The astute businessman lives his life and manages his business drawing inspiration from the Bhagavad Gita. He quotes extensively from it, which is not surprising considering the fact that every weekend, he and his wife attend a class on the teachings of the dharmic scriptures conducted by his guru.
A great believer in the power of sharing one’s privileges, his philanthropic enterprise, The Ajay G. Piramal Foundation runs multiple programmes for the rural poor in his home state of Rajasthan. He is also the Chairman of Pratham India, India’s largest non-governmental organization in the education sector, reaching out to over 33 million children through its ‘Read India’ campaign.
Piramal finds great inspiration in Rabindranath Tagore’s words:
Let me not pray to be sheltered from dangers,
But to be fearless in facing them.
Let me not beg for the stilling of my pain,
But for the heart to conquer it.
Let me not look for allies in life’s battlefield,
But to my own strength.
Let me not crave in anxious fear to be saved,
But hope for the patience to win my freedom.
Grant me that I may not be a coward,
Feeling your mercy in my success alone.
But let me find the grasp of your hand
In my failure.
Piramal’s letter to his daughter Nandini, an executive director at the group’s flagship company, Piramal Healthcare, gives a fascinating insight into his own journey to finding unbelievable success and mental bliss.
Dear Nandini,
A long time ago, when I was a young man of 24, my father, whom I was very close to, passed away unexpectedly, leaving the family without its anchor. He was the head of our family in every sense of the way. We depended on him for guidance and emotional sustenance and his death left us rudderless and the family business, without a leader. Somehow, we recouped with the help of your uncle, my brother Ashok, who became the new father figure in our lives and took over the family business. It was a difficult time. Soon after dad’s demise, the family itself went through a difficult division of assets and I chose to remain with Ashok in the textile business which constituted 90 percent of our business interests while my other brother decided to move away.
On January 1, 1982, just days after the division, our business was hit by a trade union strike. This was the infamous Datta Samant textile strike that paralyzed Mumbai’s thriving textile industry and our business went into limbo for the eighteen months that the strike lasted. Our valuations took a severe drubbing and while we were still coming to grips with the losses, my beloved brother, who was just 35 years of age at the time, was diagnosed with cancer. He suffered from the disease for over a year before passing away in 1984. I was 29-years-old then.
Suddenly, at 29, I found myself all alone, faced with the prospect of shouldering the responsibility of not just running the family business which was in shambles but also of being in charge of two families—mine and my brother’s. He had left behind a young wife and three children, the youngest of who was merely 3-years-old. Life seemed like a huge burden, an impossible task, and there were a lot of people who wondered how I could handle all this since I was an inexperienced young man. They thought the business would fold up without a leader, in no time.
But it was my faith and the spiritual teachings of my father that carried me through this difficult phase. He had a great belief in God and in a superior force above, which he believed, watches us at all times. So even though the world thought I was inexperienced, I knew that both my father and my brother had complete faith and confidence in me and that helped instilling a self-belief.
Your mother, Swati, too was no different. She always gave me the support and strength to face challenges and had the ability to look at the brighter side of things, even in the most difficult of circumstances.
How else can you explain the fact that just a couple of months before my brother passed away, we acquired Gujarat Glass, a move into a completely uncharted territory for us? My brother and Swati encouraged me to follow up that acquisition even when he was seriously ill because they believed that it was important to diversify our business so we would not be vulnerable to factors over which we had no control. And so, even though we were steeped in debt at that point, we made the acquisition in order to de-risk ourselves. Twenty years later, our textile business constituted less than 5 percent of our total business. We had succeeded in completely changing the complexion of the group.
We made that acquisition in June and my brother passed away in August, leaving me with a crucial life lesson: Life has to go on, no matter how big the loss or how deep the suffering from life’s unexpected surprises are.
Looking back now, I can see how lucky I was to have people in my life who had enough faith in me to let me make mistakes and grow from them. None of us can learn without making a few mistakes of our own.
I also learnt that what we look upon as really hopeless, bad times, are merely temporary phases which will also pass and life will be smooth again. I learnt courage from my brother who valiantly fought cancer, never giving up once or complaining about his lot in life. Never once did he say: ‘Why me?’ I learnt from him to always be optimistic. He also taught me that the difficult phases in life are moments in passing and that a situation that you think you will not be able to survive will not seem so bad when you look back at it. We as humans
