A LETTER FROM A YOUNG GIRL TO JRD TATA

[Mr. Narayan Murthy with his wife Mrs. Sudha Murthy ]






This is the stuff legends are made of..Worth a read..


THE GIRL WRITING AS HERSELF....



It was probably the April of 1974. Bangalore was getting warm and gulmohars were blooming at the IISc campus. I was the only girl in my postgraduate department and was staying at the ladies' hostel. Other girls were pursuing research in different departments of Science. I was looking forward to going abroad to complete a doctorate in computer science. I had been offered scholarships from Universities in the US... I had not thought of taking up a job in India.



One day, while on the way to my hostel from our lecture-hall complex, I saw an advertisement on the notice board. It was a standard job-requirement notice from the famous automobile company Telco (now Tata Motors)... It stated that the company required young, bright engineers, hardworking and with an excellent academic background, etc.



At the bottom was a small line: 'Lady Candidates need not apply.' I read it and was very upset. For the first time in my life I was up against gender discrimination.



Though I was not keen on taking up the job, I saw it as a challenge. I had done extremely well in academics, better than most of my male peers... Little did I know then that in real life academic excellence is not enough to be successful?



After reading the notice I went fuming to my room. I decided to inform the topmost person in Telco's management about the injustice the company was perpetrating. I got a postcard and started to write, but there was a problem: I did not know who headed Telco



I thought it must be one of the Tatas. I knew JRD Tata was the head of the Tata Group; I had seen his pictures in newspapers (actually, Sumant Moolgaokar was the company's chairman then) I took the card, addressed it to JRD and started writing. To this day I remember clearly what I wrote. 'The great Tatas have always been pioneers. They are the people who started the basic infrastructure industries in India, such as iron and steel, chemicals, textiles and locomotives they have cared for higher education in India since 1900 and they were responsible for the establishment of the Indian Institute of Science. Fortunately, I study there. But I am surprised how a company such as Telco is discriminating on the basis of gender.'



I posted the letter and forgot about it. Less than 10 days later, I received a telegram stating that I had to appear for an interview at Telco's Pune facility at the company's expense. I was taken aback by the telegram. My hostel mate told me I should use the opportunity to go to Pune free of cost and buy them the famous Pune saris for cheap! I collected Rs 30/- each from everyone who wanted a sari when I look back, I feel like laughing at the reasons for my going, but back then they seemed good enough to make the trip.



It was my first visit to Pune and I immediately fell in love with the city.



To this day it remains dear to me. I feel as much at home in Pune as I do in Hubli, my hometown. The place changed my life in so many ways. As directed, I went to Telco's Pimpri office for the interview.



There were six people on the panel and I realized then that this was serious business.



'This is the girl who wrote to JRD,' I heard somebody whisper as soon as I entered the room. By then I knew for sure that I would not get the job. The realization abolished all fear from my mind, so I was rather cool while the interview was being conducted.



Even before the interview started, I reckoned the panel was biased, so I told them, rather impolitely, 'I hope this is only a technical interview.'



They were taken aback by my rudeness, and even today I am ashamed about my attitude. The panel asked me technical questions and I answered all of them.



Then an elderly gentleman with an affectionate voice told me, 'Do you know why we said lady candidates need not apply? The reason is that we have never employed any ladies on the shop floor. This is not a co-ed college; this is a factory. When it comes to academics, you are a first ranker throughout. We appreciate that, but people like you should work in research laboratories.



I was a young girl from small-town Hubli. My world had been a limited place.



I did not know the ways of large corporate houses and their difficulties, so I answered, 'But you must start somewhere, otherwise no woman will ever be able to work in your factories.'



Finally, after a long interview, I was told I had been successful. So this was what the future had in store for me. Never had I thought I would take up a job in Pune. I met a shy young man from Karnataka there, we became good friends and we got married.



It was only after joining Telco that I realized who JRD was: the uncrowned king of Indian industry. Now I was scared, but I did not get to meet him till I was transferred to Bombay. One day I had to show some reports to Mr Moolgaokar, our chairman, who we all knew as SM. I was in his office on the first floor of Bombay House (the Tata headquarters) when, suddenly JRD walked in. That was the first time I saw 'appro JRD'. Appro means 'our' in Gujarati. This was the affectionate term by which people at Bombay House called him. I was feeling very nervous, remembering my postcard episode. SM introduced me nicely, 'Jeh (that's what his close associates called him), this young woman is an engineer and that too a postgraduate.



