On defining success. by Subroto Bagchi

This is an very inpiring biographical article .

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  
ound  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. Thank you very much; I wish you good luck and
Godspeed. Go, kiss the world.

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