A summary of the talk delivered by Mr M V Subbiah, Retired Chairman & Advisor, Murugappa Group at the 51st MMA Annual General Meeting held on 29th June 2007

It gives me great privilege and pleasure to be here this evening and give the special address. Before I proceed, may I take the opportunity to congratulate the 3 winners on the Excellence Award that they won. PSG had done an excellent job and everybody knows about that. I would like to add my congratulation to PSG and their team. I have seen their work. It is excellent and certainly deserves to be recognized and I am glad that MMA had recognized that today. Then, Green Park, the new entrant in the hospitality business and they have done extremely well. It sounds as though that they are located far away, but once you go there, you realize it is well worth taking the trip and I would like to congratulate the Green Park people. It is a bit embarrassing to congratulate the Corborundum Team because it looks it is all organized in advance and I was invited. I realized and I said, I am sorry. I declined. Mr. Ranganathan in a very innovative way asked me to congratulate the winners in a special address. I was still wondering what this special address is all about. But a good thing is that I have no problem at all in congratulating the CUMI team because they got it 3 to 4 years after my retirement from the Group before they won the Award and really they have done an excellent job and they continue to do a good job. Sreeni and his team, congratulations to all the members.

I have been wondering what is this special address and I have decided to take a different stand from the standard speeches, After your retirement, if don’t use your muscles, you lose them. If you don’t use your brain, you lose that too. So trying to use a little bit of brain and muscles whatever is there from the time of retirement. Questions like, why one Indian is a genius, two Indians are friends, three Indians automatically means politics and four Indians automatically means chaos. Questions I was bombarded with for a whole year at Kellogs Business School I am sure, all of you have heard the story of the Indian crab mentality - why India has the most ferocious crabs in the world. We are taking global strides and we are getting recognized in the globe everywhere. I have been asking a question Why is this recognition for us suddenly? It has been 60 years since our independence. We have been industrializing from the 40s and in the 50s. Why suddenly this recognition and why repetition on Indians being a genius on the one hand and chaos when four of them get together. Why is traffic so bad and everything is so disorganized; why is it we don’t learn from the western world? These are the kinds of questions I have been asking ever since I went on a sabbatical. Is there anything common within us the 1.2 billion Indians except our passports! That seems to be the only common thing we seem to have. Otherwise, everything is different. Our clothing habits are different, our food habits are different, our systems of leadership are very different. Even if we take the national leadership, we seem to have multiplicity of leadership all the time. Is there anything which we really feel proud about except being an Indian? Why is that when we go out of our country or in our own country, why is there no pride? Why is it there is no self esteem? This is the question which has been bothering me quite a bit and I have been researching more and more on it. What is so special about us? Are we only 1.2 billion people? Or are we 2.4 billion people? And why in the past 10 years all of a sudden we have been recognized by the world, and what has got us this recognition? I believe all these are very common and has a very similar answer.

I have no answer for any of these questions but I am trying to develop a hypothesis on this which I believe has something to do with the management thinking and why do we have the recognition and why do we have chaos. The hypothesis is very, very simple. If we analyse, we are the only river based civilization over 5000 years which continues to have the original philosophy and has been unchanged in every respect. I think the roots are for everything else we see in India Now what is this philosophy? I would not call it a religion, I would call it a philosophy, a thought process – you were supposed to do your duty and everything else would be done for you. Do your karma. If you look at the river based civilizations of the rest of the world, none of them exists in the original way it was formed 5000 years ago. Tigress or Nile, the Yellow River, the Yangtze or the Amazon. All of them have gone through tremendous changes and have lost their roots and philosophies. Ours is the only one where we have our original philosophy and this original philosophy of ours, and all the metals we used 5000 years ago speak about the history and anthropology of our country. We just go and stand in the Saidapet Bridge and see the way the washer man washes the clothes. See some of the very, very old carvings. Unfortunately we don’t document anything. The only thing that is available for us is some carvings- stone carvings and occasionally the Ajantha paintings. We begin to observe the dhobi washing the clothes exactly the same way 5000 years ago or 3000 years ago, 2000 years ago or 500 years ago. The way we cook in the villages, 60 to 70% of the India – most of us sitting in side this room may not know what is happening. What do they do? They carry the fire wood exactly the same way as they did 5000 years ago. You see the books, everything that we see today almost 75 to 80% of village life continues exactly untouched for 5000 years. How many books or religious books do we have compared to every other religion in the word- all other religions in the world were born in desert countries. Couple of religions Taoism of China and India were born in river based countries. So, there are some differences but by and large most of them have only one book – either Quran or Bible. We have 4 Vedas and 18 Upanishads and apparently 64000 interpretations and if somebody says, you must not start in the Rahu Kalam, it is for sure that somebody would come and say, if you have to do it, why don’t you a tie a one rupee coin for Ganesha and you can go. That is we find a route! Look at the Artha Shasthra, what does it say? Saama, Daana, Bedha, Dhandam. No other philosophy talks about the Bedha, part of the method of the work getting done, except in Indian philosophy. What is bedha? One of the interpretations of bedha is “divide and rule” and the other interpretation is “corruptions” and the third is “deceit”. There are 9 interpretations of bedha in Sanskrit. So you can use any of them to get your work done. Look at Ramayana and Mahabharatha and what do we see? A lot of deceit was used. Is there any difference from what is happening today? It is exactly the same thing, isn’t it? So we say, the value systems are changing. But it was used and it was done. But the British understood this much faster than we did. Why are we shining today? Why is India on the world map? Two basic industries which have made the difference 10 years ago. Software and agriculture. Analyse the work there. Patiently any individual who gets a procedure written down somewhere in NASA gets it on the computer, sits and writes the algorithm and sends it back the next morning. That is all he does. He has to work with the computer. He is not working with a group of people. He uses his brain power to create an algorithm – he does not know anything about space launch or stuff like that but he writes an algorithm. That is what our software engineers are doing. We don’t have a product – we have our brain, the individual brain. Look at the farmer. He basically works on reverse engineering. An individual brain working. So our individualism is our strength. On the other hand we have been trying for the last 60 years following what the British gave us, systems of working together collectively. What did British do with us, when they came in 250 years ago. I don’t know how many of you are aware, Macaulay came to India as a senior ICS officer to pay his father’s medical bills? That is why he was sent to India. Robert Clive was sent to India because he was a rogue and could not be handled in England. So Macaulay after travelling around the whole country delivered this speech in the British Parliament in 1835: “I have travelled the length and breadth of India. I have not seen one person who is a beggar or a thief. Such wealth I have seen in the country; such high moral values, people of high calibre, that I do not think that we would ever conquer this country. Unless we break the very back bone of this nation, with its spiritual and cultural heritage. Therefore I propose that we replace her old and traditional education system. If Indians think all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self esteem. They will become what you want them to become, a truly dominated nation”. That is exactly how we have been in the 250 years of British rule. But why are we doing it even after they left us 60 years ago? It is the question we never asked. That is what Macaulay says, we did not know why we do not go back and check our roots. We don’t go back to study history. We don’t go back to study anthropology. Oh! They are not subjects for us. We are all in the software business and we have got to be engineers. We have got to be scientists. Nobody has done any research in Anthropology. If at all they are going to do research on Anthropology, it is either on girl child or something like that. I think this is the sad part of our country. We have no self esteem and Macaulay had wanted that to happen. And it happened.

