by Menon, Sudha
When you are home visiting us, Deepika, you make your own bed, clear the table after meals, and sleep on the floor if there are guests at home. At home, you are not a star, and that is because we have taught you to be rooted in reality at all times. Showbiz is about make-believe. Everybody will rush to do things for you and pander to your every desire when you are on top. But the cameras that follow you everywhere will eventually fade and what will remain is the real world. If you occasionally wonder why we refuse to treat you like a star, it is because you are our daughter first and a film star later, and we want you to remember that you have to eventually return to the real world.
Dear Deepika, you are in an industry where there is much negativity, but I hope that you are the game-changer in it. As in every other industry, so too here, there is a place for everyone, and I believe that you don’t have to put anyone down in order to get work. If you can live your life without harming anyone, or talking badly about anyone, you can set an example for others. You might not succeed, you might even risk ridicule, yet continue to refuse to be a part of the circle of negativity. Strive to generate positivity around you even though you are too new and too small a player to effect a big change. Often you will find people who will lie and say untruths about you, but remember never to retaliate or talk their language. If what they say is untrue, ignore it. And if it is true, use their criticism to improve and transform yourself.
You are in an industry where there’s always going to be big money, but I hope that’s not your only motivation for work. I believe that it is important to try to be the best in whatever you do, regardless of money. Always focus on what you want to become as an individual and empower yourself to reach your goals without distractions. That big car or ‘things’ will follow later.
The things that really matter in life are relationships, honesty, and respect for your parents, and elders. Material success is important, not fundamental to happiness and peace of mind.
I have not always been perfect, but over the years I have learnt to strike a balanced view of life. After a life well lived, what is important to me today is peace of mind and good health. Your health is your most important wealth. Take care of it, nurture it.
I can’t tell you enough about the rejuvenating power of prayers and a little faith. You know it, of course, because offering prayers is a long-standing tradition in our family. Now that you are a professional with a demanding career, you might not always find the time to accompany us on our annual pilgrimage to Tirupati. Instead, spare a few minutes of your day, even if it is just twenty, to close your eyes and meditate, to think about God and you will see how much that faith in His power will strengthen you.
In the end, when your career is behind you, what remains with you and for you is family, the friends that you have made who will stand by you.
Live a life that is healthy, my children, and one that will allow you to live with your own conscience. Everything else is transient. And remember, no matter what, we are always going to be there for you.
Lovingly,
Papa
P.P. Chhabria
.P. Chhabria was born in pre-independence Karachi into a wealthy trading family that raised its children with immense luxury. Pahlaj, (as he was fondly called) and his nine siblings grew up in a sprawling bungalow set amid lush gardens and towering trees. He still remembers the happy times when the kids would go off on jaunts in horse carriages that were specially maintained for them, with dedicated staff to supervize.
But that life of comforts soon changed into a nightmare when his father died unexpectedly of a massive heart attack, leaving behind a grieving wife and young children. Almost immediately afterwards, his elder siblings speculated, unwisely as it turned out, in the commodities market and had to sell the family assets to repay creditors. And yet, he says, his mother, a hardworking woman who slogged silently to tend to her family, never complained because she knew her boys had to sell the family assets to honour their father’s name.
Twelve-year-old Pahlaj was put to work in a small wholesale cloth merchant’s shop, working as a lowly paid worker sweeping and cleaning, doing odd jobs around the place and offering tea and refreshments to the people who came there to tie up business deals. For the young man who had been used to having a paid servant to bathe and dress him, this came as a huge blow and proved to be a humiliation which he says had him raging against destiny.
The tough years continued, with one menial job after the other, till his family packed him off to faraway Poona to work as a servant in his paternal aunt’s home for a monthly salary of Rs 30 and lodging.
Looking back at his life on a high summer Pune afternoon last year, PP saab, as he is fondly called in his adopted city where his stature now is that of a loved family elder, told me it was his deep longing to free himself from the life of indignity and bondage that led him on a journey that began as a small time salesman of electrical accessories to the head of a Rs 4,000 crore plus conglomerate.
‘It has been a journey of great learning,’ said the 82-yearold patriarch of the Finolex group of industries, who continues to lead a life of discipline and hard work, despite the fact that the younger generation has stepped in to look after the business. Being a salesman who hopped from one tiny shop to the other in the tiny town of Pune taught him to be patient, determined, and persistent. If a shopkeeper refused to entertain him on his first five visits and shooed him away, he would go away silently and return a few days later, to make his sales pitch. And, if a buyer refused to keep his word and pay him, he continued to turn up at the shop, politely asking for the payment till the recalcitrant buyer dipped into his pocket and repaid his dues!
