Mind Without Fear

by Rajat Gupta

  Anita

  One of my great regrets is that two of the most important women in my life never got to meet. I met Anita Mattoo, the woman who would eventually become my wife, in my third year at IIT, several months after Ma’s death. Anita and I were cast together in a play. In the early days of our friendship I often called her “Grandma,” since she had played the role of my grandmother on stage.

  Anita was in her first year when we met, a brilliant electrical engineering student, the only woman in her graduating class of two hundred and fifty students, and one of only a handful on campus. Very few women at that time pursued an engineering career; most went into medicine or other fields. My first impression of her was as a confident and compelling actress, but I soon learned that offstage she was a very shy girl and extremely smart. She too had lost her mother, the same year mine had died, and as the eldest she became like a mother to her youngest brother, who was just a baby, and her sister, who was only four years old at the time. We quickly became good friends.

  Indians didn’t “date” in the late 1960s, but we became good friends, and our friendship slowly developed into a romance during my fourth year. Every evening, after drama practice, I would walk her back to her dorm, a mile across campus, often lingering in the rose garden on our way.

  I learned important lessons in leadership during my third year at IIT. I’d been elected to the position of head of student government, an honor never before held by a third-year student. I quickly found myself at the center of a political standoff. In my view, party politics were best kept out of campus life. We were an educational institution, and I didn’t want political agendas derailing the academic focus of the college. However, the campus had a large non-academic staff, perhaps a thousand people or more, who were unionized, organized by one of our professors, Subramanian Swamy, a prominent and ambitious Harvard-educated economist who would later become a national politician. At a certain point, the university staff decided to strike, and there was a strong movement for the students to form a student union and strike in sympathy. Some of my friends strongly backed this idea. “We’re not being treated properly!” they declared. “The staff is not being treated properly.”

  I opposed the idea. “Of course, the staff have a right to strike,” I conceded, “but this kind of politics has no place in an educational institution.” I’d read so many stories in the papers about strikes on campus bringing everything to a halt, and I felt it set a dangerous precedent to allow those kinds of issues to derail our education.

  Things came to a head when three of the pro-union students staged a hunger strike in front of the director’s office. I negotiated between the various factions, eventually convincing the student body to forgo the strike. The strike was broken and the three students disciplined. It was a tough situation all round, but it had some positive outcomes. In the course of the negotiations, I was able to use my leverage to tackle some genuine grievances put forth by the student body, in particular a draconian rule that students must attend 85 percent of classes or fail the course. This was simply unrealistic—students miss classes for all kinds of reasons, and I felt that while first-year students might need the discipline of a high attendance requirement, it was unfair to impose it for the entire five years. So I worked with the school to develop a graduated attendance scale, beginning with 75 percent in the first year and reducing each year with no attendance requirement in the final two years. It was quite a revolutionary concept at the time. I was also able to change a rule that said if you failed one subject, you had one chance to retake it over the summer; otherwise you flunked the whole year. A lot of students fell afoul of this rule because English was not their first language, and they had trouble passing the English exam, despite being there to study engineering.

  Interestingly, the next year, Subramanian Swamy, the chief proponent of the unions, turned out to be my economics professor. He and I became good friends, with great mutual respect despite our differences of view, and when it came time for me to apply to business school he wrote my recommendation letter.

  As my time at IIT came to a close, I faced one of the defining choices of my life: would I apply to graduate school, business school, or seek employment? As I considered my options, I often thought back to those conversations with my father as we walked the hospital gardens.

  “Remember this, Ratan,” he would say, quoting his favorite poet, Rabindranath Tagore, “‘The roots below the earth claim no rewards for making the branches fruitful.’ That is the spirit of the karma yogi. The karma yogi gives freely of himself without expectation of reward or consequence. There are many paths to God, but this path of selfless service is the path I have walked, and I think it will be your path too. You must strive to do what is right without attachment to the results. Whether you have success or failure, you remain free of outcomes.”

  My father exemplified this ethos of selfless service—at times, to a fault. He sacrificed his own health and almost his life for the freedom of his country. He lived with an open door and open hands, so unattached to money and worldly goods that my mother had to squirrel away cash to keep the family fed. While I’d taken to heart the spirit of his message, I had also inherited my mother’s prudence and pragmatism. As I thought about my future, I tried to marry these two influences. I felt keenly that it was my duty to excel and make a difference to my country. I also felt compelled to be successful—not just for the sake of wealth or achievement, but in order to fulfill my responsibilities and have the greatest impact.

  I knew I didn’t want to pursue graduate work in engineering or take an engineering job, which left the broader world of business. I had little sense of that world, but it held a certain appeal nonetheless. I intuitively felt that management might be where my impact could be made and my leadership skills refined and tested. In this decision, as with most of my academic choices, I was also strongly influenced by the trends among my classmates. Those going into management were generally taking one or more of three paths: applying to business schools in India, applying to business schools in the US, or seeking employment with one of India’s bigger companies that offered management training programs. I decided to do all three.

