I had to fill the shoes of a very big person, and those were very big shoes. I couldn’t possibly have filled them appropriately, so I decided just to be myself. And I would say, be yourself, be driven by a desire to make a difference, a desire to be ethical and fair, and then you will make a difference.
How many times have you heard people say, this can’t be done? It’s your job to remove those myths and to get things done. In many ways, we have been critical of and saddened by what has or has not happened in our country. To a great extent, this has been a function of, we can’t do this, or it can’t be done, or vested interest saying it shouldn’t be done.
Ethical practices are being thrown to the wind and subjective issues are being brought to the table. You, in the years ahead, are going to be leaders of this country and shaping the destiny of this country. Do not grow with a view that something can’t be done and so should not be done.
To be popular and to be a conformist itself will never make you do the kinds of things that we see happening around us. You look at the world around you. Are the great successes the large companies of this world? Or are they the companies that took chances, where individuals started in garages, where ideas were born? Where did Microsoft, where did Apple, where did Amazon, where did Google, where did Facebook come from? They came from ideas that people felt something could be done and that they could make a difference. So as you go out into this world, I would hope that you, A) would look at being ethical and holding the value systems which you want this country to have. If you think you cannot make a difference, I’d say you very well can make a difference if you so desire.
There will be thousands of occasions when you have to make difficult decisions. You need to, at all times, ask yourself if you are doing the right thing and take the decision that’s the right thing, however difficult or unpopular that may be. And think of yourself as being one of the more fortunate people in this world and that there are millions who are less fortunate.
Don’t ever forget that because you need to look at your life as one where you can make a difference. View this moment as moving from a protected environment to an environment where you have to learn and listen because your whole world is going to be learning and listening. Your success is going to be your humility.
That you are humble as you look forward. If you speak or sit next to a Nobel laureate, he never tells you that he won a Nobel Prize. Other people tell you.
So let humility be your best defence. JRD [Tata] would stand in a line rather than jump a queue where he would give way to a customer first and not him. He was just a person who longed to be anonymous.
And to some extent, that’s rubbed off on me. When I was in school, etc., you wanted to be part of the school and not the rich man’s son or have a big car take you home while your classmates went by bus or smaller cars. You just wanted to be a normal person.
I think I owe a lot to my father [for ensuring] that at no stage my brother and I [grew up to be] pompous young people but people who’d like to be everyday. We all have to face difficulties of one sort or another. A person that has not faced any difficulties ends up being a person that’s an unreal person in the world because he doesn’t know how to deal with difficulties.
I believe every problem you face is a learning exercise for you and makes you stronger and builds your character. If you don’t have that, you have a silver spoon in your mouth from the time you’re born, then you’re probably going to grow up remaining like a spoiled child and not contributing to society as you should. I think it’s a good thing for people to face difficulty because you understand hardship and you can equate to people when they come to you.
You can equate to market situations as they occur and again try to do what you think is best for the circumstances that there is. There was a time when one felt that the ethical fabric of India was being eroded and most companies including ours had to face an issue of dealing with this by participating in subjective activities – be they doing favours for people or actually paying. And the few times that we were approached and stood our ground and did not do that made me go home at night with this wonderful feeling that we didn’t succumb.
And we grew from about five billion to a hundred billion without participating in anything subjective. So that’s the one thing I would say that was probably the loneliest moment or set of moments that one has and one feels pleased that you were able to go through that period and not compromise your ideals. In the Tata group values and ethics have been foremost in the teachings or the tone that my predecessors set before me and all I did was follow in their footsteps.
You always need to take a view that you need to give back to society some of the learning you have done to do something for your country and for society. And you shouldn’t merely consider yourself successful based on the prosperity you gain for yourself but you should go home at night feeling satisfied if you have made a difference. That difference is something each one of us can make we’ll have we’ll have failures and we’ve had frustrations but it’s a continued commitment that we have to the world around us to ourselves and to the people of India.
All of us in our own way need to ask ourselves are we doing something we feel proud of or do we bask in showing off our wealth or our prosperity or our well-being so that people can look up to us. If it’s that then I think we’re wasting our lives. There are people that need our help and if we’ve sent one poor person to school and seen that person prosper it should give us a feeling of well-being much more than making our first million or billion as the case might be.
I wish you all the greatest success as you move into this important change in your life and make your life a great success and make the country proud of what you have done. That destiny is in your hands. Thank you very much.
This is part of ThePrint’s Great Speeches series. It features speeches and debates that shaped modern India.