She is the first woman to work on the Telco shop floor.' JRD looked at me. I was praying he would not ask me any questions about my interview (or the postcard that preceded it).



Thankfully, he didn't. Instead, he remarked. 'It is nice that girls are getting into engineering in our country. By the way, what is your name?'



'When I joined Telco I was Sudha Kulkarni, Sir,' I replied. 'Now I am Sudha Murthy.' He smiled and kindly smile and started a discussion with SM. As for me, I almost ran out of the room.



After that I used to see JRD on and off. He was the Tata Group chairman and I was merely an engineer. There was nothing that we had in common. I was in awe of him.



One day I was waiting for Murthy, my husband, to pick me up after office hours. To my surprise I saw JRD standing next to me. I did not know how to react. Yet again I started worrying about that postcard. Looking back, I realize JRD had forgotten about it. It must have been a small incident for him, but not so for me.



'Young lady, why are you here?' he asked. 'Office time is over.' I said, 'Sir, I'm waiting for my husband to come and pick me up.' JRD said, 'It is getting dark and there's no one in the corridor.



I'll wait with you till your husband comes.'



I was quite used to waiting for Murthy, but having JRD waiting alongside made me extremely uncomfortable.



I was nervous. Out of the corner of my eye I looked at him. He wore a simple white pant and shirt. He was old, yet his face was glowing. There wasn't any air of superiority about him. I was thinking, 'Look at this person. He is a chairman, a well-respected man in our country and he is waiting for the sake of an ordinary employee.'



Then I saw Murthy and I rushed out. JRD called and said, 'Young lady, tell your husband never to make his wife wait again.' In 1982 I had to resign from my job at Telco. I was reluctant to go, but I really did not have a choice. I was coming down the steps of Bombay House after wrapping up my final settlement when I saw JRD coming up. He was absorbed in thought. I wanted to say goodbye to him, so I stopped. He saw me and paused.



Gently, he said, 'So what are you doing, Mrs. Kulkarni?' (That was the way he always addressed me.) 'Sir, I am leaving Telco.'



'Where are you going?' he asked. 'Pune, Sir. My husband is starting a company called Infosys and I'm shifting to Pune.'



'Oh! And what will you do when you are successful.'



'Sir, I don't know whether we will be successful.' 'Never start with diffidence,' he advised me 'Always start with confidence. When you are successful you must give back to society. Society gives us so much; we must reciprocate. Wish you all the best.'



Then JRD continued walking up the stairs. I stood there for what seemed like a millennium. That was the last time I saw him alive.



Many years later I met Ratan Tata in the same Bombay House, occupying the chair JRD once did. I told him of my many sweet memories of working with Telco. Later, he wrote to me, 'It was nice hearing about Jeh from you. The sad part is that he's not alive to see you today.'



I consider JRD a great man because, despite being an extremely busy person, he valued one postcard written by a young girl seeking justice. He must have received thousands of letters everyday. He could have thrown mine away, but he didn't do that. He respected the intentions of that unknown girl, who had neither influence nor money, and gave her an opportunity in his company. He did not merely give her a job; he changed her life and mindset forever.



Close to 50 per cent of the students in today's engineering colleges are girls. And there are women on the shop floor in many industry segments. I see these changes and I think of JRD. If at all time stops and asks me what I want from life, I would say I wish JRD were alive today to see how the company we started has grown. He would have enjoyed it wholeheartedly.



My love and respect for the House of Tata remains undiminished by the passage of time. I always looked up to JRD. I saw him as a role model for his simplicity, his generosity, his kindness and the care he took of his employees. Those blue eyes always reminded me of the sky; they had the same vastness and magnificence.





(Sudha Murthy is a widely published writer and chairperson of the Infosys Foundation involved in a number of social development initiatives. Infosys chairman Narayana Murthy is her husband.)


Article sourced from: Lasting Legacies (Tata Review- Special Commemorative Issue 2004), brought out by the house of Tatas to commemorate the 100th birth anniversary of JRD Tata on July 29, 2004

India..symbol of secularism, unity & brotherhood

(A Muslim lady taking her young son to school to participate in a Janmashtami function....)







so what if some of the people in the world are interested in looking at the wrong side of Indian secularism only..there is a beautiful "INDIANISM" which resides in every Indian's heart and that is the true inspiration for the thought called INDIA !!

Some quotes of Muhammad Ali..the greatest boxer

# We all have the same God, we just serve him differently. Rivers, lakes, ponds, streams, oceans all have different names, but they all contain water. So do religions have different names, and they all contain truth, expressed in different ways forms and times. It doesn't matter whether you're a Muslim, a Christian, or a Jew. When you believe in God, you should believe that all people are part of one family. If you love God, you can't love only some of his children.