The journey from being an electrical switches and ceiling roses salesman to a businessman trading electrical cables and wires led him to become a defense and government supplier. At each stage, the confidence that he got led him to eventually set up his own cable manufacturing business, Finolex Cables, in 1958. The Finolex group of companies today boasts of multiple companies and eleven modern manufacturing facilities across the country. It has won several national and international awards and has been acknowledged as one of the country’s most quality conscious groups and wealth creators. It also has the distinct honour of being the number one manufacturer of cables in the country.
Such an arduous journey to the top of the charts has taught him about the value of being kind and cordial to people, because his own life was built brick by brick on the foundation of unexpected kindness of other people, some strangers, some even more poor than him.
Which is why, to this day, he makes it a point to make time for the humblest of his staff on the shop floor, stopping to listen to and sometimes take feedback from the watchman or the peon who have devoted decades of their lives in his service. It is a matter of great pride to him that the children of some of these loyal workers now hold positions in his group.
His one regret in life continues to be the fact that he never went to school after the age of 12. It was the fact that he was unlettered that relegated him to menial jobs for a large part of his life and while he painstakingly taught himself to speak and write in English, one of the requirements for his job as a door to door salesman, he continues to regret that he could not complete his formal education.
The Interntational Institute for Information Technology (IIIT), Pune, an educational institution that he set up in Pune, now run by his only daughter, Aruna, stands testimony to his belief in the redeeming power of education. IIIT has grown to be a widely respected institution of learning for cutting-edge developments in Information Technology and other high-tech areas.
My own memories of PP saab go back to the early nineties when I would run into him and his walking group at the thickly wooded, colonial era campus of the University of Pune. I was a struggling young mother trying to balance the competing demands of a toddler and a cherished career as a journalist. Early every morning I would head for a walk in the magnificent woods of the university campus. That was the o
ne hour in the day that belonged to me, when I could regain my calm by breathing in the fresh morning air with the sounds of birds humming. Sometimes I would run into PP and would exchange pleasantries with him. On a few occasions we found ourselves heading towards the University at the same time so I would walk with him, often having to almost run to keep up with his fast pace and we would exchange notes about life and work.
At 82, PP continues to live and work with a discipline that few of us can match. He continues to remain true to his morning walks.
‘All my life, I have followed the practice of waking early, working all day and sleeping early. To wake early is to experience a freshness of the spirit. When you walk alone in the fresh morning air, nature walks with you and speaks to you, bringing ideas, energy, and the courage to make quick decisions. My association with the sky continues to fuel me with the power to envision and strive.’
(Taken from his autobiography,
There’s No Such Thing as a Self-made Man.)
Here, he writes a touching, surprisingly candid, and infinitely wise letter to his daughter Aruna Katara, herself a mother of two today. Aruna steers the growth of IIIT, her once-upon-a-time-unlettered father’s ode to the benefits of formal education.
Dear Aruna,
I know this is letter that has been long in writing, a letter that I should have actually sent you years ago when you were a young girl growing up with dreams, hopes, and aspirations. You are a mature woman now but I want you to know that this has been a letter I have been writing to you in my mind for many, many years. And, like they say, it is never too late for anything. I know the best years of your life are yet to come and I can see from the way you lead your life now that your dreams are about to take flight.
Aruna, I don’t know if I have told you this before but through this letter, I want to tell you how precious a gift you were to your mother and me from the day you were born. You were a kind, gentle, studious little child who quietly bore being left alone to grow on her own when your mother and I focused on your sister as she struggled with a fatal illness. Not once in all those years that we paid little heed to you and your brother, did you complain or rebel against our continued absence from your life. Your sister passed away and when we recovered from our grief, you had already become a self-sustained person who had learnt to live life on her own.
Dear child, looking back today, I confess I never realized when and how you grew up. Back then, I was still a struggling entrepreneur trying to grow his business and life was an endless journey from small town to yet another small town, in dirty, dusty buses and trains. Money was scarce and making a phone call to my family back home was a needless, unaffordable luxury. It was your mother who shouldered the responsibility of raising both of you since I was never around for either parent-teacher meetings or sports days. Looking back, I think I lost out on a large part of my own life by being detached from your growing up years. But that is life and I always believed in taking each day as it came.
When you came to be of a marriageable age, I decided I did not want you to be wife to a businessman and become like the other women in our traditional community who stayed at home being good wives and mothers, doing little other than attending parties. When we found you a professional doctor as a spouse, it was a happy occasion for us because we knew he would support you in anything that you wanted to do for yourself. For years after that, you raised your kids and looked after your family but I was consumed with the need to leave behind me a legacy that you could take up and run with.
