V Raghunathan - Dont Sprint The Marathon

V. Raghunathans first career was as an academic as Professor of Finance at IIM, Ahmedabad, for nearly two decades, until early 2001. His second a corporate one started in 2001, first as President, ING Vysya Bank for about four years, and then with the GMR Group an infrastructure major. He is currently CEO, GMR Varalakshmi Foundation. Also, since 1990 he has been an Adjunct Professor at the University of Bocconi, Milan, lecturing on behavioural finance.

Raghu has published over 400 academic papers and popular articles, and six books. He is the author of the best-seller Games Indians Play - Why We Are the Way We Are (Penguin, 2006), and Stock Exchanges, Investments and Derivatives (Tata McGraw Hill, 2007). He also writes a regular guest column in The Economic Times and monthly pieces in Mint and is a busy public speaker.

He has probably the largest private collection of old locks in the country, has been a cartoonist with a national daily, has played chess at all-India level, and sketched competitively in the past.

His website is www.vraghunathan.com.

W E REGULARLY COME ACROSS PARENTS WHO PUSH themselves and who push their children to their limits in a bid to make them superachievers. Their assumption seems to be, if their child did not make it to a top engineering, medical or management school, somehow thats a letdown. They would speak of their child with a little less pride if the child did not score 95 per cent in the CBSE finals or make it to a good engineering or medical college, or score a big SAT score and make it into an Ivy League college in the US. There are also those among us, who, unless they are in high-profile careers, somehow feel life has passed them by, and give up on all enthusiasm. Then there are those in high-profile careers who have little time for their near and dear, or for their hobbies and interests, till it is too late. I have had my share of friends and acquaintances in all the above categories who hasnt?

Then there are all those reports that one sees in the newspapers regularly about children killing themselves, unable to bear the examination pressure. We see a number of schools where teaching is so routine that learning is given short shrift. It appears to me that a lot of parents, teachers and professionals are guilty of preparing their own lives and those of their children as if life were a sprint. The fact is that life is not a sprint at all. Rather, it mimics a marathon more. Clearly, much of todays generation has all the wrong coaches for the race they have to run!

It was to address these issues that I decided to write this book, aimed at parents, teachers and other adults especially the overambitious ones.

In the course of writing this book, five remarkable marathoners helped me with their time. These, in the alphabetical order of their surnames, are, Ela R. Bhatt, Ashwini Datta (formerly Ashwini Nachappa), N.R. Narayana Murthy, G.M. Rao, and Kallam Anji Reddy. I had sought their valuable time so that I could include excerpts of my interactions with them in this book for the benefit of the readers, to give them a brief window into the lives of some overachieving marathoners. My purpose was for readers to understand that overachievers do not have to be sprinters. I thank them most heartily for their time and their trust in me to share glimpses from their lives. There have been others too, no less remarkable, whose exemplary lives I have quoted for the same purpose. These are: Subash Bose, Ashish Goyal, Mahantesh G. Kivadasannar, V. Mani, T. Raja, P.D.K. Rao, Kim and Kishore S. Rao. I thank them for permitting me to enrich the book with their stories.

There are a number of my close friends and well-wishers who have helped me through various stages of this book. First and foremost, I am hugely indebted to my best friend and wife, Meena. As with all my previous books, she has been instrumental in plodding through my manuscripts, draft after draft. Her perspectives on education and life have contributed greatly to my thinking, and hence the book as well.

I owe a great deal to Sushma Bhalkikar and Nilofer Suleman, who reviewed the first draft for me and gave me some critical comments. Nor can I overlook the ever-smiling T.S. Unnikrishnan, who helped me with certain key sections of the book, particularly chapter 6.

One person who has enriched this book enormously with his critical comments, suggestions and ideas is my editor, Krishan Chopra. Krishan was also the one who edited my earlier book, Games Indians Play - Why We Are the Way We Are , under the Penguin banner. Without Krishans incisive and severe editing, the book would have been much poorer.

I hardly need mention that while the book has benifited immensely from all these excellent people, the shortcomings are all my own.

And lastly, no present-day writing is complete without that him or her conundrum. I believe in absolute equality of genders. However, I find it distracting to keep using him or her or he or she or S(he) etc. each time just to sound politically correct or to advertise to the world that I am not a male chauvinist. My experience (or call it my shortcoming, if you will) is that using a plural, though perhaps more gender-neutral, isnt always a workable option. So I have chosen not to use any systematic style on this count and have used whatever pronoun that first came to my mind. If anyone doubts my stance on gender equality, s(he) may feel free to call my wife for testimony! With that I rest my case.

V. R AGHUNATHAN

Imagine that you are the parent of an 11- to 15-year-old. When you moved to a new city, he took the entrance tests for two of the best schools in town. But he made it to neither. However, he managed to get into a school that was considered good, though not among the best. He appears to be bright, but not necessarily brilliant. His general grasp of school subjects is good, though his performance in examinations is at best just above average. In a class of sixty, he usually manages a rank in the top 20 per cent, but never in the top 5 per cent.