Dhirubhai Ambani - A Tribute

By Dattaraj Salgaocar

To write about Mr. Dhirubhai Ambani, even if to pay a humble, though much deserved tribute, is, I confess, not at all an easy task. Even more so to one like me, who looked at him not merely with the eyes of a much loved son-in-law but as a friend, a guide, as an elder, a surrogate father so to speak, since the death in 1984 of my only father, the much respected and fondly remembered Vassudeva M. Salgaocar.

When Vikram, my son, and a passionate sports aficionado, and I made our plans to fly to Korea and Japan for the World Cup 2002, the furthest thought from our mind was that our trip could be cut short by a grave and irreparable family tragedy.

I was in Seoul, South Korea, with Vikram, at the Hotel Coex Intercontinental. It was Monday June 24. We had had a successful meeting with POSCO, buyers, of our iron ore, earlier in the evening and we were looking forward to watching the first semi-finals of the World Cup, with South Korea to play Germany, the next day in Seoul, as guests of POSCO. The phone woke me up around 11.30 p.m. It was my brother-in-law Anil on the line. He said, "Papa is not well. It is better you and Vikram come back tonight or tomorrow." Anil added, "I will be speaking to Dipti (my wife) and Isheta (my daughter) and sending our plane tonight to fetch them to Mumbai." I was absolutely shocked. I asked, "How is Papa?" He said, "Not good." I then realised that he must be really serious and told Anil that I would come by the "earliest flight" to Mumbai. I spoke to Dipti and she started crying on the phone and I could sense that all was not well. I told Dipti, "We have to all pray", and I would be in Mumbai in a day. Vikram was awake by now and was quite simply stunned at the news. "Can never be possible", he said. We could easily get a flight out of Seoul and drove from Mumbai airport straight to Breach Candy Hospital.

Papa had had a massive stroke the previous day in the afternoon after having spent a regular day at the office. The best team of doctors was in place, but they gave him a few hours to a day. The whole family was devastated. He was a very healthy person for his age, of 69 years, and only two days earlier I had spoken to him and he sounded so cheerful. The next day and the days following saw countless number of visitors to the hospital, including media persons. Friends and well wishers offered prayers and poojas in many religious places. We all prayed for a miracle. Papa, we kept hoping against hope, would, as ever, fight back. Indeed, he fought back for 12 days, proving his doctors wrong. It was as if he was giving the family time to adjust to his not being able to be with us.

I was in a predicament. I had a very important event in Tokyo on July 5, where we were commemorating 50 years of our very happy association with Nippon Steel Corporation (NSC), the world's largest steel-maker and Itochu which the Chairman of NSC, Mr. Imai (also Chairman of the powerful Kedanren in Japan) and Mr. Sumie, President of Itochu Corporation were to attend. I did not know if I could attend the event (which was fixed almost a year in advance), and be back with Papa before he leaves us. In my heart I knew I would always have Papa's blessings and that he would not leave me till I returned from this very important event for me. Indeed! I left for Japan on July 4, attended the function on July 5 and returned on July 6 reaching the hospital to be with Papa at 9.00 p.m. He breathed his last around 11.50 on the night of July 6. It was the third saddest day of my life, after losing my own father in 1984 and my mother in 1996.

"Bubble that Burst"
My first meeting with him dates back to the early seventies. My father, owned a flat in Usha Kiran, then the tallest building in Mumbai, on the 14th floor and the Ambanis lived on the 22nd floor. My father and he had many common friends, especially Saraswats from the banking sector like Mr K K Pai and the late Mr S S Nadkarni. But their closest friend was the gifted and brilliant, late Mr T A Pai who, after becoming Chairman of Syndicate Bank, rose to be the Industries Minister at the centre. I became friendly with Mr Ambani's sons, Mukesh, the eldest who was studying Chemical Engineering at UDCT and Anil, studying Chemistry at K C College. During that period I met Mr Ambani a few times and he used to always greet me with a firm handshake or a thump on my back. He always used to talk animatedly in an interactive way ending almost every short sentence with a "Kya? or Kitna? when he quoted a figure". Isn't it? Don't you agree? It was always a brief two-way inter-active and engaging conversation. He always had a glint in his sharp eyes. He would be dead serious at times but always end with a loud chuckle, grin or guffaw. He had the mannerism of holding out the palm of his hand frequently for me to clap on it or just touch it when I agreed or replied; in fact, to signify that I was in tune with him. This was a mannerism he continued with till the end with all people he liked.

The shiny polyester look was very much in vogue in the late seventies, thanks to the aggressive marketing of Reliance. It was a convenience fabric for the masses requiring little looking-after and care. A family friend of ours, the famous ad-man, Frank Simoes, coined a beautiful punch line for the Reliance textile brand name Vimal for the sari range, "A woman expresses herself in many languages, Vimal is one of them." Vimal fabrics were a huge success and Mr. Ambani planned a scorching growth plan. Instead of going to the banks and financial institutions, he dared go public in 1977. He himself recommended that I buy his shares at the time of the public issue when a lot of blue-chip MNCs like Levers, Colgate, etc were also coming out with public issues. I invested what little I could at that age in Reliance shares (which I still hold) despite caution advisories by some share brokers inspired by crab-like mentalities of the traditional family-owned textile owners who spread the word that Reliance was "a bubble". Mr Ambani proved wrong all his critics. The Reliance share price continued to grow. Admittedly, he revolutionised the share market by rewarding his shareholders handsomely and soon the middle class and common masses started pouring in their money into the series of Reliance share and debenture issues which followed. As he jokingly said, "I am the bubble that burst!"

"Be like the Sun"
Mukesh and I were planning to go abroad for our MBA studies after engineering and were applying together to various US colleges. Anil, two years younger, also planned likewise. Mr Ambani, who believed in good education, would caution me that after I return with an MBA, I would have to unlearn what I had learnt and study how to do business in India. Once in one of his moods he told me, "You are like the moon, kya?" He continued, "You are shining in the reflected glory of your father. You should be like the sun, a star, and have your own light and glory," stretching out the palm of his hand, which I touched in agreement. And, typically he stretched the palm of his hand, which I touched in agreement. It took a while to sink in and I realised he was absolutely right. He had this great ability to come up with analogies and similes which conveyed the meaning in a way nothing else could.
Upon my return from the USA in 1981 with a Wharton MBA, I joined the family business and, like all business people, had to do the rounds of Delhi in the days of the Licence Raj. I once met him on a flight from Delhi to Mumbai and told him how frustrating and cumbersome I found the licence and permit regulatory environment. He said, "You are a Brahmin, aren't you?" I said, "Yes". He cautioned, "Whenever you have a pooja you have to sit for many hours for the rituals starting with washing the idols, putting flowers and offering food to the Gods, isn't it?" Again, I said, "Yes", though not fully understanding where this was taking me. He continued, "Then you have to appease and feed the priests, the fire Gods, the Brahmins, the guests, the cow, the crow and so on. Only then can you eat and at that moment don't you enjoy your meal?" I nodded in agreement. He concluded, "In India the position is that the system is the same. You can only enjoy your meal after you take care of everybody else, kya?" On another occasion he said, "I have no ego. I'm willing to salaam anybody."

Dipti (who I had been dating for a few years) and I decided to marry in 1983. My father and her father (Dipti's was the first wedding in the Ambani family) were both elated with the news, despite our very different backgrounds and cultures. Both had great mutual respect and regard for each other as I guess both were self-made men, born in poverty, barely educated and had achieved their successes by sheer determination and grit. In fact, they had so much in common that till my father died prematurely on October 13, 1984 at 67 years, they were in constant touch, my father enjoying a Campari with him over hot onion bhajias. My father's demise brought me even closer to my father-in-law and soon I started calling him "Papa" as the rest of his family did.

Doting grandpa
He was delighted at the birth of our son Vassudev Vikram on October 25, 1984. He was his first grandchild and became the centre of his attention and time. No day went by without him asking Dipti or me about Vikram. He was the apple of his eye. When Vikram started playing with toys based on cartoon and comics, he was very upset and dismissive. He used to tell us that Vikram should know stories of real life heroes and heroines like Shivaji, Rana Pratap Singh, and Jhansi Ki Rani and visit real places. When Vikram was in Mumbai for his holidays, he would tell Vikram the stories of those heroes, of their courage and dare-devilry, and in fact, almost hired a history teacher. When Vikram was just over five years, he created such a hype for Shivaji that he was insistent on Raigad. He then made arrangements the next day for Vikram to go to Raigad along with his secretary and servants, one of them with a videocamera to document Vikram's feat. His sheer motivation and persuasion made Vikram climb the 1500-odd steps of Raigad, a feat which Vikram has always been proud of.
In February 1986 he suffered a cerebral stroke. A normal person might never have recovered, but Papa, with his sheer determination and will power, overcame the illness proving even respected doctors wrong. His mind became even more razor-sharp. He took it in his stride and countered the vicious media onslaught initiated by his friend turned foe-Ramnath Goenka, in the Express Group of newspapers, and a hostile Central government with V P Singh, the then Finance Minister, relentlessly hounding him. He valiantly defended and fought back with strength and honour and set a shining example for us, especially Mukesh and Anil, who got baptised by fire in this ordeal. In the post-liberalisation period, he set his goals very high and aimed to be a global competitive presence in petrochemicals. He shunned the protection sought by the Bombay Club and said boldly, "Pedigree is no longer of any significance in democratic India; it is performance that is crucial."

