” Mark my words.

Remember these ten things: if just one of them helps you
helps just one of you, this speech will have been a success:

#10: Live off your parents as long as possible.

#9: Pursue joy, not happiness.

#8: Challenge the known and embrace the unknown.

#7: Learn to speak a foreign language, play a musical
instrument, and play non-contact sports.

#6: Continue to learn.

#5: Learn to like yourself or change yourself until you can
like yourself.

#4: Don’t get married too soon.

#3: Play to win and win to play.

#2: Obey the absolutes.

#1: Enjoy your family and friends before they are gone.

Congratulations on your graduation. Thank you very much.

Go, Kiss the World

Welcome Address by Subroto Bagchi, Chief Operating Officer, MindTree Consulting Delivered to the Class of 2006 at the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore, 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 gettig 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.