Here, There and Everywhere

by Sudha Murty

  I joined the Infosys Foundation as a founder trustee. The foundation took up a number of philanthropic projects for the benefit of the poor in different states of India.

  I received many awards on various occasions. One of them was the Economic Times Award given to the Infosys Foundation. As a trustee I was invited to receive this award. At that time I remembered my guru. Now she was a student in the US. I told her, ‘At least for one day you must come for this award ceremony in Mumbai. If you had not woken me up at the right time, I would not have been receiving it today. I want you to be present.’

  I will remain indebted to Akshata forever for the way she made me change my life and the lesson she taught me.

  3

  Honesty Comes from the Heart

  One bright June morning three years ago, I was reading my Kannada newspaper as usual. It was the day the Secondary School Leaving Certificate results had been published. While columns of roll numbers filled the inside pages, the list of rank holders and their photographs took up almost the entire front page.

  I have a great fascination for rank holders. Rank is not merely an index of one’s intelligence, it also indicates the hard work and perseverance that students have put in to reach their goal. My background—I was brought up in a professor’s family—and my own experience as a teacher have led me to believe this.

  Of all the photographs in that morning’s newspaper, one boy’s snapshot caught my attention. I could not take my eyes off him. He was frail and pale, but there was an endearing sparkle in his eyes. I wanted to know more about him. I read that his name was Hanumanthappa and that he had secured the eighth rank. That was all the information I could gather.

  The next day, to my surprise, his photograph was published again, this time with an interview. With growing interest I learnt that Hanumanthappa was a coolie’s son, the oldest of five children. They belonged to a tribal group. He was unable to study further, he said in the interview, because he lived in a village and his father, the sole breadwinner, earned only Rs 40 a day.

  I felt sorry for this bright boy. Most of us send our children to tuitions and to coaching classes, we buy them reference books and guides, and provide the best possible facilities for them without considering the cost. But it was different for Hanumanthappa of Rampura. He had excelled in spite of being denied some of the basic necessities of life.

  While I was thinking about him with the newspaper still in my hands, I gazed at a mango tree in my neighbour’s compound. It looked its best with a fresh bark, tender green leaves glistening with dewdrops and mangoes that were about to ripen in a few days. Beyond the tree was a small potted plant that, I noticed, had remained almost the same ever since it had been potted. It was a calm morning. The air was cool and fresh. My thoughts were running free. The continuous whistle of our pressure cooker broke the silence, reminding me that half an hour had passed.

  Hanumanthappa’s postal address was provided in the interview. Without wasting much time, I took a postcard and wrote to him. I wrote only two lines, saying that I was interested in meeting him and asking whether he could come to Bangalore. Just then my father, ever a practical man, returned from his morning walk. He read the postcard and said, ‘Where will he have the money to come so far? If you want him to come here, send some money for his bus fare plus a little extra to buy himself a decent set of clothes.’

  So I added a third line to say that I would pay for his travel and some clothes. Within four days I received a similar postcard in reply. Two sentences: in the first he thanked me for the letter, in the second he expressed his willingness to come to Bangalore and meet me. Immediately, I sent him some money and details of my office address.

  When he finally arrived in our office, he looked like a frightened calf that had lost its way. It must have been his first trip to Bangalore. He was humble. He wore a clean shirt and trousers, and his hair was neatly parted and combed. The sparkle in his eyes was still there.

  I got straight to the point. ‘We are happy about your academic performance. Do you want to study further? We would like to sponsor you. This means we will pay your fees for any course of study you wish to take up—wherever it may be.’

  He did not answer.

  My senior colleague, who was in the office with me, interrupted with a smile, ‘Don’t go at the speed of bits and bytes. Let the boy understand what you are suggesting. He can give us his answer at the end of the day.’

  When Hanumanthappa was ready to return home, he said in a low and steady tone, ‘Madam, I want to pursue my studies at the Teachers’ Training College in Bellary. That is the one nearest to my village.’

  I agreed instantly but spoke to him a little more to find out whether there was any other course he preferred. I was trying to make it clear to him that we would pay the fees for any course he might choose. The boy, however, seemed to know exactly what he wanted.

  ‘How much money should I send you per month? Does the college have a hostel facility?’ I asked.

  He said he would get back to me after collecting the correct details. Two days later, he wrote to us in his beautiful handwriting that he would require approximately Rs 300 per month. He planned to take a room on rent and share it with a friend. The two boys would cook for themselves in order to keep their expenses down.

  I sent him Rs 1800 to cover his expenses for six months. He acknowledged my draft without delay and expressed his gratitude.

  Time passed. One day, I suddenly remembered that I had to pay Hanumanthappa for the next six months, so I sent him another draft for Rs 1800.

  This too was duly acknowledged, but I was surprised to find some currency notes in the envelope along with his letter. ‘Madam,’ he had written, ‘it is kind of you to have sent me money for the next six months. But I was not in Bellary for the last two months. One month, our college was closed for holidays and during the next month, there was a strike. So I stayed at home for those two months. My expenditure during these months was less than Rs 300 per month. Therefore, I am sending you the Rs 300 that I have not used for the last two months. Kindly accept this amount.’