Faith in God
In 1999, Reliance commissioned the largest grassroots oil refinery in the world, of 27 million tonnes per year at Jamnagar, in a record time of less than three years. Many critics argued that Reliance grew because it cornered licences and permits during the Licence Raj. But Reliance's quantum jump to success was post-liberalisation. Last year, Reliance's revenues were Rs 65,000 crore, with a net profit of Rs 4,604 crore and over five million investors with businesses encompassing petrochemicals, textiles, oil and gas exploration, power, IT, telecom. Reliance sales equalled three per cent of India's GDP and contributed 10 per cent to India's indirect tax revenues. In fact, without the Licence Raj, I am convinced that what he achieved in 30-odd years, he might have achieved in much less time. That a person born in a dot of a village in Gujarat, called Chorwad, filling petrol at a Shell station in Aden and arriving in Bombay with Rs 500 in his pocket, could achieve this in his lifetime was indeed a miracle. "The problem with Indians," he said once, "is that we have lost the habit of thinking big." He firmly believed that "ideas are no one's monopoly"' and that you did not need an initiation to make profits.

He had an unshakeable faith and trust in God, but he was not ritualistic. His wife, Kokilaben, is a deeply religious and spiritual person and he never discouraged her from performing any poojas or organising bhajans or pravachans. Last year, when she had organised a week-long programme of the Ramayan discourse by the respected Bhaishri Rameshbhai Oza, Papa told Bhaishri privately that his thousands of disciples based in Porbandar should work on building roads and lay water-pipelines providing water to the people of Saurashtra instead of doing bhajans all the time! Bhaishri was speechless for a change, but visibly impressed.

He left the nurturing of his whole family to his loving and capable wife, Kokilaben, who was indeed his biggest strength. She ran his home inculcating the right values in her four children, with her two daughters, Dipti and Nina, imbibing the qualities to become solid home-makers. He played no favourites in the family, but my son Vikram was his only exception. He was his favourite, I guess being his first grandchild. Last year he was very happy and excited that Vikram was going to stay with him in Mumbai while studying science at the Jai Hind College. Everyday he talked to him about his grand plans for India and for Reliance. He involved him in meetings with his key people, bankers and politicians to expose and educate him. He would frequently ask me if Vikram was happy in Mumbai, which I replied in the affirmative. But he was even more thrilled when Vikram himself told him after a while that he was happier in Mumbai than Goa because of Papa.

Family First
He was a loving and caring husband, father and father-in-law and a doting grandfather to his nine grandchildren. He was generous, broadminded and liberal. In his early days in Mumbai, Dipti told me that every weekend the family used to go on outings together. He never spent any time with business organisations like FICCI, CII, etc. nor on any other hobby or indulgence. Family always came first for him. He also inspired in the family fearlessness and a sense of adventure, leading by example. He would gleefully recall how as a young man he swam in the Yemeni Sea in the middle of the night jumping off a ship to win an ice-cream bet or his feats as a young NCC cadet in Junagadh during India's independence, his wildlife escapades and so on. He loved nature with a passion and many of our exciting holidays were in wildlife parks. At such holidays he would tolerate no lazing around. A stickler for time, he would be up early and made us get ready at the crack of dawn. The holidays always were jam-packed with outdoor activities and very little rest, so much so that I sometimes wanted to go on a relaxed vacation after such a holiday.

He was generous and big-hearted, yet fair, firm and disciplined. He laid a lot of emphasis to his family on exercise, physical fitness and good health. He daily exercised for two or three hours. Never ever did hecomplain that he was tired or in pain. Before his stroke he enjoyed trekking every weekend in the monsoon, in Khandala. I remember joining him for a trek in the Khandala hills in the monsoons of 1985 without any assistants by his side for over six hours, which almost incapacitated me for the following week. He believed that if one enjoyed good health and had a good family, the sky was the limit for success.

Early in life, I guess, he realised God had chosen him for a purpose and mission on earth. This faith in God gave him great simplicity, humility and modesty, besides strength and courage. He accepted, gracefully, all the prestigious awards bestowed on him. Whenever I congratulated him on receiving one more award or a major milestone achieved by Reliance, he would typically play it down and say, "Theek hai." If I commented that his fan following was growing internationally and the likes of Bill Clinton wanted to meet him, he would look me straight in the eye putting his left palm on his chin and modestly say, "Achcha?", showing surprise on his face. He was the same person to all, whether it was a politician, a relative, his old friend from Chorward, a professional, an artiste, a driver or a servant.

Trust in People
A few years back, I went with him and the entire family to Chorwad. I was surprised to see his tiny tenement in a chawl. There he had spent his childhood. He was chuckling with glee as he showed us, especially Vikram, around Chorwad. He mixed freely with the people there. From their faces, I could see, they simply adored him. He never forgot his less fortunate childhood friends in Gujarat, many of whom he helped in their bad times for years. And unlike many other self-made millionaires, he neither tried whitewashing or forgetting his humble beginnings.

Another unique quality he had was the ability to trust people. He could size and evaluate a person in no time and guess his or her talents. He had an innate and endearing quality to manage human relations, which would bring out the best in people. For him relationships mattered a great deal. He said, "We must have the courage to trust people. Distrust kills initiative." He believed people were his biggest asset. He empowered them, but also said "I delegate, but do not abdicate".

He loved India with passion. On many an occasion, he discussed my criticism of India's economy and infrastructure with the reason that the young were not seeing opportunities to make India world-class. Last month, when we were together in the US, he took us to see the well-designed and planned US gas (petrol) stations and truck stops. He took keen interest in all the details as he told me that his 3000-odd Reliance petrol pumps, which were soon to be set up in India, would be of even better standard. Nothing sub-standard for the Indian customer, only the best. Such was his sense of pride in India! He strongly believed, like Gandhi, that India's strength lay in its villages and agriculture. In the last ten years or so, he would talk more about our country's problems - water, education, agriculture, power, roads, health care, Kashmir and so on. He had radical ideas, for a change. Agriculture to him meant employing the best technology for the wastelands of India to generate high-yielding products; water meant irrigating the arid regions of India by connecting all of its rivers and building dams and so on. In fact, he convinced my daughter Isheta when she was 10 years of age that she should become a scientist and convert sea water into sweet (potable) water to green deserts of India. All his plans were to significantly improve or touch the lives of at least 20 per cent of India, otherwise he would not conceptualise an idea.
He had amazing foresight and instinct. At times, he could almost see into the future. For example, he realised that succession has always been a difficult issue in corporate history and had led to the downfall of many a business group and empire. Since 1986, he delegated to his highly talented sons, Mukesh and Anil, all the day-to-day operations, with him providing the direction and strategic vision. He made his sons partners and co-builders of his business instead of mere spoilt inheritors. He said, "Reliance is a concept now in which the Ambanis have become insignificant".

Incredible Legacy
Abraham Lincoln's biographer said that the shadow of a huge tree could best be measured when it falls down. Nobody, including me, could ever imagine that Papa had lakhs of open admirers who loved and respected him, instead of only thousands of fans. I saw hordes and masses of people, almost a lakh, most of them unknown to him come to see him off at this final journey to the Chandanwadi crematorium on July 7. I could see that he had touched their lives and hearts in a manner no person had in the history of Mumbai. No businessman in India has ever had so many people at a funeral.

Before India's independence, Albert Einstein, one of the world's greatest scientists, said about Mahatma Gandhi "Generations to come will scarce believe that such a one as this walked the earth in flesh and blood." Post-independence, another Gujarati, Dhirubhai Ambani, left his impact as the greatest visionary businessman, a legend and an icon, not just by creating a $12.5 billion empire from scratch, but by firing the imagination and passion of every Indian to make their dream a reality and build a great country. Mahatma Gandhi, I could never possibly meet, but only respect and admire. But I had the great fortune of knowing Papa whose incredible legacy and memories will forever live on with me.
I am sure his story will inspire and fire the imagination of every Indian to improve the lot of every citizen here and build a great nation, second to none. As he said while receiving the Wharton Dean's medal, "If one Dhirubhai can do so much, just think what a 1000 Dhirubhais can do for this country. There are easily a 1000 Dhirubhais, if not more, in this country". A strong and modern India will be a true Shraddhanjali, a tribute, to one of India's greatest sons, Dhirubhai Ambani.

The Story of Sergey Brin

How the Moscow-born entrepreneur cofounded and changed the way the world searches
Mark Malseed

It takes a bit of searching to find Sergey Brin’s office at the Googleplex. Tucked away in a corner of Building #43 on this sprawling campus near the southern tip of San Francisco Bay, past rows of colorfully decorated cubicles and dorm-like meeting spaces, Office 211 has a nondescript exterior and sits far from the public eye. Although it takes several twists and turns to get there, his office is not protected—as you would expect for the cofounder of a $150-billion company—by a Russian nesting doll’s worth of doors and gatekeepers.

