I was compelled to read ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ by Gurcharan Das slowly one paragraph, one sentence and one word at a time at least thrice. Before I begin with the book review, a contextual detour is in order.
My Tryst with Gurcharan Das
My first brief face-to-face encounter with Gurcharan Das happened in the precincts of the Rail Bhawan on Raisina Road, Delhi in January 2015. Gurcharan along with my friend Partha Mukhopadhyay was a member of the Bibek Debroy Committee on railway reforms and I was the only other member of the E Sreedharan Committee tasked to usher in decentralisation and transparency in commercial decision-making in Indian Railways.
Gurcharan has no memory of our meeting and rightly so.
A Tale of Two Articles That Changed My Life
But my first introduction to Gurcharan Das uncharacteristically happened 2,769 nautical miles away from Bombay, in the wee hours of December 12, 1999, when shaken and petrified for life, I was smarting in the immediate aftermath of an earthquake of the magnitude 6.8 on Ritcher scale, in the Sunken Garden of the Asian Institute of Management (AIM), Makati City, Metro Manila, Philippines.
That night, two Harvard Business Review articles lying on the table stared at my face– the first was ‘Managing Oneself’ by 90-year-old father of modern management Peter F. Drucker (HBR May-June 1999) and the second was ‘Local Memoirs of a Global Manager’ (HBR March-April 1993), by a young 57-year-old Indian business executive, Gurcharan Das, an unknown Indian to me then.
The only Indian whose article that I had read thus far in Harvard Business Review was ‘Core Competency of a Corporation’ (HBR May-June 1990) by Coimbatore Krishnarao (CK) Prahalad, arguably the second most distinguished management thinker in the world next only to Drucker. I soon was engrossed in reading and re-reading the two contrasting pieces, oblivious that sooner that night, Drucker and Gurcharan would change my life irrevocably, taking me on a road not travelled before.
Managing Oneself
The now classic ‘Managing Oneself’ written by Peter F. Drucker, six years before he died at the ripe age of 95 in 2005, was such a profound piece that Harvard Business School Press, in the book ‘HBR At 100’ (published in 2022 to mark the 100th anniversary of the first issue of Harvard Business Review) has placed ‘Managing Oneself’ as the first article.
Two paragraphs of ‘Managing Oneself’ and its two sentences changed my life. The sentences were – “I did not want to be the richest man in the cemetery” and “In the morning when I see my face in the mirror, I do not want to see a pimp”. And I decided in a split second that when my sabbatical at the Asian Institute of Management, where I was pursuing a master’s in management degree, ends, I would quit my high flying cushy corporate job with a bid Indian business house as vice president (corporate finance) with a high six-figure salary and hefty perks. I was working in a corporate where the value incongruence between my old-fashioned values and situational values of the corporate had landed me in an abyss with two mental breakdowns in quick succession sending me to the couch of a shrink who had summarily given me a life sentence- sufferer of incurable Bipolar Affective Disorder-I.
Local Memoirs of a Global Manager
I have in my library most of the HBR articles published over 101 years, and to the best of my knowledge, ‘Local Memoirs of a Global Manager’ by Gurcharan Das, is probably the second article I have read in HBR by an Indian after ‘Core Competency of a Corporation’ by C. K. Prahalad. And the difference was, while Prahalad was a preeminent management thinker, Gurcharan was an “action manager”.
The very first paragraph of ‘Local Memoirs of a Global Manager’ made me take the second seminal decision that night. The paragraph was-
“There was a time when I used to believe with Diogenes the Cynic that “I am a citizen of the world,” and I used to strut about feeling that a ‘blade of grass is always a blade of grass, whether in one country or another.’ Now I feel that each blade of grass has its spot-on earth from where it draws its life, its strength; and so is man rooted to the land from where he draws his faith, together with his life.”
And the decision was that after receiving my master’s in management degree, I took the first available Singapore Airlines flight to Calcutta from Manila via Singapore with two gunny bags full of Harvard Business Review articles and Harvard Case Studies. I returned to India for good, while most of my Indian AIM cohorts pursued greener corporate careers in Singapore and Hong Kong.
Confessionary Conversation
I first properly met Gurcharan Das for a minute on October 29 at the end of what was the last program of this year’s Tata Lit Festival, aptly titled ‘Restless- Discussion about the many Avatars of the Author Gurcharan Das’ where ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ was first launched. I was in the queue for an author-signed copy of the book, and when my turn came, I blabbered “Sir Akhilesh here”. Soon was my turn to get flabbergasted when Gurcharan wrote on my piece of the book “To Akhilesh, with admiration and affection” and introduced me to a famous Mumbai personality standing next to him “Akhilesh has had an amazing life”.