# Wouldn't it be a beautiful world if just 10 percent of the people who believe in the power of love would compete with one another to see who could do the most good for the most people?



# If we continue to think and live as if we belong only to different cultures and different religions, with separate missions and goals, we will always be in self-defeating competition with each other.
Once we realize we are all members of humanity, we will want to compete in the spirit of love.



# In a competition of love we'll all share in the victory, no matter who comes first.



# I've wrestled with an alligator..
tussled with a whale..
handcuffed the lightening..
& thrown thunder in the jail..

...Murdered a rock.. injured a stone..hospitalised a brick..
i am so mean.. i make medicines sick !!

A mere update..

Life has become a bit busy these days.. dunno how to take time out..
I've heard married people making such claims....but being a single and still not being able to take some moments to update.. is really a big problem of mine i guess..

am i lazy ??
i guess so !!

so the festive season is going on.. witnessed the "Dahi-Handi" celebration of "Janmashtami" near by..
it was good..reminded me of my childhood memories..and my stupidities too :)

The Festive Season sets in..

was out of station.. was sufferring from fever..
was not interested in writing any stuff..





But jus thought to write a few lines about this festive season which started from the beginning of the pious month of "Shraavan" (Saawan)..
The month of Lord Shiva..People fast and pray..visit temples to offer their prayers to the supreme lord of this world.. Mahadeva Shiva

Yesterday was "Hariyali Teej" and i've come to know that Islamic pious month of Ramadan too has begun from yesterday. I was just wondering that it was "Hariyali Teej" yesterday i.e. it was the third day after the "Amavasya" then how come Ramadan started from the Third day of the moon 'cuz i've heard that Ramadan starts from the First day of the moon after "Amavasya"..

Also, "Ganesh Chaturthi" is on 11th of September.. and as the name suggests..it falls on "Chaturthi" i.e. 4th day after the "Amavasya". Again, the islamic festival of "Eid-ul-Fitr" is coinciding with "Ganesh Chaturthi" i.e. on 11th of September.. Now..i can't understand..how is it possible that "Eid" is falling on 4th day after "Amavasya" when the word "Eid ka Chaand" refers to the moon after the first day of "Amavasya"

Ok....leaving it aside.... we are going to have Parsi's (Zoroastrian's) New Year on 19th of August and the most beautiful festival for celebrating the bond between Brother and Sister on 24th of August..i.e. "Rakshabandhan" !!

But...... we are having one of the best day scheduled on this sunday.. and that is
"15th of August".... the Independence Day (Swatantrata Divas).. the day India got independence from the British Rule....

"Happy Independence Day" and "Happy Festive season" to all of you !!

The Palestinian Card

You probably think the flotilla is about the Palestinian people....

Well, yes and no.


For much of the last six decades, the Palestinian 'cause' has really been a Palestinian 'card' used by regional powers in the region aspiring for pre-eminence in the Middle East. This is the First Law of Middle Eastern Geopolitics-if you want to be the leader of region, you must first show your support for the Palestinian cause by poking Israel in the eye. The Second Law is that once you have played the Palestinian card, you can move on to your real agenda.

Egypt-once the "leader of the Arabs" in the 1960s-fought two wars with Israel before settling for a peace deal in the 1970s. It now gets large sums of money in aid from the United States. Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran then pressed its claims for leadership of the region, and promptly used Syrian and Lebanese proxies to strike Israel. Iran's Sunni Arab neighbours didn't like the idea of a radical Shia regime grabbing the mantle of regional leadership and Saddam Hussein stepped up to challenge the Khomeini's Islamic Republic. He even lobbed several Scud missiles towards the Jewish state, in return for which he received Yasser Arafat's endorsement. Iraq lost the war. So did the Palestinians actually, who became suspect in the eyes of the Kuwaitis and other Gulf Arab states. With both Iran and Iraq under sanctions in the 1990s, the mantle of leadership of the Middle East fell upon the sophisticated shoulders of Saudi Arabia.

