Be happy 365×24×7. Dear Kanna, if you decide today that you want to stay back in the US because your happiness lies there, don’t feel pressured to come back home because you feel guilty that I am alone. Only when you are happy can you make me happy, so don’t compromise on your needs and happiness. Often a woman is told to blend into the family she marries into. To me, blending into an environment means understanding the value system of the family you are marrying into, respecting it, and complying with it in order to avoid jarring the existing equations in the family. But this should be only to the extent possible when you are in that environment. Remember to always define your own space in your family and to live by what you believe in. Don’t change yourself depending on where you end up in marriage.
When I quit ICICI to set up this private equity firm, a lot of people were skeptical; friends and family were concerned about where I was headed, even though their misgivings were out of concern for my well-being.
That venture has now grown to be significant success story and that is because I don’t subscribe to any bracketing or boxing of people into categories. I am a great believer of Osho and I believe that boxes are created by people to put others down and put themselves in a position of advantage by getting to live in a less threatened and less competitive world. Likewise, it’s with gender.
I truly believe that the only constraints to growth are the ones in the mind. In reality, the world outside is waiting to help you succeed in whatever it is you want to do, if you only reach out to it. If you believe you can do something, pursue it without distraction, without wasting time on fearing failure. Think deeper about how you can get to where you want to. The power of the universe is beyond our imagination and so are its resources. You are the master of your own destiny and nobody else.
As you set out on your own journey, I want to tell you that in life, nothing is more powerful than the power of love. What love can win for you is much more than what your intellect can. Let every engagement of yours be driven by love and genuine interest in people. My first disposition for everybody has always been genuine care and respect for their aspirations and dreams. I know from experience that there is nothing to be gained by being skeptical, over smart, or insecure and these are not crucial to success. Success itself is a nebulous thing. Great things can be achieved with love and by avoiding the dog-eat-dog mentality that seems often to have taken over the environment.
However, all of these things cannot be traded off or practiced to the detriment of competence or performance. If there is an economic activity that you are following, you have to respect that, respect the economic resources that go into it. But that need not be done to the detriment of love and caring. As a teenager, I was thought to be arrogant and opinionated when I was actually only just expressing my conviction about things.
I have learnt to have a complete open-mindedness to others’ point of view. I got the gift of positivity from a college mate at VJTI who, besides me, was the only girl in class. When I stood alone in the corridors all those years ago, weeping from the jibes and taunts of my male classmates, she would tap me on the shoulder and tell me to straighten my spine and get back to work. ‘If you choose to cry, you will do that for the next twenty years and nobody will care. But if you want to get on with your life and your career, make sure you are accepted by the boys. If you want to be part of the mainstream, figure out what it takes and do that. They are complete without you and you are the one who needs them so you have to make the effort,’ she would say. Instead of a cup of tea and a shoulder to cry on, she gave me that sharp wake-up call but it gave me the strength and the confidence to help me through that very difficult period. I can never thank her enough for that lesson well learnt!
There are other things that have been of immense value in my life. Early on in life, I was amazed by the positivity that my grandmother spread around her, by her happiness in the face of great adversity. To this day I can see her going about industriously, creating things out of the little resources she had—shopping bags from old clothes and the floral decorations for the daily puja at home. Our house had lovely things from the stuff that she made out of recycled items because she was an incredibly creative and persevering person. To this day, I don’t allow anyone to say anything negative around me. Positivity is contagious, so spread it around. There is nothing that I respect more than creativity and innovation, even if it is something small that the gardener does in our garden. Originality is a rare attribute to be cherished and nurtured. Never let go of your own originality and let society tell you that you are not good
