worth reading

http://in.rediff.com/money/2006/apr/27spec.htm

Stanford University Birth-- true story....

A lady in a faded gingham dress and her husband, dressed in ahomespun threadbare suit, stepped off the train in Boston and walk timidly without an appointment into the Harvard University President's outeroffice. The secretary could tell in a moment that such backwoods, country Hicks had no business at Harvard and probably didn't even deserve tobein Cambridge.

"We want to see the president," the man said softly. "He'll be busy all day," the secretary snapped. "We'll wait," the lady replied". For hours the secretary ignored them, hoping that the couplewould Finally become discouraged and go away. They didn't.... and the secretary grew frustrated and finally decided to disturb the president, even though it was a chore she always regretted. "May be if you see them for a few minutes, they'll leave," she said to him. He sighed in exasperation and nodded. Someone of his importance obviously didn't have the time to spend with them, but he detested gingham dresses and homespun suits cluttering up his outer office. The president, stern faced and with dignity, strutted toward thecouple.
The lady told him, "We had a son who attended Harvard for one year. He loved Harvard. He was happy here. But about a year ago, he was accidentally killed . My husband and I would like to erect a memorial to him, somewhere on campus " , The president wasn't touched.... He was shocked. "Madam," he said, gruffly, "we can't put up a statue for every person who attended Harvard and died. If we did, this place would look like a cemetery."
"Oh, no," the lady explained quickly. "We don't want to erect a statue. We thought we would like to give a building to Harvard. "The president rolled his eyes. He glanced at the gingham dressand Homespun suit, and then exclaimed, "A building! Do you have any earthly idea how much a building costs? We have over seven and a half million dollars in the physical buildings here at Harvard."
For a moment the lady was silent.
The president was pleased. Maybe he could get rid of them now. The lady turned to her husband and said quietly, "Is that all it costs to start a university? Why don't we just start our own?" Her husband nodded. The president's face wilted in confusion and bewilderment. Mr. and Mrs. Leland Stanford got up and walked away, travelling to Palo Alto,California where they established the university that bears their name, Stanford University, a memorial to a son that Harvard no longer cared about.

True story - Nice Moral

Madan Mohan Malviya was trying to build a good university; he had to overcome many difficulties and barriers. He worked with determination to start the university. There was fund crisis, but he did not get disheartened. He went from town to town, met many rich people and traders to collect donations.
He went to the Nizam of Hyderabad to request him for funds.The Nizam was furious, 'How dare you come to me for funds... that too for a Hindu university?' he roared with anger and took off his footwear and flung it at Malviya. Malviya picked up the footwear and left silently. He came directly to the market place and began to auction the footwear. As it was the Nizam's footwear, many came forward to buy it. The price went up.When Nizam heard of this, he became uneasy. He thought it would be an insult if his footwear were to be bought by someone for a pittance.
So he sent one of his attendants with the instruction,'Buy that footwear no matter what the bidding price be! Thus, Malviya managed to sell the Nizam's own footwear to him, for a huge amount. He used that money to build the Benares Hindu University.

Moral: It is not what you have, but it is how you usewhat you have that makes the difference in your life

Message from Subroto Bagchi - COO, Mind Tree - Too GUD.

Subroto Bagchi - COO, Mind Tree
I got this touching and thought provoking piece today. Thought I should share it with you.

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 simplelesson. 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.

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

nice image

Vivekananda -- simply awesome!!!!!!!!!!!

When I Asked God for Strength ,
He Gave Me Difficult Situations to Face.
When I Asked God for Brain & Brown ,
  He Gave Me Puzzles in Life to Solve.
When I Asked God for Happiness ,
He Showed Me Some Unhappy People.
When I Asked God for Wealth ,
He Showed Me How to Work Hard.
When I Asked God for Favors ,
He Showed Me Opportunities to Work Hard.
When I Asked God for Peace ,
He Showed Me How to Help Others.

God Gave Me Nothing I Wanted He Gave Me Everything I Needed
- Swami Vivekananda

Mother Teresa- nice

A group of working adults got together to visit their University lecturer. The lecturer was happy to see them. Conversation soon turned into complaints about stress in work and life. The Lecturer just smiled and went to the kitchen to get an assortment of cups - some porcelain, some in plastic, some in glass, some plain looking and some looked rather expensive and exquisite. The Lecturer offered his former students the cups to get drinks for themselves. When all the students had a cup in hand with water, the Lecturer spoke: "If you noticed, all the nice looking, expensive cups were taken up, leaving behind the plain and cheap ones. While it is normal that you only want the best for yourselves, that is the source of your problems and stress. What all you wanted was water, not the cup, but we unconsciously went for the better cups." "Just like in life, if Life is Water, then the jobs, money and position in society are the cups. They are just tools to hold/maintain Life, but the quality of Life doesn't change."

"If we only concentrate on the cup, we won't have time to enjoy/taste the water in it."
-Mother Teresa

Few good ones.....

I don't measure a man's success by how high he climbs but how high he bounces when he hits bottom. -George S. Patton

In order to succeed, your desire for success should be greater than your fear of failure. -Bill Cosby

A man may fall many times, but he won't be a failure until he says that someone pushed him. -Elmer G. Letterman.

* If you believe you can, you probably can. If you believe you won't, you most assuredly won't. Belief is the ignition switch that gets you off the launching pad. -Denis Waitley


Each morning when I open my eyes I say to myself: I, not events, have the power to make me happy or unhappy today. I can choose which it shall be. Yesterday is dead, tomorrow hasn't arrived yet. I have just one day, today, and I'm going to be happy in it. -Groucho Marx


There are no great people in this world, only great challenges which ordinary people rise to meet. -William Frederick Halsy, Jr.


Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago. -Warren Buffett

The tragedy of life doesn't lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goal to reach. -Benjamin Mays


Size isn't everything. The whale is endangered, while the ant continues to do just fine. -Bill Vaughan


Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. -Thomas A. Edison

A good article on IT myth in India

Wanted: Out of the box thinking

Ask any well-informed person on the street about her impressions of the software industry and chances are she would tell you that we are a world leader in software services; the industry is doing extremely well; and if all our other industries performed as well, we would be one of the most developed countries by now. Face in the Mirror The Indian software industry is one of those feel-good stories that make most Indian hearts swell with pride. It is a story that has been told umpteen times. In 2002-03 the size of the Indian software and services industry totalled $12.4 billion, with exports accounting for $9.6 billion and the domestic sector $2.8 billion. The corresponding figure for 2003-04 was $15.9 billion, with exports amounting to $12.5 billion and domestic sales $3.4 billion. In 2004-05, the figures are estimated to climb to an industry size of $20.5 billion, with exports of $16.3 billionand domestic sales of $4.2 billion. Three Indian companies—TCS, Infosys and Wipro—have already crossed the billion dollar revenue mark, and several others like Satyam and HCL are waiting in the wings. They are also huge in terms of headcount: TCS (37000 approx), Wipro (37000 approx) and Infosys (37000 approx), and each day you hear not only of them but even smaller companies hiring by the thousands. But as someone once commented "Statistics are like a bikini. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital." So consider these statistics too. The revenue of Microsoft was $32 billion in 2003, and $36.8 billion in 2004. So that makes the entire Indian software and services industry less than half the size of just one global giant. Currently India's share of the world's software and services market is only 3.5%. We do not have any consumer or desktop software to our name. Big Question In a country so short of global success stories, whatever has been achieved by the software industry is remarkable. But the reality is that we haven't done anything earth-shattering. Let me explain. Save for IBM, there are not many well-known software companies from the pre-1950s still around; EDS was founded in 1962, but most of the marquee names in the global software industry came up in the 70s and early 80s: SAP in 1972, Microsoft in 1975, Oracle in 1977, and both Sun and Adobe in 1982. The Indian poster boys too came up in the same period. TCS was founded in 1968, Patni in 1978, Wipro IT in 1981 and Infosys in 1982. Today SAP, Oracle and Sun are all over $ 10 billion companies while TCS, Wipro Technologies and Infosys are $1 billion companies. Why such asymmetrical growth? After all, most of these Indian companies make their money from selling to the world, and therefore are in an equally good position to compete with their global corporate peers dollar-for-dollar. My hypothesis is that we as a nation are immensely adverse to risk-taking, and prefer the easy way out wherever possible. And this holds true as much for the average individual as for the big software companies. Why take risks, why innovate when there is so much easy (risk-free) money to be made?Just think: How many Indian parents would gladly accept their child not choosing a mainstream career like medicine, engineering or chartered accountancy, in favour of, say, sports or music? Even among the mainstream careers, how many engineers would say that they prefer the dust and grease of a shop-floor or construction site to the air-conditioned ambience of an office job? All through the 1970s and 80s, Indian software companies made their money by body-shopping. Their value proposition was simple: wage arbitration. If your American programmers charge $X to do a piece of work, our programmers can do the same at the same location for one-fourth or even less. With the coming of the internet and better network connectivity, the logical progression from onsite body-shopping was offshoring. If our programmers can do the same piece of work at your American location for one-fourth the price of your American programmers, let us do the same from India and we can lower costs to one-tenth. This continues to be the reigning mantra of the BPO industry. As long as a couple of variables are in place—our people have a certain basic level of knowledge, we have mastered certain processes for smooth delivery, and our wage levels are lower—this value proposition will work. Our software giants will go from the billion dollar mark to two billion to five billion to even 50 billion. And we will continue to uncork the bubbly. But the lingering doubt is: can we do better?Good, But Not Good Enough I would argue that Indian software industry is more a story of the lack of imagination, myopic vision, missed opportunities and plain lethargy. Why is it that none of the big Indian companies have been able to come up with a database product? In 1970 an IBM researcher Dr EF Codd published the paper titled A Relational Model of Data for Large Shared Data Banks. Based on this article, Larry Ellison and his associates founded a database product company that later took the name Oracle. Note that Oracle and Patni are near contemporaries. In the early 1990s, Linus Torvalds, a student at the University of Helsinki, released a new operating system called Linux. It was a little rough-edged in the sense that it did not come with the installation wizards of commercial OS like Windows, but then it was free for anyone to download and do whatever he or she liked. Several companies like Red Hat, Mandrake, Caldera, etc. did precisely that: they downloaded the software, added some tools so that non-techie people can install it easily on computers, wrote out help guides, and marketed it to the world. These days one regularly reads stories of how Linux is gaining ground and is poised to become a significant player in OS segment in the future. Why did none of our big guys think it worthwhile to create our own 'flavour' of Linux? Take another example—this time not of corporations but individuals—that demonstrates that we Indians have a serious lack of pluck. There is on the web a site called Source Forge that hosts open-source software projects. Software engineers can ut up ideas, invite people with specific skill-sets to join them, and start the software development work. Why do software programmers undertake such work? For most people it is out of a spirit of altruism, but there is an equal driving force in the challenge of creating something that can match the work of a commercial enterprise. It's like: if Microsoft can do it, so can I. There are about one lakh projects hosted on Source Forge and more than a million programmers work on them but there's very little participation by Indian programmers. Many years ago the founder of Apple Computers, Steve Jobs, while luring Pepsi veteran John Sculley famously asked: "Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?" The Indian software industry needs to ask the same question: do we want to keep making money, or do we want to change the world?

byProdyut Bora

The author is CEO,Brahmaputra Infotech