Legacy: Letters from eminent parents to their daughters by Sudha Menon Read Free Book Online Page A

discrimination between us based on our gender. Your grandparents always had the same message for the three of us—that it was important to focus on what gave us satisfaction and to work towards it with utmost dedication. That early initiation enabled us to develop into confident individuals capable of taking decisions independently. This also helped me when I started out on my journey of self-discovery.
    Every quality that has stood me in good stead in life actually has its roots in my childhood. I remember an incident which as a young girl, had left me thinking of my father as a harsh man. But it was only much later in life that I realized that what I had mistaken for harshness was, in fact, his way of teaching us to lead an honourable life.
    My father was the Principal of an engineering college in Jaipur to which my elder brother had applied for an admission. He had also applied to a college in Baroda to be on the safe side, but it was far away for us who had grown up in a protected environment all our lives. When the results were announced, my brother found out to his dismay that he had missed the admission into the Jaipur College by a mere half per cent but had cleared the Baroda entrance test with flying colours. The family was, of course, disappointed. At that time, my father’s colleagues in the college approached him with the suggestion that the college start a system wherein children of the faculty members seeking entry into a given course be given a small privilege in terms of a lower cut-off level as compared to the others. My father flatly refused to implement the suggestion in the year when his son would benefit from the proposed new rule. It was a good suggestion, he felt, ‘but the college could implement it from the next year’. I remember feeling very angry with my father and thinking how unfair it was on his part to deny his son something that was within his reach to give. But now when I look back, I think my stand on values, ethics, and governance today was, in fact, formed from that very incident! We got our initial moorings about fair play and honesty from him and these are the values that I adopted for myself in the long run.
    I was only a young girl of 13 when my father passed away from a sudden heart attack, leaving us unprepared to take on life without him. We had been protected from life’s challenges so far. But without warning, all that changed overnight and my mother, who had only been a homemaker till then, faced the responsibility of raising three children all on her own. It was then that we realized how strong she was and how determined to do her duty in the best possible manner. Slowly, she discovered a flair for designing and textiles, found herself a job with a small firm, and quickly made herself indispensable to them. It must have been challenging for her to shoulder the responsibility of bringing up her family single- handed, but she never let us feel like it was a task for her. She worked hard till she saw all of us through college and we became independent. I never knew that my mother had such a wealth of self-assurance and belief within her.
    As a parent with a full-time job, one must not let work affect the way you relate to your family. Remember the time that you were studying in the US and the announcement of my becoming MD and CEO of ICICI was splashed across all newspapers? I remember the mail you wrote to me a couple of days later. ‘You never made us realize that you had such a demanding, successful, and stressful career. At home, you were just our mother,’ you wrote in your email. Live your life in the same way, my darling.
    I also learnt from my mother that it is very important to have the ability to handle difficult situations and keep moving forward in life, no matter what. Even today I can remember the equanimity and calmness with which she handled the crisis on hand when my father passed away. You have to handle challenges and emerge stronger from them, rather than