Sergey, 33, shares the space with his Google cofounder, fellow Stanford Ph.D. dropout and billionaire pal, 34-year-old Larry Page, an arrangement that began eight years ago in the company’s first humble headquarters in a Menlo Park, California, garage. Since then, Google has grown from just another Silicon Valley startup into the world’s largest media corporation; in fact, based on its recent stock price of $513 per share, Google, which has made searching the Web easy and even fun, is larger than Disney, General Motors and McDonald’s combined. It achieved these lofty heights by revolutionizing how people surf the Internet: Before Sergey and Larry analyzed the links between web pages to deliver search results speedily based on relevance, looking up information on the Web was a shot in the dark.

Stepping through the sliding glass door into their office is like walking into a playroom for tech-savvy adults. A row of sleek flat-screen monitors lining one wall displays critical information: email, calendars, documents and, naturally, the Google search engine. Assorted green plants and an air purifier keep the oxygen flowing, while medicine balls provide appropriately kinetic seating. Upstairs, a private mezzanine with Astroturf carpeting and an electric massage chair afford Sergey and Larry a comfortable perch from which to entertain visitors and survey the carnival of innovation going on below. And there is ample space for walking around, which is absolutely essential for Sergey, who just can’t seem to sit still.

Trim and boyishly handsome, with low sloping shoulders that give him a perpetually relaxed appearance, Sergey bounces around the Googleplex with apparently endless energy. He has dark hair, penetrating eyes and a puckish sense of humor that often catches people off guard. A typical workday finds him in jeans, sneakers and a fitted black T-shirt, though his casual manner belies a serious, even aggressive sense of purpose. This intensity emerges during weekly strategy meetings, where Sergey and Larry—who share the title of president—command the last word on approving new products, reviewing new hires and funding long-term research. Sergey also holds sway over the unscientific but all-important realms of people, policy and politics. Google’s workers enjoy such family-friendly perks as three free meals a day, free home food delivery for new parents, designated private spaces for nursing mothers, and full on-site medical care, all of which recently led Fortune magazine to rank the company as the #1 place to work in the country.

The co-presidents share management duties with Eric Schmidt, a seasoned software executive whom they hired as chief executive officer in 2001 to oversee the day-to-day aspects of Google’s business—in short, to be the “adult” in the playroom. But they have no intention of ceding control. Since day one, they have resisted outside meddling, preferring to do everything their own way, from opting to piece together computers on the cheap (and build a computer casing out of Lego blocks) to flouting Wall Street in an unconventional initial public offering.
Blazing one’s own trail comes naturally to Sergey. The Moscow-born entrepreneur and his parents have been doing it their entire lives.

On December 16, 2005, 16 months after the company’s high-flying initial stock auction, Google closed its biggest deal yet: a $1-billion advertising partnership with America Online, the popular Internet service provider.

That evening, by coincidence, I am meeting with Sergey’s parents at their home in the suburbs of Washington, DC. Michael Brin, wearing a black fleece vest emblazoned with the multicolored Google logo, greets me in the driveway. I ask if he has heard the big news. “We spoke with Sergey earlier today and he didn’t mention anything,” he tells me. “He did say he was on his way home from yoga.”

Michael, 59, a mathematics professor at the University of Maryland, and his wife, Eugenia, 58, a research scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, are gracious and down-to-earth and still somewhat astonished by their son’s success. “It’s mind-boggling,” marvels Genia, as family and friends call her. She speaks slowly, in a syrupy, Russian-accented English that quickens when she is competing with her husband. “It’s hard to comprehend, really. He was a very capable child in math and computers, but we could have never imagined this.” Michael, in his milder accent, adds with typical pragmatism, “Google has saved more time for more people than anything else in the world.”

They sit me down at the dining room table, clearing off papers to make space for a spread of cheese and fruit. The room itself is simply decorated, even sparse; the only signs of wealth I can see anywhere are a big-screen TV in the living room and a Lexus in the driveway.

The Brins are a compact, young-looking couple; Michael is skeptical in demeanor with a precise manner of speaking, and Genia soft and nurturing. Both have sincere, easygoing laughs. We talk for several hours, interrupted occasionally by Michael’s cigarette breaks, for which he heads outside with the family dog, Toby. Smoking is a habit he brought with him from the Soviet Union in 1979, when he immigrated to the United States with his mother, Maya, Genia and Sergey, then six. (A second son, Sam, was born in 1987.)

One of Michael’s stories particularly strikes me. In the summer of 1990, a few weeks before Sergey’s 17th birthday, Michael led a group of gifted high school math students on a two-week exchange program to the Soviet Union. He decided to bring the family along, despite uneasiness about the welcome they could expect from Communist authorities. It would give them a chance to visit family members still living in Moscow, including Sergey’s paternal grandfather, like Michael, a Ph.D. mathematician.

It didn’t take long for Sergey, a precocious teenager about to enter college, to size up his former environs. The Soviet empire was crumbling and, in the drab, cinder-block landscape and people’s stony mien of resignation, he could see first-hand the bleak future that would have been his. On the second day of the trip, while the group toured a sanitarium in the countryside near Moscow, Sergey took his father aside, looked him in the eye and said, “Thank you for taking us all out of Russia.”

“There were only two occasions when my children were grateful to me,” Michael says dryly, and I get the sense that he is completely serious. The other occasion, he says, involved Sergey’s younger brother, Sam, and the repair of a broken toilet.

Genia, seated next to him, protests. “Misha, what are you talking about!?” she exclaims, as she often does when their memories differ or when she feels Michael is editorializing.

As Sergey recalls, the trip awakened his childhood fear of authority. His crisp tenor voice, tinged with a faint accent that is no longer identifiably Russian, came to me via satellite phone as he flew to Asia last November. Teenagers have their own way of transforming fear into defiance, Sergey reflects, remembering that his impulse on confronting Soviet oppression had been to throw pebbles at a police car. The two officers sitting inside got out of the car “quite upset” he says but, luckily, his parents were able to defuse the matter.

“My rebelliousness, I think, came out of being born in Moscow,” Sergey says, adding, “I’d say this is something that followed me into adulthood.”

At a bagel shop across the street from the Maryland campus where he has taught dynamical systems and statistics for 25 years, Michael talks of the discrimination that drove him to take his family out of Russia. It’s a bitter cold day in College Park, reminiscent of winter in Moscow. Over a lunch of soup and sandwiches, Michael explains how he was forced to abandon his dream of becoming an astronomer even before he reached college. Officially, anti-Semitism didn’t exist in the U.S.S.R. but, in reality, Communist Party heads barred Jews from upper professional ranks by denying them entry to universities. Jews were excluded from the physics department, in particular, at the prestigious Moscow State University, because Soviet leaders did not trust them with nuclear rocket research. Unfortunately for Michael, astronomy fell under the rubric of physics.

Michael opted to study mathematics instead. But gaining acceptance to the math department at Moscow State, home of arguably the brightest mathematicians in the world, also proved exceedingly difficult. Discrimination there was administered by means of entrance exams for which Jews were tested in different rooms from other applicants—morbidly nicknamed “gas chambers”—and graded more harshly. Nevertheless, with help from a well-connected family friend, Michael was accepted and in 1970 graduated with an honors degree.

“I had all A’s except for three classes where I got B’s: history of the Communist Party, military training and statistics,” he says. “But nobody would even consider me for graduate school because I was Jewish. That was normal.” So Michael became an economist for GOSPLAN, the central planning agency. “I was trying to prove that, in a few years, living standards in Russia would be higher than in the United States,” he says. “And I proved it. I know enough about math to prove whatever you want.”

He continued to study mathematics on his own, sneaking into evening seminars at the university and writing research papers. After several were published, Brin began a doctoral thesis. At the time, a student in the Soviet Union could earn a doctorate without going to graduate school if he passed certain exams and an institution agreed to consider his thesis. Michael found two advisers, an official adviser, an ethnic Russian, and an informal Jewish mentor. (“Jews could not have Jewish advisers,” he says.) With their help, he successfully defended his thesis at a university in Kharkov, Ukraine, but life didn’t change much even after he received his Ph.D. He continued in his day job at GOSPLAN and received a 100-ruble raise. “I thought I was rich. Life was beautiful,” he says with a wry chuckle.

For Genia, life in Moscow was also comfortable enough. She, too, had managed to overcome the entrance hurdles to attend Moscow State, graduating from the School of Mechanics and Mathematics. In a research lab of the Soviet Oil and Gas Institute, a prestigious industrial school, she worked alongside a number of other Jews. “I was content in my job and had many friends,” she says. The Brins’ encounters with institutional anti-Semitism did not extend to day-to-day interactions with colleagues and neighbors. Highly assimilated into Russian culture, they were part of the intelligentsia and had a circle of university-educated friends. Occupying a tiny, three-room apartment in central Moscow, 350 square feet in all shared with Michael’s mother, they were better off than many Muscovites who still lived in communal apartments. After Sergey was born, on August 21, 1973, the courtyard of their hulking five-story building became his playground. In keeping with Russian tradition, Sergey spent two hours in the morning and evening each day outdoors, regardless of the season.