Since I never went to school, I thought why not do something in the field of education and thus was born our first engineering college in Ratnagiri, a project which benefitted the simple people from our beautiful Konkan coast who did not have an engineering college in their region. That fledgling effort has now become a college that is much appreciated and has under its wings as many as four thousand students. But even though you were involved in it from the very beginning, the distance from your home in Pune to Ratnagiri always meant you were not able to work hands-on in the project.
In our families, girls marry young and don the role of traditional housewives. That was precisely the reason why I wanted you to get married to a professional instead of someone from a business family so you could have the option of doing something that would fulfill you, even after marriage. After the engineering college came about, you decided to take its reigns and started the journey of your own life. Later, my meetings with Dr Raghunath Mashelkar and Dr Vijay Bhatkar, (Dr. Mashekar is the former Director General of the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research, Dr. Vijay Bhatkar is one of the key scientists behind India’s national initiative in supercomputing, leading the development of Param supercomputers) got me thinking about setting up a path-breaking institute that would provide global quality education in advanced technologies, at affordable prices, to middle-class Indian students who could not afford to pay the exorbitant fees required for foreign education. That, I decided, would be my legacy for you.
In 2000, when I started this project, you took charge of it fully and it remains your passion a decade later. It amazes me how much time and commitment you invest in this project. Now that your children are all grown up, this is your main preoccupation. I’m happy that I have given you something that will outlive me and remain with you for a long time.
Aruna, it makes me happy that you have committed yourself to this institution because it is important to leave something in this world through which you will be remembered. I want you to create a name for yourself, support the poor, and the middle-class. The privileged have their money and their connections but the lesser privileged need the support and guidance of those who have much in their lives.
Through the course of the ten years since the institute’s establishment, IIIT has entered into so many joint ventures with foreign institutions. It filled me with pride when you travelled recently to China to work on an invitation by the University of Hunan which wants you to set up a branch of our college in that country. I am proud of you in a way I am not able to express. I grew up a poor, unlettered man and it makes me proud to see you so immersed in a career that has the power to change people’s lives.
For a long time after you got married and had children, I struggled to figure out what I could leave you as a legacy. In our community, women don’t study enough and often spend time in parties and other equally inconsequential stuff, but that does not help leaving any legacy. I wanted you to focus on something meaningful that will help the community around you and you have done such a splendid job, Aruna, and created your own identity with it.
It gives me satisfaction that I have done my job in giving you a meaningful path to follow. I deprived myself of education as a young boy but I wanted you to study and also open that magical door for others.
Aruna, my years on this earth have taught me that the most important thing in life is to never forget your roots, the place you came from before you became rich and successful. The initial years of my life were spent in luxury, but when my father passed away, all the money disappeared and the family came face to face with abject poverty. You know I have done every job from being a cleaning boy in a tiny textile shop in Karachi, to a domestic servant, to being a collection agent before I set up this business which has given me immense wealth and respect. I never let myself forget where I came from and in my daily life at home and at work, I always make time to meet the poor and the underprivileged people around me because that keeps me rooted and reminds me of my difficult initial years.
As you progress in life and move from success to success, be sensitive to the people around you. Ours is a country of vast inequities, so use your money to benefit many. Ultimately when you depart from this earth, you cannot carry your riches and possessions with you. Ashes to ashes, we go back into the earth that we came from. Instead, leave something for society to remember you by.
Because I grew up virtually with no education, I learnt that education is the best way to impr
ove your situation in life and pull yourself out of you poverty and so, setting up a clutch of educational institutions is my way of giving back to society.
Whatever work you are doing, keep thinking ahead of your trade or business or chosen calling. Learning is an endless journey. Have a vision, continually dream new things for yourself, build a body of work, never put limitations on yourself by being timid, never think that you are poor and can’t achieve anything. All of us came to this earth with nothing. Establish your credentials with hard work and commitment. Being poor can often be an advantage because it acts as an incentive for you to work hard and excel. And, if you have been blessed by God’s grace and have a good life, be humble and aware of the difficulties of people around you.
Aruna, unlike the earlier times in which you grew up, the younger generation is more independent. Let your children be free, be aware of the changes of society around you. The young have their own way of life, don’t interfere with it. Our cherished joint family system is gone and it is the best to accept things as they are. I have adopted silence as the best way for myself, leaving the young to find their own way, but I want you to be willing enough to give guidance and advice when your young ones want it.
While you were growing up, I never got the time to instill values in you but I know that if you are attached to your children, they see you and follow your actions and there is no need to teach them anything. Children follow and adopt the things they see around them, so show them by your own living what the right path is.
I admire your hard work, commitment, and complete involvement in managing the growth of an institution that is now already being counted as one of the most forward-looking in the country. You have made it the only organization in the state to get triple IT status (Indian Institute of Information Technology.) When we started, I never imagined that we would one day become an institution where scholars could register for their doctorate programs. Now I know that you will do much more with this, even when I am long gone.