The Hindu Business Line : Kiss and tell!

Surely, holding a mirror to one’s entire life — childhood, parents, siblings — in great detail is not the easiest of things to do. Even though this is done in autobiographies.

Subroto Bagchi’s second book, Go Kiss the World: Life Lessons for the Young Professionals (Penguin Portfolio) begins with the story of how he was born, told much better in his mother’s words. “My mother always tol d me I was born just when the big red sun emerged in the east and burst forth into a new day. I love this sheer imagery every time the story of my birth crosses my mind.”

Those who have heard/read some of his speeches/articles would know that Bagchi, a co-founder of MindTree, is blessed with the gift of telling a story well, in great detail, and sensitively. This book tells us where this came from. Primarily from his mother, who is described with as much detail as affection by Bagchi. The title came from his mother’s words even as she lay on her deathbed in a Bhubaneswar hospital.

Her youngest son came down from the US, where he was working, to keep a vigil at her bedside. But after two weeks, with no improvement in her condition as she lay quiet and unmoving, Bagchi decided to get back. On his way to the airport, he stopped by at the hospital, held her hand and bent “to kiss her forehead, wrinkled with age but still beautiful", when she told him: “Why are you kissing me? Go kiss the world.”

This, says Bagchi, became the guiding principle of his life.

Through interesting anecdotes, the book recreates the author’s humble background. Describing his father’s mental illness, and the quiet manner in which Labonya Prova, his mother, took charge of the family during such times, without helplessness or blaming anybody, Bagchi says: “Though my father and mother were temperamentally very different, they were bound by a very visible value system that glorified education, hard work, simplicity and honest living. She let him do his work in the service of the state (he was a magistrate) as though he was next only to the governor general of India… He brought her a paltry sum of money at the end of the month (the couple had five sons) and she took pride in the fact that the household never spent beyond its means.”

As a young boy Bagchi was first tutored at home before joining school in Class VI; in college he opted for political science and wanted to do a post-graduate degree at JNU in international relations, but his national scholarship — an annual grant of Rs 1,200 — proved insufficient for the residential programme and he returned to Bhubaneswar for a PG course in political science, tired of it in two months and took up a job as a lower divisional clerk in the industries department of the Orissa Government at a salary of Rs 300. Here he was biding time to be old enough to sit for the IAS examination, “the socially acceptable thing to do” in those days.

Some attempt was made to make him do some “real work” but after he had drafted a letter using big words such as “pressing preoccupations” to find an excuse for a Secretary’s absence from an inconsequential meeting, his superiors, who could not understand these words, struck them off and decided “it would be better to keep me harmlessly engaged than load me with any real work. So I came and went as I pleased, attended to the occasional affairs”, went for picnics, dinners at the homes of co-workers. But soon all this became unbearable and he joined the DCM group as a management trainee in 1977.

Bagchi’s book is filled with interesting anecdotes on the kind of compromises the corporate world environment demanded from him. But thanks to the strong values inherited from his parents, he had little difficulty in fighting back.

But often, the price had to be paid. One such fight resulted in his being sidelined at DCM and in 1981 he decided to move on. But the problem was that the sales job available at HCL meant a 40 per cent salary cut. A chance reading of Richard Bach’s Jonathan Livingston helped his decision by teaching him that “life’s true purpose is not to live to earn, it’s about having the courage to take flight.”

With wife Susmita, who was still studying, supporting the decision, he joined HCL for a brief stint before joining PSI Data Systems, where he sold computers across the country. Next came a one-year stint at MMC but when it decided to close down its computers business in 1985, “when the country’s annual intake of computers could be counted in the hundreds”, he was without a job. But not before he had learnt how “in a management career a sales job is a great way to reach the top”.

At this point Bagchi had a brief and disastrous stint at entrepreneurship when he joined an IT training start-up called Project.21 as a founder member. But here he learnt an important lesson for entrepreneurs: “Growth-bound start-ups need capital to run operations; they cannot be held hostage to fluctuating operational cash flow.”

In March 1988 he joined Wipro for a 10-year stint, where he first helped solve Wipro’s debtor problem by improving receivables by teaching the sales team that even “decent guys” can remind people that they owed money which needed to be paid. Next came an opportunity to open a Wipro office in the US, during days when the RBI rationed foreign exchange.

Bagchi consolidated Wipro’s R&D strength, raised the morale of the team of engineers. When all was going well, in 1993 Bagchi was “blown away” by an incredible job offer from an airline engine company that offered him a nine-fold hike in salary.

Ashok Soota, then at Wipro, and later to join the founder team at MindTree, called it a “stupid job” and motivated him to stay back. Apart from Soota, “an interesting leader from many different standpoints”, he learnt a lot from Azim Premji, including “the power of simplicity and forthrightness”.

The rest of the book is about the founding of MindTree by 10 people, from three different nationalities, two continents and three professional backgrounds.

Summing up the success of the company and the staying together of the founder team, a rare feat, he notes: “What united us was an aspiration to build something memorable and be bound together by strong professional values and unimpeachable personal integrity.”

Like his first book (The High-Performance Entrepreneur) this book too contains nuggets of wisdom for would-be entrepreneurs. The book is written in a simple and chatty style, but the most precious takeaway from it is the strong family bonding, which the author values so much.

Bagchi leaves with the reader a rich portrait of his mother, a remarkable woman who comes alive through his vivid imagery. She grew up on a “heady diet of Bengali literature, music and patriotism” and was a “beautiful woman; pretty outside and very strong inside”.

Response may be sent to rasheeda@thehindu.co.in

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