As we talk at the bagel shop, Michael keeps careful watch on the time. Every so often he leaps from his chair and dashes outside. This isn’t just for a smoke, although he does light up. He’s also keeping close tabs on the parking meters, his and mine, and takes care when the time runs out to drop in more quarters.

The history of Russian Jewish emigration in the mid-1970s can be neatly summarized in a joke from the era: Two Jews are talking in the street, a third walks by and says to them, “I don’t know what you’re talking about but yes, it’s time to get out of here!”

“I’ve known for a long time that my father wasn’t able to pursue the career he wanted,” Sergey tells me. As a young boy, though, Sergey had only a vague awareness of why his family wanted to leave their native Russia. He picked up the ugly details of the anti-Semitism they faced bit by bit years later, he says. Nevertheless, he sensed, early on, all of the things that he wasn’t: He wasn’t Russian. He wasn’t welcome in his own country. He wasn’t going to get a fair shake in advancing through its schools. Further complicating his understanding of his Jewish identity was the fact that, under the ardently atheist Soviet regime, there were few religious or cultural models of what being Jewish was. The negatives were all he had.

Sergey is too young to remember the day, in the summer of 1977, when his father came home and announced that it was time for the family to emigrate. “We cannot stay here any more,” he told his wife and mother. He had arrived at his decision while attending a mathematics conference in Warsaw. For the first time, he had been able to mingle freely with colleagues from the United States, France, England and Germany. Discovering that his intellectual brethren in the West “were not monsters,” he listened as they described the opportunities and comforts of life beyond the Iron Curtain. “He said he wouldn’t stay, now that he had seen what life could be about,” says Genia.

The couple knew, of course, the perils of applying for an exit visa. They could easily end up refuseniks, unable to find work, shunned, in perpetual limbo. Nobody had promised Michael a position abroad but he was confident he could find work in the West that was intellectually stimulating and would support the family. Genia, however, was unconvinced. They had lived in Moscow their entire lives. They had decent jobs and a young son. Was it worth it to try to leave? “I didn’t want to go,” she says. “It took a while for me and his mother to agree. I had a lot more attachments.” It was up to Michael to do the convincing. “I was the only one in the family who decided it was really important to leave—not in some distant future,” he says.

The Brins’ story provides me with a clue to the origins of Sergey’s entrepreneurial instincts. His parents, academics through and through, deny any role in forming their son’s considerable business acumen—“He did not learn it from us, absolutely not our area,” Michael says. Yet Sergey’s willingness to take risks, his sense of whom to trust and ask for help, his vision to see something better and the conviction to go after it—these traits are evident in much of what Michael Brin did in circumventing the system and working twice as hard as others to earn his doctorate, then leave the Soviet Union.

For Genia, the decision ultimately came down to Sergey. While her husband admits he was thinking as much about his own future as his son’s, for her, “it was 80/20 about Sergey.” They formally applied for an exit visa in September 1978. Michael was promptly fired. Genia, who had obtained her job through a relative, had to quit to insulate him from any recrimination. “When he got a whiff of our intentions,” she says, “he said ‘please get out of there as soon as possible.’ It had to be a secret from everybody at work, my real reason for leaving. So I lied to all of my coworkers that I was simply leaving my job because I got another job, where I would only have to be at work three days a week and the salary would be higher. I made up—totally made up—the name of a place where I was planning to work.” There was no other job, of course, and suddenly they found themselves with no income. To get by, Michael translated technical books into English, but it was painstaking work. He also began to teach himself computer programming, having no expectation of getting an academic position if they ever got out. When Genia found temporary work, again lying about her situation, they shared responsibility for looking after Sergey, who stayed at home rather than attend a miserable Soviet pre-school.
And then they waited.

For many Soviet Jews, exit visas never came. But, in May 1979, the Brins were granted papers to leave the U.S.S.R. “We hoped it would happen,” Genia says, “but we were completely surprised by how quickly it did.” The timing was fortuitous: They were among the last Jews allowed to leave until the Gorbachev era.

Sergey, who turned six that summer, remembers what followed as simply “unsettling”—literally so. “We were in different places from day to day,” he says. The journey was a blur. First Vienna, where the family was met by representatives of HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, which helped thousands of Eastern European Jews establish new lives in the free world. Then, on to the suburbs of Paris, where Michael’s “unofficial” Jewish Ph.D. advisor, Anatole Katok, had arranged a temporary research position for him at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques. Katok, who had emigrated the year before with his family, looked after the Brins and paved the way for Michael to teach at Maryland.

When the family finally landed in America on October 25, they were met at New York’s Kennedy Airport by friends from Moscow. Sergey’s first memory of the United States was of sitting in the backseat of the car, amazed at all the giant automobiles on the highway as their hosts drove them home to Long Island.

The Brins found a house to rent in Maryland—a simple, cinder-block structure in a lower-middle-class neighborhood not far from the university campus. With a $2,000 loan from the Jewish community, they bought a 1973 Ford Maverick. And, at Katok’s suggestion, they enrolled Sergey in Paint Branch Montessori School in Adelphi, Maryland.

He struggled to adjust. Bright-eyed and bashful, with only a rudimentary knowledge of English, Sergey spoke with a heavy accent when he started school. “It was a difficult year for him, the first year,” recalls Genia. “We were constantly discussing the fact we had been told that children are like sponges, that they immediately grasp the language and have no problem, and that wasn’t the case.”

Patty Barshay, the school’s director, became a friend and mentor to Sergey and his parents. She invited them to a party at her house that first December (“a bunch of Jewish people with nothing to do on Christmas Day”) and wound up teaching Genia how to drive. Everywhere they turned, there was so much to take in. “I remember them inviting me over for dinner one day,” Barshay says, “and I asked Genia, ‘What kind of meat is this?’ She had no idea. They had never seen so much meat” as American supermarkets offer.

When I ask about her former pupil, Barshay lights up, obviously proud of Sergey’s achievements. “Sergey wasn’t a particularly outgoing child,” she says, “but he always had the self-confidence to pursue what he had his mind set on.”

He gravitated toward puzzles, maps and math games that taught multiplication. “I really enjoyed the Montessori method,” he tells me. “I could grow at my own pace.” He adds that the Montessori environment—which gives students the freedom to choose activities that suit their interests—helped foster his creativity.

“He was interested in everything,” Barshay says, but adds, “I never thought he was any brighter than anyone else.”

One thing the Brins shared with thousands of other families emigrating to the West from the Soviet Union was the discovery that, suddenly, they were free to be Jews.

“Russian Jews lacked the vocabulary to even articulate what they were feeling,” says Lenny Gusel, the founder of a San Francisco-based network of Russian-Jewish immigrants; many newcomers he encounters struggle with this fundamental change. “They were considered Jews back home. Here they were considered Russians. Many longed just to assimilate as Americans.” Gusel’s group, which he calls the “79ers,” after the peak year of immigration in the 1970s, and its New York cousin, RJeneration, have attracted hundreds of 20- and 30-something immigrants who grapple with their Jewish identity. “Sergey is the absolute emblem of our group, the number one Russian-Jewish immigrant success story,” he says.

The Brins were no different from their fellow immigrants in that being Jewish was an ethnic, not a religious experience. “We felt our Jewishness in different ways, not by keeping kosher or going to synagogue. It is genetic,” explains Michael. “We were not very religious. My wife doesn’t eat on Yom Kippur; I do.” Genia interjects: “We always have a Passover dinner. We have a seder. I have the recipe for gefilte fish from my grandmother.”

Religious or not, on arriving in the suburbs of Washington, the Brins were adopted by a synagogue, Mishkan Torah of Greenbelt, Maryland, which helped them acquire furnishings for their home. “We didn’t need that much, but we saw how much the community helped other families,” Genia says.

Sergey attended Hebrew school at Mishkan Torah for the better part of three years but hated the language instruction and everything else, too. “He was teased there by other kids and he begged us not to send him any more,” his mother remembers. “Eventually, it worked.” The Conservative congregation turned out to be too religious for the Brins and they drifted. When a three-week trip to Israel awakened 11-year-old Sergey’s interest in all things Jewish, the family inquired at another synagogue about restarting studies to prepare for a bar mitzvah. But the rabbi said it would take more than a year to catch up and Sergey, who didn’t want to wait past his 13th birthday, abandoned the pursuit.

If there was one Jewish value the Brin family upheld without reservation, Michael says, it was scholarship. Sergey’s brother—who in his younger years was more fond of basketball than homework—even got the notion that advanced degrees were mandatory for all professions. “Sam once asked us, ‘Is it true that before you play in the N.B.A. you have to get a Ph.D.?’” recalls his dad. To which the professor couldn’t resist replying, “Yes, Sam, that’s it!”

