When Courage created an entrepreneur

Most of us live, yet our lives have no story to tell. What story can be more pedantic than the pursuit of security and luxury while living within one’s zone of comfort and constrained imagination. Does your life tell a story?

This note, then, is about someone whose life has a story to tell. As I turned the pages of The Times of India this morning, I saw a touching memoriam to a Fauji, killed in the Valley exactly a decade ago. A few months ago, when I met his wife, it was in my role as a Coach for a program run by the Indian School of Business.
Sangeetha was in her late twenties when she lost her husband. Without an MBA or other professional qualification, holding a little child and overwhelmed by grief, she could well have retreated into the recesses of family comfort and anonymity, as many others have. The Government did what it always does: the unthinkable. It offered to allot her a fuel station in a lower-middle class locality in an unknown city (Bangalore). The circle of family and friends gave her predictable advice: say No, be the quintessential home-maker, live for the child, and so on. If she did the unthinkable and took on the task of setting up a bunk, with little knowledge of this, or for that matter any, business, it was because she wanted to temper the grief and develop an identity.

Eight years later, it’s a job very well done, even though she has little entrepreneurial passion for this business. I spent a few hours understanding the operation and the person – knowing the person is the most important bit – and the question on my mind was: Why was I a mentor to her, and not the other way around? Let’s define entrepreneurship for a minute: courage, persistence, the will to survive in business, the ability to take risks and some business basics……Most of us, particularly us MBAs, have the last part. She has the lot. If she is constrained, it is because of the dynamics of the fuel business, but, as I repeatedly told her, she would be a success in any business she chose to do with passion. The only thing a mentor can really do is listen, possibly praise; I trust I did both in some measure.

As I sat reading the rest of the newspaper, these thoughts crossed my head, as I silently saluted a man who laid his life down in defence of his country, and his wife who had the courage to step up to the challenge of creating a space for herself. Aristotle once said, “ Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” I teach.