  I sat the entrance exam for the Indian Institutes of Management (IIM) of Ahmedabad and Calcutta and was accepted. I also applied to a long list of American schools, including Harvard Business School. Although I had deep reservations about leaving my family and Anita to study so far away, I thought that this option had perhaps the best long-term prospects. I had long discussions with my siblings about the pros and cons—staying in India might bring more immediate benefit but I’d likely be able to do more for my family over time if I studied abroad. Didi had become engaged to a man she’d met at the Indian Institute of Science, so I knew she would soon be married. But Kumkum and Anjan were still in school, and the elderly spinster aunt also needed care. I hated to leave them, but in the end they were supportive of my decision to apply. Anita steadfastly encouraged me to go, despite the two-year separation it would mean, and the risk of us drifting apart. Later, she would confess that she was convinced I’d never come back, but she still felt it was right for me to go.

  The Chance of a Lifetime

  Personally, it was my dream to attend Harvard—after all, it was the best business school in the world. But I also knew it was unlikely I’d get in, since they usually chose students with several years of business experience under their belts, and they did not typically offer scholarships. With no money, I would be reliant on financial aid. Nevertheless, I spent several days sitting in a little cafeteria near the women’s hostel on campus, crafting the long application essays, with Anita editing. Into each handwritten draft, I poured my hopes, dreams, and ambitions. As I hurried to the post office, right before the deadline, to send it out, I tried hard to take my father’s advice to heart and be unattached to the outcome.

  While I waited to hear from the business schools, I applied for jobs. Many of India’s top employers conducted campus i
nterviews, and for management trainees one of the best options was the India Tobacco Company (ITC), a consumer conglomerate that encompassed hospitality, food, clothing, and other retail lines in addition to its core business selling cigarettes. At the time, everyone smoked, so I didn’t give a second thought to working in an industry that I wouldn’t even consider today. ITC had a reputation as a great employer, and their management training program was outstanding. They also paid much better than other companies. There were so many applicants in my graduating class that the company decided to conduct group interviews, fifteen people at a time, in a discussion format. From each group, the interviewer, Ramesh Sarin, would select one or two people for the next round. When my group was done, I was not selected.

  This surprised me—I knew that objectively I was a much better student than those he had chosen. As the other candidates filed out, mostly disappointed, I sat frozen in my chair. Should I just accept this decision, even though it feels wrong? I asked myself. Part of me was ready to bow my head and slink away, accepting that this was my fate, but another part of me was galvanized by the sense of unfairness. As Sarin was getting ready to leave, I stood up, took a deep breath, and approached him.

  “Excuse me, sir, but I think you are making a mistake.”

  He looked taken aback, but perhaps a little intrigued as well. Since he didn’t immediately dismiss me, I pressed on.

  “You can’t possibly know which are the best applicants from such a short discussion with so many people simultaneously.”

  No doubt he thought I was arrogant for questioning his interviewing method, but perhaps he knew I had a point. Or maybe he just wanted to get rid of me. “Look,” he said, “here’s the problem. I have a limited quota and it’s already filled. But if space opens up, I’ll invite you to the next round.”

  It turned out he was as good as his word. A week later, I got my invitation, and went to Kolkata for the interviews.

  The ITC headquarters impressed me, and I began to feel more confident that I could make a career in management. After all, I’d been in various leadership roles since high school—in student government, in cadets, in the debate team, and in sports. When Sarin asked me to define the term “leader,” I tried to sum up the most effective approach I’d learned: “A leader is one who can motivate his colleagues and get things done without making them feel that it was the leader who actually had the idea and got the work done.” I forgot about this, until twenty years later I ran into Sarin quite by chance at an airport, and he reminded me what I had told him. By that point, it was a philosophy that I was putting into practice, and one that would serve me well for the rest of my life, in leadership positions I could never have imagined back in that interview. Long before I knew the terminology, I was sensing the power of “leading from behind” and “servant leadership.” The ITC executives must have liked my approach, because a few days later I was one of only two people from IIT Delhi they selected for job offers.

  Elated, I began to think that maybe this was the right path—staying in India, close to my family and Anita, and building a solid career to support them all. The steady stream of rejection letters from the US business schools seemed to confirm this—thin envelopes that signaled their contents before they were even opened. Most of them told me I didn’t have enough business experience, or that they couldn’t offer me financial aid. And then one fat envelope arrived: from Harvard. It was a complete surprise—not only did they accept me despite my lack of business experience, but they offered a generous financial aid package. It was a chance I couldn’t turn down. Very few of my fellow Indians had taken this path, but opportunity beckoned. As I lay in my dorm bed that night reading and rereading my acceptance letter in disbelief, another favorite quote of my father’s came to mind, from the American poet Robert Frost. He would often recite it to me, as we walked in the gardens: “I took the road less traveled by; And that has made all the difference.”2

  With Anita’s encouragement and the support of my siblings, I made the decision to go to Harvard. I felt bad about turning down ITC. I wrote to Ajit Haksar, the CEO, and thanked him for the offer but declined.