Sergey attended Eleanor Roosevelt High School, a large public school in Greenbelt. He raced through in three years, amassing a year’s worth of college credits that would enable him to finish college in three years as well. At the University of Maryland, he majored in mathematics and computer science and graduated near the top of his class. When he won a prestigious National Science Foundation scholarship for graduate school, he insisted on Stanford. (M.I.T. had rejected him.) Aside from the physical beauty of Stanford’s campus, Sergey knew the school’s reputation for supporting high-tech entrepreneurs. At the time, though, his focus was squarely on getting his doctorate.

Personable, with an easy smile, Sergey brims with a healthy self-assuredness that at times spills over into arrogance. At Stanford, he was known for his habit of bursting in on professors without knocking. One of his advisers, Rajeev Motwani, recalls, “He was the brash young man. But he was so smart, it just oozed out of him.” His abiding interest was computer science, specifically the field of “data mining,” or how to extract meaningful patterns from mountains of information. But he also took time out to enjoy Stanford social life and all manner of sports: skiing, rollerblading, gymnastics, even trapeze. His father once remarked, “I asked him if he was taking any advanced courses, and he said, ‘yes, advanced swimming.’”

What came next is Google legend. In the spring of 1995, during a prospective student weekend, Sergey met an opinionated computer science student from the University of Michigan named Larry Page. They talked and argued over the course of two days, each finding the other cocky and obnoxious. They also formed an instant connection, relishing the intellectual combat.

Like Sergey, Larry is the son of high-powered intellects steeped in computer science. His father, Carl Victor Page, a computer science professor at Michigan State University until his death in 1996, received one of the first Ph.D.s awarded in the field. His mother, Gloria, holds a master’s degree in computer science and has taught college programming classes. The two young graduate students also shared a Jewish background. Larry’s maternal grandfather made aliyah and lived in the desert town of Arad near the Dead Sea, working as a tool and die maker, and his mother was raised Jewish. Larry, however, brought up in the mold of his father, whose religion was technology, does not readily identify as a Jew. He, too, never had a bar mitzvah.

Larry and Sergey soon began working on ways to harness information on the World Wide Web, spending so much time together that they took on a joint identity, “LarryandSergey.” By 1996, Larry had hit on the idea of using the links between web pages to rank their relative importance. Borrowing from academia the concept of citations in research papers as a measure of topicality and value, he and Brin applied that thinking to the Web: if one page linked to another, it was in effect “citing” or casting a vote for that page. The more votes a page had, the more valuable it was. The concept seems rather obvious in retrospect, and today most search engines operate on this principle. But, at the time, it was groundbreaking. Calling their new invention Google—a misspelling of a very large number in mathematics—Larry and Sergey shopped it around to various companies for the price of $1 million.

No one was interested. In the technology boom of the late 1990s, conventional thinking was that so-called web portals like Yahoo! and AOL, which offered email, news, weather and more, would make the most money. No one cared about search. But Sergey and Larry knew they were on to something, so they decided to take leaves of absence from Stanford and build a company themselves. Sergey’s parents were skeptical. “We were definitely upset,” Genia says. “We thought everybody in their right mind ought to get a Ph.D.”

Soliciting funds from faculty members, family and friends, Sergey and Larry scraped together enough to buy some servers and rent that famous garage in Menlo Park. Their venture quickly bore fruit: After viewing a quick demo, Sun Microsystems cofounder Andy Bechtolsheim (himself a Jewish immigrant from Germany) wrote a $100,000 check to “Google, Inc.” The only problem was, “Google, Inc.” did not yet exist—the company hadn’t yet been incorporated. For two weeks, as they handled the paperwork, the young men had nowhere to deposit the money.

It is difficult to pinpoint the moment when Google became a true American phenomenon. Traditional measures, such as gracing the cover of Time magazine or being profiled on 60 Minutes, seem irrelevant when it comes to the fast-moving world of the Internet. But there’s no doubt about the date that Wall Street began to take the quirky California company seriously. It was April 29, 2004, when Google formally filed paperwork for its initial public offering of stock.

Two things shocked the investment world that day. First were the company’s staggeringly large revenue and profit figures, which until then had been closely guarded secrets. No one had dreamed that the subtle text advertisements Google placed alongside search results—which many web users don’t even recognize as ads—could be so profitable. Second was the ruthlessly earnest “founders’ letter” that Sergey and Larry had included with the filing, which began by stating that Google was “not a conventional company” and did not intend to become one. They followed up that show of bravado by granting an interview to Playboy for publication during a mandatory “quiet period” before the public offering, when securities regulations restrict company executives’ public comments. The misdeed prompted many to wonder whether the Google founders were careless and immature or just incorrigible troublemakers. It didn’t help that they had decided to make it tough for Wall Street insiders to dominate the stock offering by selling shares via public auction—their way of making the process more democratic and transparent.

On August 16, 2004, its first day of trading, Google stock shot from $85 to $100 per share. Last November, it crossed the $500 mark, a number seldom seen in stock market history and far above the share prices of rivals Microsoft and Yahoo! At that price, Sergey and Larry, who together hold a controlling interest the company, each boast an estimated net worth of $15 billion.

What does that sort of money do to a 33-year-old? If you’re Sergey, you buy a new house on the peninsula south of San Francisco, trade in your hybrid Toyota Prius for a fancier ride, and continue shopping at Costco. “From my parents, I certainly learned to be frugal and to be happy without very many things,” Sergey tells me. “It’s interesting—I still find myself not wanting to leave anything on the plate uneaten. I still look at prices. I try to force myself to do this less, not to be so frugal. But I was raised being happy with not so much.” His parents say Sergey taught them to shop at Costco, too. “He bought us a membership,” Michael says. “It’s a store that he knows and understands.”

Sergey also understands something about cooking, a skill he picked up on his own. “A month before leaving [for Stanford], he realized he didn’t know how to cook, so he learned,” his mother tells me. Now, he owns a pasta machine and often joins his father in the kitchen when he comes home to visit. His specialty is Chernobyl Chili—“45 minutes in the microwave.”

The trappings of extreme wealth haven’t passed Sergey by entirely. In 2005, he and Larry jointly purchased a Boeing 767 jet and had it refitted for personal use. Interior sketches of the “party airplane”—which has two staterooms, sitting and dining areas, a large galley and seating for 50—surfaced in The Wall Street Journal last July. At one point, according to the plane’s designer, the Google founders got into a spat over Sergey’s insistence on a “California” king-sized bed in his private cabin. CEO Schmidt had to mediate, telling them, “Sergey, you can have whatever bed you want in your room; Larry, you can have whatever bed you want in your bedroom. Let’s move on.”

While everyone I’ve talked to who knows them well repeats the same line—“They’re good guys”—gossip web sites occasionally print rumors of Larry and Sergey’s soirees in posh private clubs and other typical jet-setter antics. They are without a doubt two of the most eligible bachelors on Google Earth, but both are reported to be in serious relationships: Larry with Stanford graduate student Lucy Southworth, and Sergey with Anne Wojcicki, a healthcare investor and the sister of Google executive Susan Wojcicki, who owned the garage where Google got started. In a 2001 interview for the now-defunct web site Women.com, Genia said she hoped Sergey would find “somebody exciting who could be really interesting to him….[who] had a sense of humor that could match his.” As one might expect, she also prefers that Sergey marry a Jewish girl. “I hope that he would keep it in mind,” she confided.

The Ten Commandments it’s not, but Google does operate with a moral code of sorts: “Don’t Be Evil.” The maxim is supposed to guide behavior at all levels of the company. When pressed for clarification, Eric Schmidt has famously said, “Evil is whatever Sergey says is evil.”

One malevolent practice, in Google’s view, is tampering with or otherwise censoring the list of results produced by a Google search. An early test of the Google founders’ commitment to providing unfiltered information struck very close to home. The anti-Semitic web site “Jew Watch” appeared prominently in Google results for searches on the term “Jew,” prompting some Jewish groups to demand that Google remove the defamatory site from the top of its listings. Google refused. Sergey said at the time, “I certainly am very offended by the site, but the objectivity of our rankings is one of our very important principles.” As a compromise, Google displays a warning at the top of questionable pages entitled “Offensive Search Results,” which links to a fuller explanation of Google’s policy: “Our search results are generated completely objectively and are independent of the beliefs and preferences of those who work at Google.”

The most telling measure of Google’s moral code has come in China, the world’s second largest Internet market, where an army of Communist Party bureaucrats actively monitors and censors the Internet. During months of intense debate at the Googleplex, Sergey, Larry and other executives weighed the vast profit potential of launching a China-based service against their opposition to the country’s odious human rights abuses. Ever the computer geeks, Schmidt said they actually worked up an “evil scale.” To their minds, operating a censored Google site in China was a lesser evil than providing spotty, substandard service from outside the country. The outcome also happened to favor the profit motive. Viewed against the backdrop of Sergey’s distaste for authority, the decision to cave in to China’s totalitarian leadership seems out of character.

