Rohini Rathour - Leading Ladies: Inspiring stories of women who found their purpose with passion

Copyright ROHINI RATHOUR, 2016

Published by I_AM Self-Publishing, 2016.

The right of ROHINI RATHOUR to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved.

This book is sold subject to the condition it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be circulated in any form or by any means, electronic or otherwise without the publishers prior consent.

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This book is a tribute to every person who has touched my life, knowingly or not, bringing me to where I am today. In particular, I dedicate this book to my husband Gurdeep, my children Ayesha, Sonaali and Yuvraj, my parents Bhalchandra and Bharati, my aunt and uncle Nirmala and Gurudutt with whom I have always had a home away from home, Nicolas Paravicini, the man who gave me my first proper career break, and last but not least Jennifer Ramsey, the best colleague and friend I could have ever wished for.

Story is the song line of a persons life. We need to sing it and we need someone to hear the singing.
Story told. Story heard. Story written. Story read creates the web of life in words.

Christina Baldwin, Storycatcher

Introduction

CHAPTER 1

My Story

I spent 20 years in an industry that is all about managing money. I was a Fund Manager and my job was to invest our clients money. At the end of 2014, I decided to call time on a job that I had thought would be for life. In the months leading up to that decision it had dawned on me that too many things had changed, it was time to be brave. Greatly influenced by Stephen Coveys The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, I hoped to spend my career break developing Habit 7: Sharpen the Saw.

According to the author, Sharpening the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have: you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. As you renew yourself in each of the four areas, you create growth and change in your life. Sharpening the Saw keeps you fresh so you can continue to practice the other six habits. You increase your capacity to produce and handle the challenges around you. Without this renewal, the body becomes weak, the mind mechanical, the emotions raw, the spirit insensitive, and the person selfish.

It took me several years to find the right job. I used to wake up each working day looking forward to what the stock markets had in store for me. I thrived on the fact that no two days were ever the same. I had the opportunity to learn new skills, master different roles and carve out my own niche from where I could add value. The market over the years provided a recurring lesson in humility. I faced three major bear markets in my time, each one teaching me new lessons and providing a valuable perspective.

I met clever, hard-working people at the top of their game who represented organisations that have changed the way in which we live our lives. I learnt something new every day. In my capacity as fund manager, I was sometimes able to influence the way they ran their businesses. How many jobs are there that give you that sort of privilege, power and responsibility? One of the many rewarding aspects of my job was watching companies I had invested in achieve the potential I believed they possessed.

But I never grew up dreaming of becoming a fund manager or working in finance. In fact, where it all began could not have been further from where I am today.

The early years: living with change

I grew up in India and came from a family of servicemen. My paternal grandfather served in the Royal Indian Navy, my father and two of his three brothers also served in the Indian Navy and the Indian Army. For the sake of her childrens education, my grandmother lived in Mumbai, whilst my grandfather travelled to wherever his job took him. It cannot have been easy for her spending many years in a one-bedroom flat with five children, especially as four of them were boisterous boys. There are stories of how she had to tie the furniture down to stop her children from dragging chairs or tables to the balcony that overlooked onto a busy road from three floors above.

My grandfather was an austere man of deep integrity. His own experience of spending many years away from his family was a reason why he pioneered a centralised educational standard, which aimed at helping families of peripatetic service personnel in India. This resulted in schools being set up in major cities across the country that followed the same national curriculum with standard textbooks and enabled children to join from another school, even if they were part way through their academic year. These were named Kendriya Vidyalaya (Central Schools).

My brother and I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my grandfather and his colleagues because they made it possible for us to travel with our father every two or three years, with very little disruption to our education, to places where his job as a Naval Officer took him.

When you live with so much change, you experience many things that leave no lasting impression. Even though I remember some things clearly, like they happened yesterday, there are great swathes of other things and details of people who touched my life that have now simply disappeared from my memory.

I remember a maths teacher at a school in Delhi who took an irrational dislike towards me. She enjoyed humiliating me by calling me to the front and getting me to work out a problem on the blackboard, knowing full well that I would fail. I dont remember her name, but I will never forget how she made me feel: fearful and ashamed.

I told my mother about this teacher, hoping she would tell her to back off. Instead, my mother suggested that I focus on improving myself by spending 10-15 minutes doing maths after school. You can just imagine how well that suggestion went down with the twelve-year-old me.

At first, I was bitterly disappointed that my mother was not willing to fight for me. Her reasoning was that if I got better at maths the teacher would leave me alone and I had no choice but to acquiesce. A few weeks later, when I did particularly well on a test, my teacher turned to me and asked me if I had cheated. More importantly, just as my mother had said, once I was no longer a soft target, she stopped picking on me.

I moved to a school in Mumbai in the next academic year, where I had one of my best ever maths teachers, whose name I do remember. Mr Balani, with his happy smiling face, instilled in me a love for the subject that lives with me even today.

That experience as a young pre-teenager taught me one of the greatest of life lessons.

Choose your battles with care. Sometimes you can win simply by making yourself stronger, so the enemy has no appetite to fight you anymore.

Coming to England: an accidental immigrant

Growing up, I had no desire to live abroad, nor did I have any aspirations of a foreign education. Many of my fellow students were busy taking entrance exams that would enable them to study in the West with a scholarship. It was the gateway to a world of opportunity, meritocracy and abundance. These educational migrants were unlikely to return home. I did not want to be one of them.