  I was taken aback. Such poverty and yet such honesty. Hanumanthappa knew I expected no account of the money sent to him for his monthly expenses, yet he had made it a point to return the balance amount. Unbelievable but true!

  Experience has taught me that honesty is not the mark of any particular class nor is it related to education or wealth. It cannot be taught at any university. In most people, it springs naturally from the heart.

  I did not know how to react to this simple village boy’s honesty. I just prayed that God would continue to bestow the best on Hanumanthappa and his family.

  4

  The Red Rice Granary

  Every year, our country has to face natural disasters in some form. It may be an earthquake in Gujarat, floods in Orissa or a drought in Karnataka. In a poor country, these calamities cause havoc.

  In the course of my work, I have found that after such calamities, many people like to donate money or materials to relief funds. We assume that most donations come from rich people, but that is not true. On the contrary, people from the middle class and the lower middle class help more. Rarely do rich people participate wholeheartedly.

  A few years back, I was invited to a reputed company in Bangalore to deliver a lecture on corporate social responsibility. Giving a speech is easy. But I was not sure how many people in the audience would really understand the speech and change themselves.

  After my talk was over, I met many young girls and boys. It was an affluent company and the employees were well off and well dressed. They were all very emotional after the lecture.

  ‘Madam, we buy so many clothes every month. Can we donate our old clothes to those people who are affected by the earthquake? Can you coordinate and send these to them?’

  Some of them offered other things.

  ‘We have grown-up children, we would like to give their old toys and some vessels.’

 
I was very pleased at the reaction. It reminded me of the incident in the Ramayana where, during the construction of the bridge between India and Lanka, every squirrel helped Sri Rama by bringing a handful of sand.

  ‘Please send your bags to my office. I will see that they reach the right persons.’

  Within a week, my office was flooded with hundreds of bags. I was proud that my lecture had proven so effective.

  One Sunday, along with my assistants, I opened the bags. What we saw left us amazed and shocked. The bags were brimming with all kinds of junk! Piles of high-heeled slippers (some of them without the pair), torn undergarments, unwashed shirts, cheap, transparent saris, toys which had neither shape nor colour, unusable bed sheets, aluminium vessels and broken cassettes were soon piled in front of us like a mountain. There were only a few good shirts, saris and usable materials. It was apparent that instead of sending the material to a garbage dump or the kabariwala, these people had transferred them to my office in the name of donation. The men and women I had met that day were bright, well-travelled, well-off people. If educated people like them behaved like this, what would uneducated people do?

  But then I was reminded of an incident from my childhood. I was born and brought up in a village called Shiggaon in Karnataka’s Haveri district. My grandfather was a retired schoolteacher and my grandmother, Krishtakka, never went to school. Both of them hardly travelled and had never stepped out of Karnataka. Yet, they were hard-working people, who did their work wholeheartedly without expecting anything from anybody in their life. Their photographs never appeared in any paper, nor did they go up on stage to receive a prize for the work they did. They lived like flowers with fragrance in the forest, enchanting everyone around them, but hardly noticed by the outside world.

  In the village we had paddy fields and we used to store the paddy in granaries. There were two granaries. One was in the front and the other at the back of our house. The better-quality rice, which was white, was always stored in the front granary and the inferior quality, which was a little thick and red, was stored in the granary at the back.

  In those days, there was no communal divide in the village. People from different communities lived together in peace. Many would come to our house to ask for alms. There were Muslim fakirs, Hindu dasaiahs who roamed the countryside singing devotional songs, Yellamma Jogathis who appeared holding the image of Goddess Yellamma over their heads, poor students and invalid people.

  We never had too much cash in the house and the only help my grandfather could give these people was in the form of rice. People who receive help do not talk too much. They would receive the rice, smile and raise their right hand to bless us. Irrespective of their religion, the blessing was always ‘May God bless you.’ My grandfather always looked happy after giving them alms.

  I was a little girl then and not too tall. Since the entrance to the front granary was low, it was difficult for grown-ups to enter. So I would be given a small bucket and sent inside. There I used to fill up the bucket with rice and give it to them. They would tell me how many measures they wanted.

  In the evening, my grandmother used to cook for everybody. That time she would send me to the granary at the back of the house where the red rice was stored. I would again fill up the bucket with as much rice as she wanted and get it for her to cook our dinner.

  This went on for many years. When I was a little older, I asked my grandparents a question that had been bothering me for long.

  ‘Why should we eat the red rice always at night when it is not so good, and give those poor people the better-quality rice?’

  My grandmother smiled and told me something I will never forget in my life.

  ‘Child, whenever you want to give something to somebody, give the best in you, never the second best. That is what I have learnt from life. God is not there in the temple, mosque or church. He is with the people. If you serve them with whatever you have, you have served God.’

  My grandfather answered my question in a different way.

  ‘Our ancestors have taught us in the Vedas that one should:

  ‘Donate with kind words.

  ‘Donate with happiness.

  ‘Donate with sincerity.

  ‘Donate only to the needy.

  ‘Donate without expectation because it is not a gift. It is a duty.

