The Stranger In Your Life January 20, 2006

I often ask this question to people: “Who played the most important part in bringing you to this world when you were born?’’ Invariably, people are at a loss to answer. Many people reply that it was their mother. Nothing could be more incorrect. Because, chances are, she was quite unconscious and unable to handle you as you were being delivered. The new born, on delivery, is always picked up by someone who holds the baby upside down and pats the back so that the lungs begin to breathe, to signal the first act of independence. Yet, most of us grow up to forget how much we owe that one individual, whose act of complete involvement becomes the cornerstone on which every other reality of our living rests. How many of us know the name of that person? She who asked our tiny pair of lungs to welcome life into the little body is not remembered in most cases—probably one in a million would ever go back to her to say, “Thank you; without you I would not have come to this world.’’ There is a huge lesson in that one act played by someone who recedes into uncomplaining anonymity. She remains a stranger.What is the role of such strangers in our lives? It is a matter worthy of reflection. As is this one thought: how good a stranger am I?The thought has followed me for many years. In 1992, when I was setting up Wipro’s international operations with meagre resources, Tom Best, a customer at Sun left his job and moved to Novell in Salt Lake City, Utah. As soon as he joined his new employer, he called us. “Could we set up an inter-operability lab at Novell?’’ It was a god-send. While we wanted to grab the opportunity, we had no ground support in Utah. We knew no one there and needed help. Tom gave me the reference of a lady, a professional mover, who had helped him with his relocation. It was winter, and the snow had moved in. We had no spending capability, and needed to get a team operational immediately. I asked my colleague Subroto Mukerjee to meet the lady. Subroto arrived there and what happened next blew us off our feet. The lady took charge of everything, and in two days, Subroto was able to tie up all the details. All this while, we had been nervous that if she were to bill us for her efforts, we would be unable to pay her. In the end, Subroto asked her, with trepidation, what we owed her. “Nothing,’’ she replied. That was the last we saw of her. Many years after that, I met a young Chinese gentleman who was visiting Bangalore for the first time. He did not know anyone, and had no hotel reservation. On alighting at the airport, he struck up a chance conversation with a co-passenger who, upon learning about his predicament, despite being jetlagged himself and under severe time pressure, took him to three different hotels, helped him check in at one, and then left. The Chinese visitor was amazed subsequently to learn that the man who did that for him was none other than Dr Sridhar Mitta, who was at that time the chief technology officer at Wipro. He realised who his angel was only when he came to call on him at his office. Until then the two had not even exchanged proper introductions.In my own life, when I look back at all the golden turns, each one has been signalled by a person whom I have never known personally, someone who expected nothing from me, and had no personal benefit from my success. They all came unsolicited, played their angelic part, and quietly left the scene like the lady at Salt Lake City. When I look for them today, they are as faded as a woman named ‘Dandor-ma’ (Such people never had names they were always referred to as someone’s wife or mother. Her name meant ‘mother of Dando, the boy’), the illiterate, lower-caste midwife who assisted my mother as I was born in a small-town government quarter 48 years back.As we grow up and seek success, at every step and each turn, we seek the familiar. We look for comfort in familiarity and seek sameness. Is there a lesson delivered to us right at birth that we all forget? Just as a stranger helped me take my first breath, is the next great thing in my life, being held upside down by a stranger? And by the same token, how good a stranger am I to the world around? Source : http://digvijayankoti.blogspot.in/2009/04/subroto-bagchi-speaks-all-articles-by.html