You are telling software is great and you are being recognized. I am going to give another example which would be very interesting. This time it is the software guy or guy in computer business. Even after 60 years of independence, we are still struggling to get our self esteem. So Adam Asbond, the co-founder of the Apple computer has this to say about us Indians. “I was raised in Tamilnadu. I don’t know how many of you are aware of the fact that he was raised in Tamilnadu, in South India, in the Ashram of Sri Ramana Maharishi, My English father and Polish mother were dedicated followers of Maharishi. After all, how could anyone even an English boy growing up in Thiruvannamalai in an ashram not acquire pride in his roots? He is saying that the pride that he acquired was in Thiruvannamalai. I was surrounded by Indians who were very proud of their heritage. They believed that they had a lot to teach Europeans. It is therefore with some misgivings that today I find myself dealing with Indians many of whom do not feel proud of their Indianness. Indians are recognized throughout America as technically superior. The day Indians learn to have pride in their own country, the day they work together as Indians, they will move out of their third world status and become one of the world’s industrial powers. This is what Adam Asbond is saying and not me. It is basically to do with our own self esteem. We have no self esteem. We always think, a white guy, a guy who can speak English has got a greater position and that is why we all want to learn English. Not many of us are willing to learn our own mother tongue. I am equally a culprit. I am trying my best to understand a little bit of Sanskrit.
So basically, ladies and gentlemen, it is the individualism which has brought us the pride that we have today. We are riding on somebody else’s pride. Infosys, TCS, WIPRO and Ranbaxy. Can we learn from this and do something about it? We are innovative. Individually we are extremely innovative. So what is the challenge for all of us – in leadership or management? How many of us are conscious of the fact that we can do something about it if we go to our own roots. It is amazing what kind of things we can do. It is amazing what I am learning from my village. Everybody says, Chettiyars havw come from Chettinadu. We are from Kovalan and Kannagi and things like that. Nobody is able to give the connection between Kovalan and Kannagi Chettiars. Those who moved into Karaikudi area are nattu kottai chettiyars. There are several chettiyars. So what you see are some marriage customs. Though all the chettiyars are from different communities, there are some common aspects in their marriage systems. There must have been common connections somewhere else. These are the kind of research that the universities and institutions must be doing. Unfortunately, there is very little done on this. If at all it is being done, it is done by American universities. If we apply the Maslow’s theory to the river base civilization and see what is happening, Maslow’s theory talked about Hierarchy of needs: air, water, food, shelter and social actualizations. If we see the river side civilization, it had all these things which we all had and we are all doing. We had air, water, shelter, and things like that. What we need was always self actualization. That is exactly what we are doing, what Amartya Sen called “we sit and argue” In the olden days we used to sit and dialogued and therefore there was something creative. Today we sit and argue because we don’t know the dialogue, the process of dialogue has been forgotten. So instead of doing that, can we go back to the process of dialoguing and in the process of dialoguing become creative and innovative. As leaders and managers, can we create an environment in our plants, in our society, in our towns and villages, where we encourage dialogues rather than encourage arguments. I think, then not only software industry and pharma industries the other innovative industries would start moving and bringing pride to India. Then we would all be proud as individuals and Indians