Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters by Menon, Sudha (books suggested by bill gates txt) 📗

well as private sector, with stints also at UNDP and the World Bank, Bhargava has always been steered by an inner calling that saw him rise above the profile of his job to do something for the community around him. The inspiration for this came from his father, a Public Health Engineer with the Rajasthan Government. Pradeep remembers that spark of joy in his father’s eyes every time he was able to do something for the people, such as providing safe drinking water supply to the community. The young boy grew up idolizing his father and his thoughts and in the years since then, he has done his own bit for the community such as helping Pune city, his adopted home, free of the scourge of debilitating load shedding and power outages through a unique private and public sector partnership.

Bhargava is also the brain behind CII’s Finishing School project, a unique venture that he started off in collaboration with Pune’s Symbiosis College wherein scheduled caste and scheduled tribe students in the third year of engineering colleges got trained in a variety of soft skills and business etiquette in order to develop their personality and make them more employable. ‘They already had the required vocational skills; what we did was to make them more confident individuals who could compete with their more urbane, sophisticated city counterparts. These kids had been denied opportunities and put on the back foot for so long that we needed to help them believe that they could do it.’ The Finishing College experiment is now being replicated by CII’s branches in other parts of the country. Pradeep is also closely involved in the academic world where he has helped educational institutions in their development and curriculum, besides being engaged with Institutes such as TMTC, YASHDA, IIM Ahmedabad, IIM Bangalore, and Symbiosis Institutes, as a visiting faculty.

Now in his retirement phase but with a plateful of assignments to keep him busy, Bhargava’s biggest lesson was learnt nearly two decades ago, when he lay in a pool of blood in his house, after being assaulted by robbers who had broken in. In the days that he spent in the intensive care unit of a hospital, lonely and scared, Bhargava realized the ultimate truth that seems to escape most of us: That we are completely replaceable at our workplaces but there is never a back-up for us at home.

‘I did make it to the hospital and pulled through the crisis but in those days of uncertainty and loneliness in the ICU, I realized that the most important thing in my life was my family. I realized that it was not the next promotion or designation that mattered in life. In some ways, perhaps, all these years since then have been a ‘bonus‘ for me, but that episode helped shape what is truly important in life and how we should not get consumed by so many trivialities and pettiness in everyday life,’ Bhargava writes to his daughter Pooja, a young professional in an IT firm and mother to a young son.

Dearest Pooja,

It’s been a long time since you and I had one of our famous ‘man to man’ talks, the kind you would nudge me into having during your teenage years when there was something that you needed to share with me. A lot has happened in our lives since then. You found your life partner and are now a young mother. I too got busy in my career and have spent these years fully immersed in my Corporate ‘Grahastha’ mode and I sometimes wonder if I could have spent more time with my family.

After 40 plus years of an exciting professional career, I’m now moving to my ‘Vanaprastha’ phase and I think the time is perfect for us to have one of our ‘ man to mans’. It has been a memorable journey for me, one that started with a career in the public sector, took me to UNDP and World Bank, and finally put me through the hierarchies of the private sector and corporate world in India. But while I continue to carry a corporate visiting card, I have chosen to spend my time and energy on engagements I truly enjoy and am getting used to a retired life where compulsions are few and freedom is high. It is clearly a good time to capture the learning through a bit of ‘rewind and replay’ and even attempt to ‘fast forward’ to what could be a fulfilling direction for the remaining days of my life. And who can be a better person than you to share my journey and learning with!

Dear bitiya, to begin with, I would like to tell you something that is on top of my mind, always. I know you have heard this before but I still would love to tell you this: You and your brother Amit have been the best things that have happened to us—your mother and I. All the designations and achievements in my career pale into insignificance when compared to the joy I experience when I see you both now, grown up into splendid people with courage and conviction of your own.

As I rewind, I would like to first capture the learning on the professional front. And possibly try and answer the question all of us ask ourselves in our introspective moments: ‘If I were to start my life once again, would I steer it differently?’

Pooja, all of us base our lives on that one person who inspires you so much that you want to follow in his or her footsteps. My idol was my father. Such was his impact on my mind that even after passing out of the prestigious IIM, Ahmedabad with a gold medal, when I could have had a picking of the best jobs around, I chose to work with Bharat Sarkar and continued doing that for eleven long years. My father spent his entire working life with the Government of Rajasthan where, as Chief Engineer