  Haksar was shocked and affronted. “No one has ever turned us down,” he wrote in response. “I don’t understand this. I want you to come to Kolkata and explain yourself.” He enclosed a plane ticket. I knew I wasn’t going to change my mind but I also wasn’t going to turn down a chance to fly to my hometown and visit my relatives. When I sat down with Haksar and explained the choice before me, his expression softened. It turned out, to my amazement, that he had attended HBS himself, back in the 1940s—one of the first Indians to do so. “Go to Harvard,” he said. “It’s the chance of a lifetime.”

  7

  Hot Pickle at Harvard

  Our life, like a river, strikes its banks not to find itself closed in by them,

  but to realise anew every moment that it has its unending opening

  towards the sea.

  —Rabindranath Tagore, Sadhana

  September 1971

  “Why are you here? There are no jobs.”

  Just an hour earlier, I had been marveling at the Manhattan skyline through the window of the plane. I had made it to America, the land of opportunity. My future sparkled ahead of me like the lights on the Brooklyn Bridge. But now I had been brought sharply down to earth, both literally and figuratively, in the grimy streets of Jersey City.

  I had left India for the first time two weeks earlier, accompanied by two IIT classmates, Harbinder Gill and Chander Merani. We were all coming to the US to do our graduate work at various colleges. At the airport, we’d been picked up by Chander’s cousin, who’d offered us a place to stay for a few days before we each made our way to our respective schools. He pulled up at the terminal in a car that had seen better decades, and as we drove through graffiti-lined, garbage-strewn streets, he regaled us with his tale of woe.

  “Me and my friends, we’re all engineers too, just like you. We all got good degrees in India and came here with great hopes to go to American grad schools. We studied hard and expected to find good jobs and get rich and live like Americans. Instead, we just have piles of debt. It’s been months now, and there are no jobs. Everyone is preoccupied with the war in Vietnam and no one wants to employ foreigners. I don’t know why you’re here. If you ask me, you should go back to India and get a good job there. Marry a nice girl. You’ll do better than this.”

  Arriving at his home in Jersey City, I couldn’t help but think he might be right. My first impressions of America made our modest home in Delhi seem quite luxurious. We dragged our bags up several steep flights of stairs to a cramped, two-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment, where six young Indian men were living, along with an alarming number of cockroaches. I barely slept that night, lying awake on the lumpy couch with Anita’s and my siblings’ faces in my mind. They had been so strong and supportive, so encouraging. Was it for nothing? I could be working at ITC now, making a nice salary, married to my sweetheart, and supporting my family. I remembered my little brother’s tears at the airport. Had I left him behind to live like this?

  The next day, Chander asked me to go with him to visit Pratt Institute, the private school in Brooklyn where he would be pursuing his graduate degree in engineering. The streets were intimidating, and the area around his dorm downright scary. We hurried out of there as quickly as we could, and didn’t say much as we made our way back to the equally grim streets of Jersey City. I’m sure we were both asking ourselves the same question: Did I just make a huge mistake?

  The previous couple of weeks had been an adventure. We’d visited London, Paris, and Amsterdam, getting by on just a few dollars a day, enjoying our freedom to explore these new worlds. I’d known that leaving India would be challenging in some respects, but I had not anticipated the cultural and economic atmosphere I felt on arriving in the US. When we made our way across the river into Manhattan, the iconic landmarks and bustling diversity helped lift our spirits, but I was still kee
nly aware of the harsh undertones of a country struggling through a recession and embroiled in a divisive war.

  After just a few days, I was happy to board a train for Boston. As the grim city streets gave way to rolling hills, brilliant with the first burst of fall, I shook off some of my apprehension. Harvard’s beautiful campus seemed like a country club in contrast to the school my friend was attending. I quickly fell in love with the quiet courtyards tucked away in the heart of Cambridge, and the historic buildings overlooking the tranquil Charles River. I breathed a deep sigh of relief as I headed to the administrator’s office to register and get my dorm assignment. America may not have been the paradise of my dreams, but neither was it as bad as I had initially feared.

  I was greeted on arrival by a familiar face: Harinder Kohli was a second-year HBS student who had been assigned to welcome me. We’d met during the summer in India when he was home visiting family. A brilliant student, he was extremely kind and generous, sharing his meticulously organized class notes with me as well as introducing me around campus, and we’ve remained friends to this day.

  My dorm, Morris Hall, was an elegant, four-story, U-shaped building with a quiet, tree-lined courtyard. Inside, the accommodations were organized in sets of four double rooms that shared a bathroom, known as a “can.” My seven “can-mates” and I would call this home for the next year.