Sergey’s public comments on the matter have evolved to reflect this contradiction. While firmly defending the decision at first, he later acknowledged that Google had “compromised” its principles. “Perhaps now the principled approach makes more sense,” he allowed in June, but added, “It’s not where we chose to go right now.”

How Google deals with such thorny matters as accommodating government requests for information is not merely of passing interest. As the world’s dominant search engine, used some 300 million times daily, it marshals an immense amount of data about our collective interests, needs and desires. And that’s not all. Because every search typed into Google is stored indefinitely and can often be traced to individual computer users, privacy advocates point out that clever government prosecutors or divorce lawyers could get their hands on our personal digital dossiers. Google’s motto may be “Don’t Be Evil,” but it all depends into whose hands this information falls.

Does any company founded by two Jews, no matter how assimilated, necessarily retain some defining Jewish characteristics? The Google masterminds’ penchant for pushing boundaries—without asking permission—might as well be called chutzpah. However you label it, it’s an attitude that runs deeply through Google and may help explain why the company is embroiled in lawsuits over many of its new projects: the aggressive scanning of library books it doesn’t own; display of copyrighted material; and copyright issues connected to its acquisition of YouTube, the online video site whose popularity rests in part on the availability of pirated television and movie clips.

Google’s first employee and a number of other early hires were Jewish and, when the initial winter holiday season rolled around, a menorah rather than a Christmas tree graced the lobby. (The next year, there was a tree wrapped in Hanukkah lights.) Google’s former chef, Charlie Ayers, cooked up latkes, brisket, tzimmes and matzah ball soup for Hanukkah meals and turned the Passover seder into a Google tradition. To some, Google’s emphasis on academic achievement—hiring only the best and the brightest and employing hundreds of Ph.D.s—could be considered Jewish. So, perhaps, could “Don’t Be Evil.” With its hint of tikkun olam, the Kabbalistic concept of “repairing the world” is evident in the company’s commitment to aggressive philanthropy. Sergey and Larry have pledged $1 billion of Google’s profits to the company’s philanthropic arm, known as Google.org, which will funnel money both to nonprofit charities and companies that deal with global poverty, environmental issues and renewable energy.

Personal philanthropy is one area where Sergey intends to proceed cautiously. “I take the philosophical view that, aside from some modest stuff now, I am waiting to do the bulk of my philanthropy later, maybe in a few years, when I feel I’m more educated,” he says. “I don’t think it’s something I have had time to become an expert at.” Nevertheless, he and his parents do support a few charities. “There are people who helped me and my family out. I do feel responsible to those organizations,” he says. One of them is HIAS, the immigrant aid group that helped the Brins come to the United States. Genia serves on its board and heads its project to create a digital record of Jewish immigrant archives.

Sergey’s own Jewish sensibility is grounded in his family’s experience. “I do somewhat feel like a minority,” he says. “Being Jewish, especially in Russia, is one aspect of that. Then, being an immigrant in the U.S. And then, since I was significantly ahead in math in school, being the youngest one in a class. I never felt like a part of the majority. So I think that is part of the Jewish heritage in a way.” Today, of course, being a young billionaire, he’s again in a class by himself. “I don’t feel comfortable being one of the crowd,” he reflects. “It’s kind of interesting—I really liked the schools that I went to, but I never rooted for the sports teams. I was never one of the crowd supporting something or not. I like to maintain my independence.”

I’m curious as to whether Sergey has been a target of anti-Semitism since he left the Soviet Union. “I’ve experienced it,” he tells me. “Usually it is fairly subtle. People harp on all media companies being run by Jewish executives, with the implication of a conspiracy.” As an example, he cites the entry about him in Wikipedia, the popular online encyclopedia that famously accepts submissions and edits from anyone. “The Wikipedia page about me will be subtly edited in an anti-Semitic way,” he says.

He doesn’t elaborate, so I later take a look myself. Wikipedia retains the old versions of each of its pages and in that archive I find a number of occasions where people have added, moved or deleted references to Sergey’s Jewishness. Most seem harmless or ambiguous, but one jumps out. Several months ago, someone anonymously deleted a long-standing reference to the reason his parents had left Russia: “anti-Semitism.”

“I think I’m fortunate that it doesn’t really affect me personally,” Sergey says of anti-Semitism. “But there are hints of it all around. That’s why I think it is worth noting.”

Several years ago, Sergey and Larry visited a high school for gifted math students near Tel Aviv. When they came onto the stage of the darkened auditorium, the audience roared, as if they were rock stars. Every student there, many of them immigrants like Sergey from the former Soviet Union, knew of Google.

Larry took the podium first, urging the students to maintain a “healthy disregard for the impossible,” a favorite Google phrase. When it was Sergey’s turn to speak, he began, to the crowd’s delight, with a few words in Russian, which he still speaks at home with his parents.

“I have standard Russian-Jewish parents,” he then continued in English. “My dad is a math professor. They have a certain attitude about studies. And I think I can relate that here, because I was told that your school recently got seven out of the top 10 places in a math competition throughout all Israel.”

The students applauded their achievement and the recognition from Sergey, unaware that he was setting up a joke. “What I have to say,” he continued, “is in the words of my father: ‘What about the other three?’”

The students laughed. They knew where he was coming from. That Sergey has parlayed his talents and skills into unimaginable business success doesn’t mean those “standard Russian-Jewish parents” are ready to let him off the academic hook. Genia still believes that “everybody in their right mind” ought to have a doctorate, and she and Michael are not joking when they tell me that they would like to see Sergey return to Stanford and finish what he started.

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar

"Is enlightenment really possible for the average person? Yes. Big Yes. Enlightenment is very possible for the ordinary individual. Actually it is easier than for some one who thinks that they are special ....whenever someone is ordinary, simple, innocent and natural, that is enlightenment"

'THE day you feel hopeless, horrible, and worse, on that day get out of your room and ask people, What can I do you for you ? that service you have done that day will bring a revolution inside you. It will change your whole gramophone record.

‘LOVE is seeing God in the person next to us, and meditation is seeing God within us.’

‘THE more we open ourselves, the more room we will have for God to fill us’

‘A PRAYER Give me not thirst if you cannot give me water. Give me not hunger if you cannot give me food. Give me not joy if I cannot share. Give me not the skills if I cannot put them to good use.’

‘IN science you have knowledge first, and then FAITH follows. In spirituality, faith comes first, and then Knowledge follows. For example, the knowledge that pesticides and chemical fertilizers are good for plants came through science, and people had faith in it, and all over the world they were used. And then another knowledge came that they were not good and the faith shifted to organic farming. The same with antibiotics. The knowledge brought faith, the knowledge changed, and then faith changed.’

‘ENLIGHTENMENT is the very core of our being; going into the core of our self and living our life from there. We all came into this world gifted with innocence, but gradually, as we became more intelligent, we lost our innocence. We were born with silence, and as we grew up, we lost the silence and were filled with words. We lived in our hearts, and as time passed, we moved into our heads. Now the reversal of this journey is enlightenment.’

‘ IT is the journey from head back to the heart, from words, back to silence; getting back to our innocence in spite of our intelligence. Although very simple, this is a great achievement. Knowledge should lead you to that beautiful point of "I don't know." The purpose of knowledge is ignorance. The completion of knowledge will lead you to amazement and wonder. It makes you aware of this existence. Mysteries are to be lived, not understood. One can live life so fully in its completeness, in its totality.’

‘ ENLIGHTENMENT is that state of being so mature and unshakable by any circumstance. Come what may, nothing can rob the smile from your heart. Not identifying with limited boundaries and feeling "all that exists in this universe belongs to me," this is enlightenment.’

‘OUR breath plays a very important role. The breath is the connecting link between the inner world of the mind and the outer world of body and environment. You see, there are seven levels of existence, body, mind, intellect, memory, ego and being. Meditation works by bringing an effort from the level of being to the mind. With the breath we bring this effect to the physical level as well.’

‘LET it be. If the ego is there, just embrace it, take it.’

’FEAR is egocentric. Worship is the only way to let go of the fear. In worship you say, "It's all you, and you, and you.’

‘OUR ego wants to do something that is very difficult. The ego is not ready to accept something simple, something natural, something that is easily available. The nature of the ego is to do difficult things, not simple ones’

‘THE Divine is not an object of the ego. It doesn't demand from you something that is impossible for you. You don't have to do something that you cannot do. No need for that at all.’

’WHEN the ego dissolves, all discomforts go away with the ego. Discomfort is not because of "something;" it is because of ego -- a separated-ness.’

‘THE direction of life is towards one thing: that is love. You be prosperous and have no love, that prosperity has no value. You are on spiritual path but you don't experience, then that spiritual path is no path, it is very dry: it's all up here.’

‘THE secret is hidden somewhere very deep, and that is what we can call the Divine Love -- that love which is so total, which is so complete, and which is so fulfilling.’

’LOVE, the Divine Love, everyone is looking for such a love that never dies. As time goes it seems to be dying out. You see? Love dies out as time goes. But we are looking for some love that stands the time -- the old, ancient, strong, powerful Love.’

