BENGALURU: When I was two years old, my father’s job led us to relocate to Ludhiana in Punjab. Picture us, a middle-class south Indian family in Ludhiana, in the heart of Punjab - a very ostentatious, prosperous and outgoing society. It was a paradigm shift in terms of language, culture, food and lifestyle.
My childhood was a unique fusion of Telugu at home and Punjabi outside it, and was anchored to an incredible degree of attention to education. My parents ensured we spent our vacations at our native place. My mother worked towards making us comfortable with both north Indian and south Indian cuisine. This unique dual cultural influence and exposure in my formative years made me culturally and mentally very flexible. Later, in my youth, I would see many students finding it difficult to adjust to a change of culture, food or location. I took to this north-south fusion with relative ease, thanks to my background. That said, my core has typical south Indian middle-class values centred on simplicity and emphasis on education, hard work and family.
I studied in Sacred Heart Convent School, easily Ludhiana’s then most well-regarded school. It was also a magnet for students from prosperous and influential families. Convent education cemented a strong comfort with English as a language, and my parents inspired me to wholly commit myself to academics. I had the unique distinction of being a school topper consistently from Class 5 to Class 9, and was a strong favourite among many teachers. I had an intense ambition to be the district topper for Ludhiana in Class 10. In a bitter blow to me, I was unexpectedly pipped by another student for the topper’s rank and became merely a district second ranker. For many years, until wisdom dawned and the passage of time gave me a more mature perspective, I would very naively quote this academic setback as the biggest disappointment of my life.
Ludhiana’s Punjabi culture is famously flamboyant. Here I was, a conservative middle-class south Indian, growing up with friends from highly affluent families. A friend, I recall, was gifted a Maruti 800 on his 16th birthday, and another’s affluent family owned a fleet of petrol pumps. In this childhood context, education got subconsciously positioned as my ticket to, perhaps, a similar prosperous future. Hard work in academics was the theme that shaped my growing-up years.
My parents, particularly my mother, instilled in me very middle-class values based on frugality and hard work. Today, when I look back, what my parents ingrained in me is what I refer to as the marshmallow test. The marshmallow test, made famous by its Stanford association, refers to a test wherein children are asked to choose between having one marshmallow immediately or wait for 15 minutes to get two marshmallows. For children to opt for the latter choice, they need to have internalized the concept of delayed gratification and self-control, and according to the study, this group does well later in adult life. Work hard today, and you will get the reward later in life is what my mother would have simply called it!
An interesting collateral benefit of being the favourite student of my teachers was that somewhere on the way, I was nudged to participate in debates, extempore contests and public speaking. I took to this comfortably, and the ease with public speaking turned out to be an asset I could leverage in my subsequent professional life. For several years in Ludhiana, I had an unbroken record of leading my school to the top prize in inter-school and interdistrict public speaking contests.
Somewhere on the way, I also built a good track record in quizzes, creative writing and poetry. As the years passed, the affinity for poetry faded away, but the knack for creative writing survived and finds an occasional expression when work demands that I put a pen to paper, or finger to keyboard. The mix of my academic record as well as public speaking, creative writing and presentation skills formed a set of core skills during my student life that I think I still draw upon as part of my leadership style.
Am a hopeless introvert when it comes to social occasions. But drop me into a team, give me a task, and I seamlessly morph into leadership.
(Extracted with permission from CFO NITI: Candid conversations with India’s finest finance leaders’ by Pramod Bagri & Sandeep Kumar, published by Konark Publishers Pvt)