The Saudis, unlike previous claimants to Middle Eastern leadership, didn't launch tanks, proxies or missiles at Israel. Instead they launched a roadmap. It went nowhere-although, as they say in diplomatese, it is still on the table. Meanwhile the Iranians got caught working on a nuclear weapons project. The worried Saudis let it be known that they might not be averse to Israeli jets flying over their airspace just in case, you know, the Israelis want to bomb Iran's nuclear facilities. That's because Riyadh calculates that balancing the Iranians is more important than is midwifing a Palestinian state. Despite appearances and rhetoric, the interests of Saudi Arabia and Israel are aligned over preventing Iran from dominating the region.
Neither Egypt nor Iraq qualify for a place at the top of the Middle Eastern league today. Thanks to the US wars that weakened its two big neighbours, Iraq and Afghanistan, Iran is certainly a contender. So is Saudi Arabia. Last week, Turkey announced that it has joined the race, and, in accordance with the diktats of the First Law, played the Palestinian card. The flotilla was a strategic masterstroke-the moment it set sail, Turkey won and Israel lost. If it had been allowed to pass through, Turkey would be seen has having broken Israel's will. If the flotilla were stopped, Turkey would be the leader of an international chorus condemning Israel for blockading the Palestinians.

"Turkey," Samuel Huntington wrote in The Clash of Civilizations, "has the history, population, middle level of economic development, national coherence, and military tradition and competence to be the core state of Islam. In explicitly defining Turkey as a secular society, however, Ataturk prevented the Turkish republic from succeeding the Ottoman empire in that role." One of the most astute -- if controversial-political scientists of the 20th century, Huntington noted that "[at] some point, Turkey could be ready to give up its frustrating and humiliating role as a beggar for membership in the West and to resume its much more impressive and elevated historical role as the principal Islamic interlocutor and antagonist of the West. But to do so it would have to reject Ataturk's legacy..." This was in 1996, six years before Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi (AKP) came to power.

The AKP government is indeed engaged in a battle to overturn Ataturk's legacy-secularism is out, Islamism-of the 'mild' variety, we are assured-is in. Military dominance is out, democracy is in. And in foreign policy, alignment with the West is out, neo-Ottomanism is in. Ahmet Davutoglu, political science professor, AKP's foreign policy strategist and the current foreign minister, believes that Turkey must project power across its traditional sphere of influence. Last year, when the Chinese government cracked down in Xinjiang in the face of unrest between the Uyghur minority and the Han majority, the strongest international condemnation came from Ankara. Turkey has also sought a role in stabilising Afghanistan-Pakistan, ending the stand-off over Iran's nuclear programme and brokering a deal between Israel & Syria.

Yet it was only when Turkey floated the flotilla to Gaza that people took notice. The successor to the Ottoman empire had announced its arrival. Turkey's move towards becoming the dominant power in the Middle East is, however, by no means guaranteed. As my colleague V Anantha Nageswaran told me, Western speculators can exploit Turkey's vulnerable bond and currency markets and bring the country down some notches. There is a small chance that the military-secularist old guard could yet eject the AKP from power. In all likelihood though, Turkey will be an important-if not the most important-player in the Middle East.

The re-emergence of Turkey as a major power offers India the opportunity to balance its relationships with Saudi Arabia, Iran and Israel. This calls for India to reorient its relationship with Turkey, identify common interests-managing China's influence in Central Asia, for instance-and convert them into cooperative initiatives. That will also require Turkey to look beyond its relationship with Pakistan. In fact, this is the issue that will answer the big question: is Davutoglu's neo-Ottomanism merely pan-Islamism or is it about Turkey's national interests? If it is the former, then Turkey will allow its relationship with India to be constrained by its ties with Pakistan. Not so, if it is the latter.

What about the Palestinians, you ask? Well, it took the Economist all of 74 words to describe the contours of a solution. That solution, which will give the Palestinians their own state, requires both Israelis and the Palestinians to compromise. To be constructive, international intervention must push both sides towards compromise. Demonising one side emboldens the other to be more inflexible than it might otherwise be. Yet that is what the flotillas have done. Turkey got its glory, Israel is in the dock and the United States doesn't know what to do. The people of Gaza don't get anything more than schadenfreude.

Do you still think it's about the Palestinian people?






[P.S.: This article is written by Mr. Nitin Pai. Nitin Pai is founder & fellow for geopolitics at the Takshashila Institution and editor of "Pragati - The Indian National Interest Review", a publication on strategic affairs, public policy and governance.]

(Source: http://in.news.yahoo.com/columnist/nitin_pai/3/the-palestinian-card)

24/7

24/7....This day has always been special for me.

Evey year it tells me that I've grown one more year in age, experience and probably learning too.

I like this day most in my life 'cuz some of my life's bitter experiences too have come my way on this day or the week in which this day appears.

Ah..Life..what do you have in store for me ??


"Tujhse Naaraz nahin zindagi....hairaan hoon main"