B S Ajaikumar - Excellence Has No Borders

I stepped out of the patio overlooking the beach and trudged across the warm sands. It was a typical Boston summer nightwarm and breezy. I neared the lapping waves and stopped. The North Atlantic stretched in front of me, like some great, swirling, dark abyss waiting to swallow me whole. I stepped into the waters. The cold current bit. I looked back at my palatial house and thought of the family inside. I wondered whether I would ever see them again.

I turned my gaze back to the ocean. Mysteriously, it had changed. It seemed friendlier now. Almost welcoming me into its waiting arms.

For a moment, the events of the preceding months flashed through my mind like a movie. The loss of twenty million dollars in the dot-com bust, the ripple effect it had had on the people who depended on me, and its impact on my dreams. Twenty million dollars! What all I could have done with that money!

It had been an exhilarating time for dot-com investors. Riding on the stupendous growth of the Internet as a business enabler, many investors had ploughed fortunes into Internet companies and almost anything that ended with a .com. Speculation had driven valuations through the roof and fundamentals had been thrown to the wind. It had been a perfect bubble that everyone had bought into.

Everyone, including me and my advisers.

I had invested hard-earned money. All in the hope of windfall gains and capital appreciation. Somehow, I had been carried away by the euphoria and professional advice. Pretty soon, I was sitting on a war chest of Internet stocks, all registering unprecedented price gains. Perhaps I had been too immersed in my work and too dependent on the professionals to take note of the red flags and the imminent fall.

But fall the stock market did.

Perhaps fall is not the word to describe it. It plummeted. It was a free fall. Which then turned into a free-for-all. Retail investors began pulling up their agents. Analysts were disagreeing with the actions of the Federal Reserve in the run-up to the crash. Venture capitalists were at loggerheads with reckless entrepreneurs, who had burnt through piles of cash.

As the world exploded around me, my stockbroker reassured me that all was well. Expectedly, his reassurances proved to be as worthless as the paper stock I was sitting on. Horror-struck, I realized that my dreams were shattered and I had let my people down. I felt miserable. I had just remodelled my house in Boston. We had been recently graced with the birth of twins, Aagnika and Asmitha. I had also opened a not-for-profit hospital in Mysuru, a private hospital in Bengaluru, and an NGO for womens empowerment. The employees families were dependent on me and I had a definite moral obligation. With my investments wiped out, these commitments started to look like millstones round my neck. It was then that the sleepless nights and burning sensations in my stomach started. Paranoia gripped me.

As I stood there in freezing cold water, the North Atlantic lapping at my feet, the burning sensation in my stomach returned with a vengeance. My financial losses seemed mind-numbing. Wild thoughts lashed my feverish mind.

How would I answer to myself about the moral obligation to the people who had trusted me? In all my life I had never worried about what society would say, but my conscience was my keeper. I was answerable to my conscience.

What would I tell my wife, Bhagya? She would be devastated.

What would I tell my people back home in India? Had I lost confidence in myself? How could I face my young children? They were too naive to realize what a gamble their father had taken to fulfil his dreams.

The reality finally hit me.

There was no way back.

I looked ahead at the North Atlantic as it mocked me. I stared right back.

Im coming!

I started wading forward, unmindful of who or what I was leaving behind.

I would not return. I would keep walking into the ocean until it consumed me, until it erased my existence from the face of this world.

As I ploughed into the inky black waters, fighting to keep my balance, a strange thing happened. As I stood knee-deep in water, an incoming wave hit my legs and pushed me back. I staggered.

Now, Im normally not someone who believes in mumbo jumbo about signs, but that push by a harmless wave somehow halted my train of self-destructive thoughts. A singularly assertive thought hit me like a freight train.

I am a fighter. I love challenges.

I looked down at myself. I was half drenched. Defeated. All at sea. But here I was, alive! I had lost money, tons of it. But I still had myself. I had my family. I looked up and stared at the ocean again.

Todays not your day!

I turned back.

It was a stare-off that had not ended well for the ocean.

I needed to get my confidence back. I knew that if I worked with all sincerity and determination, I would be able to salvage the situation. I glanced behind me for one final look at the oceanmy co-conspirator in crime not too long ago.

What was I thinking?

As my pace quickened over the sands back towards my house, my thoughts raced faster.

I could sell my house, get some liquidity. I would make sure that none of my hospitals closed. No employee would be laid off. I would rebuild everything!

And then, suddenly, it struck me.

My stockbrokers from the investment bank! I could sue them!

I clenched my teeth, recalling all the rosy outlook and reckless investment advice given to me.

* * *

The shrill ring continued.

I stirred in my bed. It was the bedside telephone. In the darkness, I peered at my watch. It was 2 a.m. This couldnt be good. I had just landed in Chicago a few hours earlier and had been looking forward to a full nights rest.

I snatched the receiver off the hook. It was Raghavendra, my domestic help in Mysuru.

Sir, Adarsh...

I bolted upright in bed, a sickening knot forming somewhere deep in my gut. What happened to Adarsh?

Sir, he... he fell down.

He... what?

He fell, sir. Weve called the doctors.

I was already out of bed, nudging Bhagya awake with one hand while I juggled my glasses and phone with the other. Where is he now?

Still on the floor where he fell. We couldnt lift him. What should we do now?

Barking instructions over the phone, I pulled out my overnighter and started packing essentials. Three hours later, I was at the OHare International Airport, on board a Lufthansa non-stop flight to Bengaluru. Bhagya was beside me, distraught yet strangely emotionless.

As I looked out the window, waiting for departure, I sunk back into my seat. This couldnt be happening, I thought. My dear son Adarsh. Bound to a wheelchair. All of twenty-seven years and born with a rare genetic muscle-wasting disorder called Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD). This left him weak, brittle and injury-prone. And now he had fallena catastrophe with his condition.