‘WHEN we express love too much, then also it disappears, dies out. It's like when you keep the seed on the surface of the soil, not a little deep inside, it doesn't grow.’

‘THE purpose of every practice -- spiritual practice, meditation, breathing techniques, and kriya, all this -- is to uncover something that blocks the expression of Divine Love.



Jai Gurudev,
The folowing Sutras, Compliments of:

R.Praveenji



Desire for Happiness

Your desire for pleasure or happiness makes you
unhappy. You examine---whenever you are miserable or
unhappy, behind that is your wanting to be happy.



Become Free

Before this earth eats you up, become free---free from
this feverishness that is gripping your mind, free
from
this craving for happiness.



Unlimited Joy

Your mind is not reasy for limitations. It wants
unlimited joy, unlimited pleasure---which the five
sense cannot give you.



Love Does n't Stay

Everyone loves in this world.Everything loves. But
that love does n't stay too long as love. It
immediately becomes hatred, almost immediately. But
yoga is that skill, that preservative, that maintains
that love as love throughout.



Wrapping Paper

Mind is that cover that is holding the Divine, the
Divinity within us. Once that wrapping paper is
unwrapped, you find, "Oh, this beautiful gift is here
within us!" You know, it's like everyone is given a
Christmas package, a beautiful package, and they live
with the beautiful without even opening it.


Eliminate the Cause

Eliminate the cause, the very root of negativity in
us. Instead of rubbing the mind with a positive
thought, go deep into yourself through the breath,
through meditation, and cleaning the system.


Belonging

You can't cultivate the "sense of belonging". You drop
the stresses and fear---it comes in. You already
belong to this entire existence. You 're not separate.



Mind is a Field

Mind is not just in one location. Mind is a field,
like
an electric field. Like an electromagnetic field, it's
present all over.



Garbage Collectors

A master does n't need any favor from you. He just
could take all that anguish and garbage which you
cannot lift by yourself, free you from that. All
enlightened masters on this planet are garbage
collectors. They do nothing other than collect the
garbage.



Suffering

Suffering is a product of limited knowledge.




You Think You Know

You think you know the world and "This is it". That is
the biggest problem. This is not just one world; there
are many layers in this world.



Only You

One one lever there are individuals everybody is
different---they 're young, old, intelligent, wise,
dull and all types. One one level we have different
types, but on a deeper level there is only you. Only
you, nothing else.


Longing

When you give a space, the longing in you increases,
whether it is for your spouse,or for God, or for
Guru---whatever. And when there is longing, your love
becomes really strong,powerful,unshakeable.



Partial Knowledge

Shadows appear very big, much bigger than you, but
they have no existence. Smaller the light, bigger the
shadow appears. If it is total darkness, then also
there is no shadow. So partial knowledge,a partial
light,partial vision,brings the shadow. And it makes
the shadow appear very huge, very big. But know it is
just a shadow.



Forgiveness

Forgiveness shield and protects your mind, your
spirit,
from being violent.



Just Happening - Surrender


You are a happening in this ocean of consciousness.
Your heart beats by itself; you're not making it beat.
Your breath moves by itself, sleep comes, you feel
hunger, you feel thirsty, you feel good, you feel bad.
All these phenomenon are happening in your life. When
this realization comes, a deep relaxation, a trust, a
feeling of "at home" and fullness arises in you. That
is surrender.



Nothing to lose


What are you afraid of ? What do you think you will
lose ? Just wake up and see you have nothing to lose
in the first place ! And, even if you think you have
something, how long can you hold on to it ?



Surrender is Not

Surrender is not an act. It's not again and again
trying to bow down and say, "Oh, I am surrendering,
I am surrendering." Saying that to yourself a hundred
times---that is not surrender.



Surrender Is

Open your hands up---that is surrender. It is your
very nature.



God is Not

God is not the object of sight; you can never see
God. God is not an object of hearing. God is not an
object of smelling or tasting. God cannot be perceived
through your senses, nor through the mind.


God Is

God is the Seer himself. Who sees---that is God.



Seeing God

You can live God. You can be God. But you cannot
"see" God, perceive God as an Object

There was a sword hanging over my head: Amitabh

There was a sword hanging over my head: Amitabh

Wipro Chairman's Azim Premji speech at Rotary Club of Bombay

President, Distinguished Guests, Rotarians and friends : I am very happy to be with you today. The Rotary Club of Bombay has made immense contribution to many social causes and has contributed to the success of many individuals and organizations. Success shared is success multiplied. For a long time in our country, possibly due to our Fabian socialist stance in politics, it was believed that becoming successful was something one had to apologise for or at least pay enormous taxes for. Profits were confused with "profiteering", which by definition was something bad. Luckily, this has changed over time. People have begun to view that profits are future investments. There is no way one can distribute wealth without generating it in the first place. Success is a pre-requisite for helping others to be successful. The topic I have decided to speak on today is on how to build successful organizations and successful people. I have borrowed the thoughts for this from own experience with Wipro.
When I joined Wipro, a little over three and a half decades back, it was a very small company. We had one manufacturing plant where we made vanaspati and operated from Amalner, a small town in Jalgaon district. At that time, I had no idea that we will one day grow to be a large organization operating across so many continents. All I knew and wanted to build was great organization, an organization that would be respected for its strong Values. We had a small team of people who believed in this. We were able to attract other people from larger and better-known organizations to join us in our endeavour. Together, this team was able to take Wipro to new heights of success. Many times, I am asked what was it that we did differently that helped in our journey. I have made a sincere attempt to identify and list some of the factors that contributed to our success. I do hope that these will be useful to you.
First, all success begins in the mind. What the mind can conceive, it can achieve. I remember the intensity of our desire to achieve right from the beginning. After we became large enough, we had visioning exercises that codified our dreams in a much more systematic manner. But dreams come first, not vision statements. It is only when the vision statement is crafted from the dreams of many employees does it have the combined energy and enthusiasm of the organization. That is because vision deals with the "possibility" of achieving, which can be significantly more than the "probability of what seems to be achievable", or what seems to be rational. Vision or dreams create an internal stretch that pushes everyone to give their best. In a way, it is a positive self-fulfilling prophesy. When you expect to succeed from the bottom of your heart, you invariably do.
Second, one needs to have clear goals, milestones and strategies. These help to de-risk the dreams and also make them more executable. At Wipro, apart from the visioning exercise we do every five years, we have a comprehensive planning process every year. The plans ensure that there is complete alignment between organizational goals and individual performance measures. While visions are very exciting, down-to-earth measures are extremely important to make them realizable. Landing on the moon was a great vision, but without all the satellite tracking devices that monitored the trajectory of the rocket so closely, who knows where Neil Armstrong would have landed! To my mind, success comes out of monitoring because what cannot be measured cannot be managed. This, of course, does not mean breathing down people's neck or following up too closely that the entire enthusiasm is stifled. When you plan a sapling, make sure that you water it everyday. But do not take it out every day to see how much the root has grown. The plant itself will die.
Third, one needs to put in the requisite efforts. The changes that have swept over business have been so encompassing and so fundamental, that everyone's job is completely stretched. I have seen that happening with my own time requirements. Working hard is no longer a choice or a trade-off against working smart. The truth is that the working day has expanded. In my own experience, many strategies have failed, not so much for any intrinsic weakness in the strategy as much as in the last mile drop out, for want of that little extra bit of effort. I came across this interesting story some time back.
A priest was driving when he saw a very beautiful farm. He stopped the car to admire the great crop. A farmer was driving past in his tractor. Seeing the priest, he came to a halt beside him. The priest said, " God has blessed you with this farm. You must be grateful for it." The farmer replied, "Yes, I am. But you should have seen this farm when God had it all to himself!" Hard work is the most effective agent for transforming a potential for success into success.
Fourth, we must create an organization pride for performance. Organizations and individuals who perform must have that special place in the minds of the management. It is no use just praising or recognizing top performers. They must be constantly challenged to use their potential and rewarded accordingly. The 80:20 rule applies everywhere. It is important that we must not lose our best people. By best people, I mean not only those with superior intelligence or smarts, but also those who are willing to contribute to others. In the world of today, no individual can succeed as an island. Ability to work as part of a team is very important for success. Sometimes, I am confronted with this paradigm. How does one build star performers and at the same ensure that too much focus on them does not come in the way of teamwork? It does appear to be a paradox but then leadership is about managing such paradoxes. We must inculcate team spirit and at the same time not be afraid of openly acknowledging the stars.
Fifth, create a passion for excellence. Excellence is about a big win but doing every little thing as well as it can be done. We were the first organization In India to take up the Sigma approach, which has shown us tangible benefits over the last few years. Similarly, external certifications like the SEI or PCMM follow which follow very rigorous processes for assessment have brought us real benefits. While success comes from doing right things correctly, true satisfaction comes from doing them with excellence. And that is why excellence needs more than processes. It needs a passion, which helps people to face all the obstacles in the way. When excellence becomes a passion, it is no longer restricted to the Quality function. It becomes an organizational way of life.
Sixth, one must realize the difference between effort put in and the Value that it offers to the Customer. All efforts do not lead to proportionate Value for the Customer. This means that anything we do must have the Customer in mind and we should keep asking ourselves how would this activity help the Customer. Otherwise, it is possible to get sucked into an activity trap where every one is busy and yet nothing major seems to be getting accomplished.
The shopkeeper, whose shop was on the side of a busy road, was amazed by the energy of a dog. The dog would be at the back of the shop. Every time a car passed by, the dog would jump up and race after the car barking loudly. One day, the shopkeeper's friend came to the shop and also saw the same thing. "I keep wondering," said the shopkeeper to his friend. "Whether the dog will catch up with the car?" asked the friend. 'No, " replied the shopkeeper, " but what the dog will do if it does catch up with the car." Activities by themselves do not lead to success. In fact, eliminating unnecessary activities can make people more focused on the goal. Prioritising effort is a very important discipline for success.
Seventh, success comes through continuous learning. This is required most during success. Success can make us feel complacent. Even more dangerous it can blind us to our own faults and also lead us to reject better and newer ideas. In Wipro, we insist that people at every role go through certain mandatory training programs. We look upon education and learning as strategic investments and not discretionary expenses. That is why in the recent downturn we did more and not less training. Apart from training, a good knowledge management can help us tremendously in capturing the real experiences online and make it available to the right people at the right time. With advancements in Information Technology, it has become easier to build and refresh a sophisticated knowledge management system easily.
Lastly, it is not only important to achieve success but to sustain it. This is possible only when success has been built on Values. We have been hearing recently about a number of financial scams among large corporations. More than the financial loss, it is the loss of credibility that is hurting organizations lot more. Success with integrity lasts longer. It makes success more worthwhile. It also helps people sleep better at nights.
Let me end my talk with this story, which I like very much: A woman came out of her house and saw three old men with long white beards sitting in her front yard. She did not recognize them. She said "I don't think I know you, but you must be hungry. Please come in and have something to eat." "Is the man of the house home?", they asked. "No", she replied. He's out." Then we cannot come in", they replied. In the evening when her husband came home, he told him what had happened. "Go tell them I am home and invite them in!" The woman went out and invited the men in" "We do not go into a House together," they replied. "Why is that?" she asked.
One of the old men explained: "His name is Wealth," he said pointing to one of his friends, and said pointing to another one, "He is Success, and I am Truth." Then he added, "Now go in and discuss with your husband which one of us you want in your home." The woman went in and told her husband what was said. Her husband was overjoyed. "How nice!!", he said. "Since that is the case, let us invite Wealth. Let him come and fill our home with wealth!" His wife disagreed. "My dear, why don't we invite Success?" Their daughter-in-law was listening from the other corner of the house. She jumped in with her own suggestion: "Would it not be better to invite Truth? We want to instill Truth in all our children. "Let us heed our daughter-in-law's advice," said the husband to his wife. "Go out and invite Truth to be our guest." The woman went out and asked the 3 old men, "Which one of you is Truth? Please come in and be our guest."
Truth got up and started walking toward the house. The other two also got up and followed him. Surprised, the lady asked Wealth and Success: "I only invited Truth, why are you all coming in?" The old men replied together: "If you had invited Wealth or Success, the other two of us would've stayed out, but since you invited Truth, we go with him. Wherever there is Truth, there is also Wealth and Success!!!!!!"

