The Idea of Giving
Before you give, focus on having something, particularly when you are just starting your life as an adult and as a professional. Give yourself time to create, build, and save.
Excerpts from IISC Convocation 2022. About the speaker: Subroto Bagchi, co-founder of MindTree. Along with Radha and N S Parthasarathy, Susmita and Subroto Bagchi have donated Rs 425 crores INR (~USD 53 Million) to IISc, Bangalore, a premier higher education & research institute based in India.
1.1. Introduction:
The Indian Institute of Science (IISc) is the most revered education & research institution in the country, consistently ranked among the top hundred in the world. To the graduating class of 2022, my heartiest congratulations. You have completed the first phase of your professional life with glory. My hope for each one of you is that you'll be outstanding human beings, will bring all the powers of knowledge and action to make science an instrument for human betterment. Today as I bear witness to your convocation to this great rite of passage I want to share with you my thoughts about the idea of giving.
1.2. The Idea of giving:
One of the dominant themes that defines our very existence, and as a result the journey through this planet over an entire lifetime from the time we arrive to the time we leave. Every moment of our existence is defined by the act of giving. You and I were born, we came to this world because someone gave us life. And as we arrived, we arrived with nothing. We were naked, vulnerable, unable to fend for ourselves. Dependent on a nurse for our first breath, for food on the mother, for shelter, clothing, life skill and education on other human beings.
1.3. Mother’s role in giving:
Here let me share with you my own story and my own understanding of the evolving nature of giving in my own life. I was born to a small time government servant way back in 1957 in an obscure place in Odisha. My parents shifted home every year, almost every year because my father had a transferable job with the government. By the time I was 16, I had lived in 12 separate homes in many different places. I'm a child of displacement. People like me must learn to find equilibrium much faster, much deeper than other people. Human equilibrium is born of relationships. The stronger and the deeper the relationship, the higher is our state of equilibrium. Building relationship is a process.
A key part of that process was ingrained in me by my mother Labonya Prova. Wherever my father's job took the family to a new place, she would quickly make friends with the neighbors in the nearby government quarters. No sooner would we make home in a new place and my mother's kitchen was up and running. Her cooking went to the neighbors and every other day their food would come to our home. I'm the youngest born of my mother and as a result I was always around with her and it was my job to run to this auntie or that auntie to deliver a little pot of curry, sometimes some kheer on a very special occasion. I was my mother's food delivery guy. But on a serious note, I now realize that I was getting my life lessons in giving.
My mother was not just giving curry and kheer and whatever else. She was giving a little piece of herself in every act. And she was doing it in boundless joy. I told you before how often we moved from one place to another. Too short a time, one year, two years. Too short a time one might think to build meaningful relationships. But when my mother died people showed up whom I had not seen in decades. People who had known my mother 50-60 years ago, who still kept her in their hearts. But this is not just my mother's story. Listening to me, I'm sure many of you in the audience have very similar stories. While we're growing up, we do not actively realize that someone's act of giving is constantly shaping our own journey, defining who we may be.
1.4. You are the result of someone's giving
Think back in time as you sit listening to me today. Let your mind go back 5, 10, 20 years prior to coming to the IISc. Think of people who directly contributed to your coming here. You can remember who first awakened your love for mathematics. You can remember the person who sparked in you your joy for biology or physics or whatever else. Someone in your life gave you self-confidence, yet someone else gave you ambition, the power of sense-making, your resilience, someone gave you vision, someone pushed your way a chance for an interview that has made all the difference for you, that made you to come here today.
And in the years to come this phenomena of giving, giving will manifest in many other ways. Someone will give you a job. Someone will give you a very special assignment that becomes an inflection point in your own career. Sometimes an angel will come to you to give a shoulder when you think that the world is falling apart. Someone also will one day give you a challenge that will completely deconstruct your sense of self and there you will have your chrysalis moment.
1.5. Before you give, focus on having something:
As I was growing up, I was very blessed to develop an awareness of the process of giving. Its very nature, its manifestation, its effect on us and the impact it can have on our collective existence. One of my siblings, my third elder brother Amitabh became an early exemplar for me. As I have told you before we are family of limited means. Amitabh was sent to a college hostel with just a few pair of clothes, one blanket and one sweater. Come vacation time he returned with none of those. “What happened?” my mother demanded. He said he gave it all away because there were kids who had nothing.
I was very deeply influenced by his acts and often mimicked him when I was in college, sometimes not the right way. I remember as an NCC cadet I had the chance to represent the state at the republic day parade in Delhi. And there I was a judge, the best cadet of the country. I returned from Delhi with dozens of uniforms, sweaters, blankets and many other supplies that I did not return to the quarter master of NCC as I should have. Nobody asked me because I was walking on water, having shaken hands with the president of India, had breakfast with the prime minister in an official residence in the following days. I gave away all the supplies to rickshaw pullers and poor people in the neighborhood. I felt very magnanimous.
But years after I read a line from Mother Teresa, she wrote “before you give you must have” I was reminded very uncomfortably of how I had given away things which I did not have. They did not belong to me. They were given to me on lian. Mother Teresa's words need to be understood at two levels. First is that you need to focus on having something. Do not fall prey to false altruism, particularly when you are just starting your life as an adult and as a professional. Give yourself time create, build, save. Have before you can give. But at another level mother is saying “you cannot seek glory in giving away what does not belong to you.” Unlike what many of us think in India, robbing Peter to pay Paul is not the way to give. I must first pay my taxes right before I get into philanthropy and there I was, feeling benevolent giving away things for which I was a mere custodian at that point in time.
