I grew up surrounded by academicians, designers, business people, and each one of them has left his or her individual mark on me, taught me something. My aim is to constantly seek diversity and I hope this is what you seek out too because then, life truly becomes your biggest teacher. Diversity is the fun in life. Trust me.
Dear Ashni and Avni, one of the most important lessons I learnt early on in life is the importance of opening up the mind to different thoughts, opinions, views, emotions; the very process of doing this is a signal that we are accepting of people and ideas that are not our own and when we are able to do that, the rest falls in place. The most important thing is to be flexible in our thoughts and actions and to have the ability to hear and respect other people’s thoughts and opinions.
It is my flexible nature that makes it possible for us to have a no-holds-barred relationship. We never feel a generation gap between us because I learnt to be open to all kinds of opinions, no matter what age group that thought came from.
Is there a legacy that I want to leave you? Yes! But that legacy is not the business that we created. If anything, I want to leave you with the thought that life is a journey of learning and for each day that we are on this earth, there has to be hunger to learn something new, something more. As you set out on that journey with this belief, your approach to life will be different from mine. I wish and hope that you enjoy the journey of life. There is great fun in learning on your own.
With love and wishes,
Dad
K. V. Kamath
ndia’s best-known banker, Kundapur Vaman Kamath, was a carefree young man in engineering college in a tiny coastal town in Mangalore when, one day, his mother taught him his most important lesson in money management.
The housewife who spent her entire life in the little town did not chastize her son when she saw him smoke cigarette in those days. Instead, she taught him a simple lesson about money that he adopted as his mantra for the rest of his life.
‘Do you know the principal sum a person would have to have in his bank to generate the interest that you are blowing away in smoke? For every box of cigarettes that you buy, somebody has to actually work hard to invest that money to get the paltry return that you are blowing away in smoke rings,’ she told her son who later went on to architect what is today the country’s largest private sector bank, ICICI.
Today, Kundapur Vaman Kamath is the Chairman of Infosys Limited, India’s third largest IT services company. He continues to be associated with ICICI Bank as it is Non-Executive Chairman. Kamath’s life began in a small village in Mangalore where he grew up under the supervision of his grandmother, a self-sufficient woman with an independent streak, who gave him the first experience of just how much a determined woman can achieve. The mechanical engineer eventually brought about the transformation of a government backed developmental finance institution into India’s largest private lender but got his initial life lessons from his mother, a pioneering woman in the family who contested and won the local council election in Mangalore, when it was not at all common for women to have preoccupations outside their home and hearth. It is from watching her resoluteness that Kamath got his first glimpses of the true potential of women.
That young man is one of corporate India’s leading lights, with an awe-inspiring reputation that precedes him wherever he goes. He is the man who has almost singlehandedly mentored half a dozen of India’s most admired women leaders, a group of trendsetting women who began their careers as executives in the erstwhile ICICI (In the 1990s, ICICI transformed its business from a development financial institution offering only project finance to a diversified financial services group offering a wide variety of products and services, both directly and through a number of subsidiaries and affiliates like ICICI Bank) who were handpicked and groomed to take on leadership positions as the developmental finance institution transformed itself into India’s largest private sector bank.
In the years since then, it is a matter of great pride to him that one of his protégés, Chanda Kochhar, has taken over the mantle of steering the bank as its CEO and Managing Director while others have left to become heads of competing banks and financial service institutions. Much like a fond mother who might feel a temporary pang about her flock flying the coop, but takes pride in the fact that they have set out on their own individual journeys, Kamath watches with visible pride as his mentees take giant strides in the field of their choice.
The soft-spoken gentleman that I met in his office at the higher echelons of ICICI’s corporate headquarters in Mumbai, carried his many achievements lightly and insisted that the journeys and achievements of the women that he groomed would never have happened if they had not had it in them to relentlessly push their own boundaries. Each of them had it in them to take on a challenge and get after it with a single-minded commitment that nobody and nothing could distract them from.
It is perhaps one of life’s delicious ironies that his own daughter, a highly qualified young woman who left home in her teenage years to study and explore her own interests, chose to step off the beaten path and be