  ‘Donate with your wife’s consent.

  ‘Donate to other people without making your dependants helpless.

  ‘Donate without caring for caste, creed and religion.

  ‘Donate so that the receiver prospers.’

  This lesson from my grandparents, told to me when I was just a little girl, has stayed with me ever since. If at all I am helping anyone today, it is because of the teachings of those simple souls. I did not learn them in any school or college.

  5

  Lazy Portado

  Portado was a young, bright, handsome and sweet boy from Goa. We were in B.V.B. College of Engineering at Hubli. He had been my classmate and lab partner throughout our course. So I knew him fairly well.

  Portado had peculiar habits. Though he was intelligent, he was extremely lazy. Our theory classes were from eight in the morning till noon and lab was from two to five in the afternoon. Portado never came for the first class at eight. Occasionally, he turned up for the second or third hour but most of the time he only showed up for the last hour. He never missed our lab sessions, however.

  In those days, attendance was not compulsory in college and our teachers were very lenient. They requested Portado to come on time but since there was no internal assessment, they couldn’t really exercise their authority.

  One day, I asked Portado, ‘Why are you always late? What do you do at home?’

  He laughed and said, ‘I have a lot of things to do. I am so busy in the evenings that I can’t get up before nine in the morning.’

  ‘What things keep you so busy?’’ I asked him innocently.

  ‘I meet my friends at night. We have long chats followed by dinner. You know, it takes a lot of time to build friendships. You will not understand. You people are all nerds. You only come to college to study.’

  ‘Portado, you are a student. You should study, get knowledge, learn skills and work hard. Is that not important?’

  ‘Oh, please. You remind me of my mother. Don’t give me a sermon. Life is long. We have plenty of time. We should not learn anything in a hurry. We shouldn’t be so stingy about time either.’

  Then I noticed that he did not even have a watch since, for obvious reasons, he had no need for it.

  Portado continued, ‘In life, you need connections and networking. That can give you success. You can’t network in a day. You have to spend time and money on building a network. Who knows? Some people that I meet now may make it big tomorrow and then that connection will work for me.’

  I was a young girl from a middle-class and academic-minded family. I believed only in hard work. I never understood how networking could help.

  During our college breaks, Portado would proudly tell us about his childhood: ‘Oh, when I was young, I spent my time in big cities like Bombay, Delhi and Calcutta. In Calcutta, there are so many clubs. It is a matter of prestige to be a member of a club. When I start working, I want to be a member of all the good clubs in the city.’ Every now and then, Portado felt that Hubli was a small and boring town. So he regularly went to Belgaum to meet his friends and ‘network’ with them.

  During exams, Portado worked like a donkey. He glass-traced most of my original drawings so that he did not have to think about the solutions to engineering problems himself. His glass-trace drawings were definitely better than the originals because they were neater and there were no wrinkles or pencil marks. He always got more than me in drawings. He even kept the question papers of previous years and made his own question papers by process of elimination. Instead of reading textbooks, he read guides to pass the exams. With all this, he always managed to pass in second class.

  Once,
the examiner caught him because in a survey drawing he told the examiner that the mark on his drawing was actually a big tree in the middle of a road. It was a survey of a town near Dharwad. Unfortunately, the examiner happened to be from that town and he knew that there was no tree on that road. He questioned Portado, who said with a serious face, ‘Sir, I have done the survey myself. I sat below the tree, had my lunch and then I continued.’

  Calmly, the examiner said, ‘I can’t see this tree in any of your classmates’ original drawings. This is only a mosquito between the glass and the drawing that you have tried to cover up.’

  Portado just managed to pass the exams that year. But he was not perturbed. He said, ‘I am not scared of the exams or the marks. Today’s nerds will be tomorrow’s mid-level managers. A person with good networking will be their boss.’

  Because of his attitude and undisciplined habits, even the college hostel refused to keep him. So he rented a small house near college and lived there like a king.

  Once, our class planned a picnic trip to Belgaum. Since Portado was familiar with the city, we decided to take his opinion and help. The picnic committee members, including myself, went to his house around eleven on a Sunday morning. We all assumed that Portado would be awake. But to our surprise, he was still in bed. When he opened the door, he said sleepily, ‘Oh, why have you come so early on a Sunday?’ He was quite annoyed to see us. ‘Well, I am awake now, so please come in.’

  We went in but there was absolutely no place to sit. His clothes were all over the room and newspapers were scattered on the floor. In the kitchen, dirty dishes were piled up in the sink and they were stinking. There were fish bones everywhere. There was also a cat and a dog inside the house. They were well fed with Portado’s leftovers. The windows were not open either. The bed sheet looked like it had not been changed for a year. I did not have the courage to go see his bathroom.

  Portado felt neither perturbed nor guilty. He said, ‘Make some space for yourselves and sit down.’ Some people moved Portado’s undergarments and made some space but I could not do that because I was a girl, so I simply stood. Portado brought a stool for me from his kitchen. It was very sticky. I was even more hesitant to sit on it than on his clothes. I told him, ‘It is better that I stand.’ Portado offered us tea but none of us had the guts to drink any.