1.6. The Idea of giving in IT Industry
Let me now fast forward to my joining the Indian IT (Information Technology) industry. This was way back in 1981. The IT industry was at an embroidery state. I strayed into the industry with a liberal arts background. I had no idea about bits and bytes, from vacuum tubes to semiconductors, from erasable programmable memory to index sequential access media, from how pixels were generated by a cathode ray tube to pins rearranging themselves to form ascii characters in a dot matrix printer. All this simply bewildered me.
I had to learn to survive and I had to learn very fast. So I would fall at the feet of all the geeks and the nerds from the IISc and the IITs of the world, who are my colleagues. I needed to know like hell and someone had to give me like help. Today I am who I am because of the dozens of people in the R&D wings of companies like PSI and Wipro, who gave me their knowledge in abundance. At the time of giving, they had no idea where life would take me one day, what the knowledge given to me will lead me to, and least of all what credit if any that they would ever get. The bricks that became the castle in my care today are actually their bricks.
Once I joined the IT industry, everything happened in fast forward mode. I was like a child in a candy shop. There were some serious setbacks but more serious opportunities. The biggest thing that came my way was an opportunity to go to Cupertino, in the heart of the Silicon Valley. Just so you know, Cupertino at that time was a little more than a village. Wipro asked me to set up the operations there to convert their R&D from a domestically focused cost center to a global lab on higher. My job was to pitch our R&D capabilities to companies like Sun, Intel, HP, AT&T and many Silicon Valley startups.
1.7. The Idea of Giving in Silicon Valley
When I looked at the overall ecosystem in the United States, I was fascinated with how deep and wide and varied the idea of giving is in that country. In the fleeting time I have with you today I'll pick and share a couple of them that had deep impact on me.
The first one is about the founder chairman of a company named Tandem that does not exist anymore but in its time it was one of the leaders in fault tolerant computing. It was a fortune 500 tech company that I got to interact with because we ported their proprietary code onto UNIX. Early in my interaction with them, I learned that Jimmy Treybig was also the chairman of the local school board. I could not imagine how the world's first designer of a fault tolerant computer, chairman of a fortune 500 company had the time and the commitment to serve a school board in his own backyard. And school boards so you know a serious matter in the USA. You do not serve such boats in a light touch and symbolic manner yet jimmy was doing what he was doing because he had this deep felt need to serve his local community.
An act of giving must not be merely symbolic. It must be substantive. I learned from people like Jimmy Treybig that we need to make commitments to small institutions and the most precious contribution we can make to them is by making ourselves available. Of course they need the money. But more than that they need our involvement. We can be great global citizens when we make ourselves locally relevant. And money is relevant. Often we need big money to start big projects. We need big money, we need unconstrained money for solving big problems. Need big money to see the institutions that will be timeless like the IISc. Or take the example of how memorial Sloan-Kettering hospital, the world's oldest and the largest among cancer care and research institutions came into being. It started in 1884 as the Ney York cancer hospital through the act of philanthropy. Over time it grew through significant donations from many well-wishers.
In 1945 Alfred Sloan, chairman of general motors gave a grant of four million dollars, a lot of money at that time. And his colleague Charles Kettering took the responsibility of oversight. That was the inflection point for the institution that has played an iconic role in cancer care and research. Stories like this abound wherever you go in the united states. Institutions like Stanford and Yale and Harvard and Princeton have been built over time by the generosity of people who could write a check and walk away from it. Small acts of generosity are most definitely significant but institution building is a different game altogether. Minimalism doesn't work here. You need large hearts, large purses and large acts of giving.
1.8. Eminent Institutions are built on large acts of giving:
Here's another example. Seven years after New York cancer hospital opened its doors, two men accidentally met on a long voyage over the seas. One was an ascetic and the other a patriotic businessman. The ascetic was none other than Swami Vivekananda and the businessman was Jamshed Ji Tata. The ascetic was on his way to the religious congress in Chicago and the businessman was looking for technical capability from overseas to start a steel plant in India. During that long voyage, they spoke about spirituality. And at the same time the need to create a scientific temper in this country. The discussion left a lasting impression on the mind of Jamshed Ji Tata. Five years later he wrote a letter to lord Curzon, the then viceroy about the need to build an institution to pursue the knowledge of science. Lord Curzon turn asked the Nobel laureate William Ramsey to suggest a suitable location. “Bangalore” that's what he said. The king of Mysore Krishna Raja year 5 gave 371 acres of land and Jamshed Ji Tata contributed in cash and kind. That is how IISc came into existence.
1.9. Give with Joy, in Abundance, without Attachment:
That is how we have produced an education and research institute that is consistently ranked among the world's top 100. That is how you and I are standing on this ground today. But all of us must keep in mind that large acts of giving which alone can create timeless institutions come with no guarantee of success. You can crunch data to say this needs to be done, this is most likely to succeed but there is no guarantee signed by destiny. Large acts of giving require us to respect the power of emergence and to truly embody the philosophy of Karma, which is the detachment of action from attachment to an intended outcome.
My dear students when your time comes to give, give with joy and give in abundance. You remember that I opened the story about how my family moved from place to place every year or two. I learned how to manage displacement, the accompanying sense of uncertainty by watching my mother build relationships within every new community. That instinct to reach out towards each other, that need for community, that need to be part of a circle of giving and receiving is embedded deep within all of us. We are designed, we are coded to be with each other in an energetic way. The time has come for me to wrap up the conversation for the day. But before I do that, as was shared by the presenters of this event, I need to quote a few lines from Rabindranath Tagore that hum in my mind for you. I paraphrase his lines in my own words. I present what the poet seems to be telling.
1.10. Conclusion:
“Everything, everything that belongs to me,
My wealth, my voice, the things I have seen, the sounds I have heard,
All my comings and goings, my dawns, my dusks,
I'll give you all of this.
The strings of my instrument will play truest when they are in your hands,
Everything but everything must return to you”
Reference: Starting from 34:00