Quoting one of his gurus, noted author Gurcharan Das said, “We must take our work more seriously, than ourselves.” According to Das, this was the essence of his latest memoirs, “Another sort of freedom” which he discussed with psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar at the International Centre Goa (ICG), Dona Paula on Wednesday evening.
To drive home this point, Das narrated the story of one, ‘Mr Kamble,’ who progressed from being a night-duty watchman to becoming the director in the multi-national, Proctor and Gamble company. “Kamble, took his work more seriously than himself and that is how he rose to such great heights,” Das said.
Recalling incidents in his life, when he had not been good, Das narrated a story from his kindergarten days, when he did not own up to a theft, which resulted in a fellow student getting unfairly punished. “The shame from this incident stayed with me for many years,” Das confessed.
Das also recalled the difficult days of the “Licence Raj” in India, when his employers, Procter and Gamble, a multinational company nearly got penalized by the government for generating record sales of their colds medicine during an influenza epidemic in the country. Putting things in perspective, Das said, “I therefore believe that India got real freedom in 1991 with the economic liberalization and not in 1947.”
Explaining the reason for quitting the corporate world at the young age of 50, Das said, “I was deeply worried when the economic liberalization in the country was being opposed. This prompted me to become a newspaper columnist with the sole objective of explaining the benefits of liberalization to the masses.”
