Despite having studied abroad and having been exposed to the best education models, I am convinced that life has been the biggest teacher for you. You were both born on our farm at a time when your mother and I were extremely young and just learning to handle the responsibility of two girls. You would accompany me on my bullock cart to the farm and into the village, learning to enjoy the greenery and fresh air, prancing around without shoes, and attending the village school. At one point we even lived in a tent, out in the open.Later, when you were both still around 10 years of age, we shifted to Bangalore and you lived the urban experience.
My life itself has been my biggest adventure and you have had a ring-side view of it. After I resigned from the army, unable to cope with the ravages of war and its effect on my mind, I motorcycled through the length and breadth of the country and hitchhiked in the US. At 27, there was a kind of restlessness within me that I was unable to quell. I had led a full life, lived in the Himalayas for two years, experienced a war, and was longing to go back to my village. When I got there, I found the government had built a dam across the river and so my father’s small plot of land had been submerged by the waters. The compensatory land they had given my father was remote, about a hundred kilometres away. It had no water, no power, nor an approach road. But I did not find any of this intimidating. For me it was more romantic than anything else. I wanted to work with my hands on the soil, be alone, take long walks, read, raise cows, and grow crops. I was like a man possessed. Bitten by the farming bug, I went to Bangalore, bought a tent, a Doberman dog, enlisted the support of a village harijan boy to herd cattle, and went to the barren land to pitch my tent on my piece of land in the middle of nowhere. For two years I lived and breathed only that.
That has been the mantra of my life, dreaming and deciding the course that my life would take. That is how I joined the army, and subsequently Air Deccan airlines was born, and that is how I went back to farming. That is also how I founded the air cargo business a few years ago and I am now on course to restart Air Deccan.
Dear daughters, there is no recipe for success in life. Every day I get letters in the mail from people who want to know how I became successful. I just tell them to live their dream, whatever it may be, with passion and hunger. Have an inextinguishable optimism about yourself and things will fall in place. I never believed in failure and so I kept acquiring more businesses without fearing risk. In each of my ventures, that optimism propelled me and when things went wrong, I continued nevertheless, knowing I would survive. Things would ultimately reach back to near-normal. Hope always kept me afloat and alive and I always found a straw that I could grasp to survive.
It is the law of nature that at the height of our success the seed of decline is sown because suddenly you don’t want to take risks and lose what you have painstakingly built up. I believe each of us has to go through the cycle of success and failure.Your will is what will take you through life’s vagaries.
My father never sent me to school in childhood. The first time I went to school was in the fifth standard and I was never the worse for it because he taught me at home. Instead, he would take me to the fields and would show me the harijan way of labour. My father himself was a poor school teacher but he was better off than the harijans. He brought up seven to eight village children in the house who he would feed out of his small salary of Rs 90 per month. He never told me to emulate or aspire to be the village sahukar or the rich baniya, but he would show me the strength of character of the hard working peasant in the farm. He would point to the labour working in the slush in the fields and he would say: ‘They have nature’s bounty, free food, the blessing of being in the midst of nature’. He would read to me about the lives of Tagore and Gandhi, Nehru and Tilak, and he showed me the less fortunate people around me so that I always counted my blessings.He never gave me the opportunity to be envious of those more privileged. It was because of this that when I found myself living hand-to-mouth in