ADDRESS BY AZIM PREMJI, ON "CONTINUOUS TRANSFORMATION"

ADDRESS BY AZIM PREMJI, CHAIRMAN, WIPRO AT THE ANNUAL CONVOCATION 2004 OF THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF MANAGEMENT AT KOLKATA AT 2-15 PM ON APRIL 3, 2004 ON "CONTINUOUS TRANSFORMATION".


Distinguished Director and faculty of IIM- Kolkata, Guests, and my young friends
I am very happy to be with you this afternoon. Indian Institute of Management - Calcutta is one the earliest management colleges of higher learning to be set up in the country. The pioneering spirit continues even after IIM-C has transformed itself into a world class institution. In your two years here, you must have experienced the enormous change in your own understanding of business and management. Graduation is not the end but the beginning of learning and change. I have found that people who succeed most in their careers are those who can constantly transform themselves. Transformation is not so much a process, as a deep seated desire to change ourselves and our environment. Based on my own experience, I would like to share with you my thoughts on how to make continuous transformation possible. I hope you find them useful.
First, you have got to have a dream. Dreams are very powerful internal motivators. Great achievements are created twice – First in the mind and then in a concrete form. The most exhilarating part of being young is the ability to dream. As one grows, one may realize that not all of them are achievable. But never turn cynical. Aging is not adding on years. It is parting with one’s dreams. Use your experience to reshape your dreams and adapt them to changing reality but do not stop dreaming. I cannot think of a single transformation or achievement, individual or social that did not begin with a dream. Dreams not only help us in seeing things before they happen, but they also give us the passion and energy to make them happen.
Second, stay on course even if you stumble. When everything seems to go wrong, you can either give up or you can let misfortune transform you into something stronger. The difference between great achievement and mediocrity is not extraordinary talent or intelligence, but perseverance. In fact, dreams and perseverance make a winning combination. In 1972, a chartered plane, carrying a Rugby team crashed in the Andes. After a week long futile search, the rescue team gave up thinking that all of them must be dead. The passengers after waiting for many days to be rescued, decided to help themselves since apparently nobody else was going to do it. Two of them volunteered to cross the mountains by foot to reach the green valleys of Chile and bring back help. It was a walk of more than 50 miles. But they did it and came back to rescue their fellow passengers who managed to survive in the mountain 70 days after the crash. The core of heroism lies in the ability to walk that extra mile. As long as you can do that, you will never be defeated.
Third, do not be afraid to admit your ignorance. While it is important to project what we are good at, we must be equally candid about areas we do not know enough about. The seeds of learning were sown by the great great philosopher Socrates who said "All I know is that I don’t know." Today, knowledge is multiplying at such a rapid rate that it is impossible for anyone to know everything. But if we can develop an index system by which we at least know with whom or where the knowledge is available, we have achieved quite a bit! And there will still be areas which we will be unable to tap. The important thing is not to hide behind a false front. People will respect you for your honesty, if not your wisdom.
Fourth, think about what you will take on next rather than about what you may be letting go. Too many people are so enamoured by the legacy of success in their current roles that they are afraid to look further. This can lead to inertia. If we linger too long on past success, we will miss out on the opportunities that lie ahead of us. We must learn to look at change as an exciting adventure rather than a disruption. New avenues for learning always lie just beyond the shade of our comfort zone.
Fifth, contribute in every situation. The only way to keep learning is by contributing. You do not have to be the leader every time. When a formation of birds flies over long distances, each bird takes its turn in leading. This ensures that no bird gets too tired and yet the formation keeps moving at a certain pace. Every person is important. It doesn’t matter whether you play the violin, the flute or the drums; you are still part of the orchestra. Leadership is not about exercising power as much as it is about contributing. This will happen when you realize that leadership is not a privilege but a responsibility.
Sixth, pursue excellence in whatever you do. Excellence cannot be forced through a process nor guaranteed by a certificate. It comes from an all consuming passion to do one’s best. It needs an eye for the smallest of details. When differences become small, it is the small things that make the difference.
Seventh, while you must take your careers seriously, do not take yourself too seriously. You have to laugh and find humour everyday. This will help you to keep issues in their perspective. Being cheerful is an attitude. Not only will it help you to reduce your own stress, but a positive attitude is contagious. It can do a lot to elevate the moods of people around you and recharge you to take one more shot at the problems facing you.
Eighth, we must always know what we are really good at. Rather than trying to be everything to everyone, we must focus on areas where our talents truly lie. A talent can be defined as that skill which we not only enjoy learning but which we can also learn rapidly. We need to work at honing our talent and smoothening the rough edges. But exceptional performance usually comes from doing what comes naturally to us
Ninth, always welcome feedback even if it comes in the guise of criticism. I remember the story of a boy who dreamt of becoming an artist but was frustrated because whenever he showed his painting, the teacher would look at it with a frown and find some fault with it. The student improved on his work continuously and he thought he would one day hear a word of appreciation from his teacher. But it never happened. Finally, in disgust, he bought a painting from an accomplished artist, touched it up with fresh paint and showed it to his teacher. To his amazement, the teacher smiled and said, "now this is really good work. Congratulations." Feeling guilty, the student confessed that it was not really his painting. The teacher looked at him silently and then said, "Till now, I thought you wanted to paint a great picture. But I realize now that you do not want any more corrections, which means that the last painting you did was the best you will ever do. Remember you have set these limits to your talent, not me." Criticism may actually be an expression of faith in us rather than a put down. We must learn to take it constructively because it will show us what more we can learn.
Finally, always play to win. Winning is not about making the other person lose. It is about stretching yourself to your own limits. Once so stretched, you will realize the true extent of your potential. Ultimately, transformation is about reaching and utilizing not only your potential but those of others who work with you.
I wish you all the best in your career and in your lives as you step out into a new world.