Sudha Murty - Wise and Otherwise - A Salute to life

We are heirs to the tradition of seeing human quality as sattwa, rajas or tamas. This is a beautifully Indian way of expressing a metaphysical concept familiar to other civilizations as well: of all Gods creations, man alone has a choice between good and evil, and he reaps his rewards according to what he chooses.

Few set out consciously to perform sattwik work. Fewer still deliberately desire a life of tamas. Some could even start out with tamas or rajas and elevate themselves to sattwa. All this would be attributed to the larger cosmic scheme of karma. Jamshedji Tata appears to have had only a sattwik view of life and worklaying an industrial foundation for his country, starting educational and research institutions, and setting up a network of charities when such ideas were unknown. On the other hand, Alfred Nobel spent his genius inventing dynamite and smokeless gunpowder, which would all become agents of mass destruction. Then, perhaps stung by the implications of his lifes achievements, he put the fortune he made to sattwik use by instituting the Nobel Prizes, as recognition for noble work.

Sudha Murty was not meant to hide her light under a housewifes bushel. She was born with teachers blood in her veins, and teaching, she learned early, was a vocation that could help shape the world. But she did not remain just another face in the teaching crowd either. Unseen but clearly felt forces propelled her into unfamiliar territory. For one thing, she married a man with socialist blood in his veins. For another, when the benedictions of capitalism came their way, the instincts of the teacher and the socialist combined to take them into an orbit of public service for public good. While remaining a teacher, wife, mother and very much the woman next door, Sudha Murty turned into an institution.

She has built no edifices. No public announcements accompany her work. No statues or tablets or archways proclaim her presence. She goes into tribal forests, into hamlets ravaged by poverty, into communities devastated by disease. She discovers the deserving on her own. The assistance she supplies meets the demand she sees. Frustrations, obstacles and red tape do not slow her down. Even human greed, a great deal of which she faces in the course of her work, does not dissuade her. Her work is her mission. She does her duty in the style and the spirit of the karma yogi.

This book gives a clear account of both her work and her approach to it. An accomplished storyteller in Kannada, Sudha wrote for the first time in English to inaugurate a fortnightly column in the New Sunday Express. She focused on her personal experiences, her travels and her encounters with ordinary people with extraordinary minds. The column attracted instant attention because of its freshness and its directness. Evidently, she was writing not with her pen but with her heart. It was clear from the start that these anecdotal insights into human nature merited a format more enduring than journalism could provide.

It would be a pity, though, if the benefits of these stories stop with the pleasure of reading them. Sudha Murty is nothing if not a message. By turning the success of Infosys into an opportunity to serve the less privileged, she has conveyed an idea to others similarly positioned. Corporate championship of social amelioration programmes on the one hand and intellectual creativity on the other is common in advanced countries, but rare in ours. There is nothing in India comparable to the foundations associated with families of great wealth in the West, such as Ford, Rockefeller and Nuffield. The most respected of them, the MacArthur Foundation, gives out what have come to be known as genius awards. No one knows about this because no publicity of any kind is given to it. Yet it quietly identifies people of great talentlike A.K. Ramanujanand quietly gives them funds to proceed with their chosen work. Thus is excellence, the true worth of a nation, nurtured by society. Sudha Murtys work will be complete only when the tradition of grand foundations rises in India to help the needy, recognize originality, facilitate intellectual inquiry and generally inspire the pursuit of greatness.

T.J.S. George
Editorial Adviser
The New Indian Express