As the story goes, a couple of days before as part of the book review, I was to interview him. Gurcharan Das called at the appointed time of 1500 hours but unable to speak due to a flare-up of my chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), I missed the call. Guilt-ridden, I had travelled all the way from Hyderabad to attend the book launch and eventually, the interview was rescheduled at half an hour’s notice at 1430 hours before the evening launch of the book. What was supposed to be a few minutes interview became a long conversation and at the end of it turned out to be a two-way honest confession between an “accomplished philosopher author” and an “ordinary manic depressive Indian lunatic.”
I will end this piece with the extract of the conversation for which I have depended on my memory as I was unable to record the telephonic conversation.
Introducing Gurcharan Das
Gurcharan Das needs no introduction to readers. But few Indians are aware that Gurcharan is a rare Indian gem on whom Harvard Business School has done four case studies. The famous Aravind Eye Hospital, Madurai has a two-part Harvard Case Study, and Padma Vibhushan E. Sreedharan has one Harvard case study to his name. What more can one ask for? But at the age of 75, Gurucharan Das is as hungry as he was at 25, trying to “make his life” in dogged pursuit of his atypical Moksha.
Another Sort of Freedom -Rarest of the Rare Gem
Earlier in the piece, I wrote that I was compelled to read ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ three times, one paragraph, one sentence and one word at a time. And the reason is, I found it the rarest of the rare gems.
Gopal Krishna Gandhi, the illustrious grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, says eloquently about the book, “An honest riveting tale that will live long on bookshelves and in libraries. Thank you, Gurcharan Das, for a sheaf of whole grain in a market of chaff in an age of fakery”.
Nandan Nilekani finds the book “a story told with slightness of touch and unflinching honesty, an eventful memoir that takes us on an epic journey. We encounter historical landmarks, bustling cities of the East and West, and public figures, including politicians and corporate leaders. But at the centre is his rich, private sphere with its ups and downs, love and losses.”.
What more can I add? Nonetheless, my three-pound restless defective “unquiet mind” tries.
Five decades ago, I turned into a voracious reader. And I am an obsessive-compulsive writer who writes a four-thousand-word piece a night for publishing while my memoir “The Naked Naked Truth: Life and Times of a Manic-Depressive Indian” that bares all, languishes as a work in progress for twenty-five years. With all the humility at my command, I posit that in integrity, authenticity and impact I have found ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ in the same league as ‘My Experiments with Truth’ (Mahatma Gandhi), ‘Autobiography on a Yogi’ (Paramahansa Yogananda), ‘The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian’ (Nirad C. Chaudhuri), ‘Beyond the Last Blue Mountain’ (biography of JRD Tata by Russi M. Lala) and ‘Shekhar Ek Jivani’ (two volume autobiographical novel by Sachchidananda Vatsyayan “Agyeya”).
The 30,000-word book ‘Hind Swaraj’ written by Mahatma Gandhi in 1908 on a ship in 10 days, that too with the left hand when his right hand was aching, during his return visit to South Africa from India via London, sowed the seed of Indian independence using satya and ahimsa. I hope ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ written by a self-proclaimed oddball, turns the soul changer and creates the evolutionary revolution that 21st-century India needs.
Gurcharan Das and his latest creation reminds me of what American Cultural Anthropologist Marget Mead once said, famously “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Ideally, I must rest my case here.
Beginning at the End
But compulsively, I begin with where these 20 chapters, 274-page magna-carta ends. In the last paragraph of the book, Gurucharan Das says- “My idea of a happy death is to slip away gently, in the same way as I feel sleep, I want do die a natural death, without a doctor in sight. I want to go lightly, surrounded by beauty and good cheer, listening to the music of life with a smile on my face. When death smiles at me, I want to smile back. Socrates too, was in good humour at his deathbed. Laghima is as much the art of dying as the art of living. Even though I know the answer, my famous last word will be ‘What’s next’?”
And one more compelling paragraph from the last chapter ‘At the End I’ll Laugh at Anything’, before I end with the beginning – “I may have entered the world crying but I want to go out laughing. And now I’ll laugh at anything. But I do not like laughing alone. Crying comes naturally to us. Laughing needs learning, acquiring the right attitude- the levity of laghima that Hanuman possessed, gambolling over the clouds above the Himalayas. My real hero is however Kamble. He lived a life of dignity, without a burden, taking his work, never himself seriously. Easy in his harness, he eased my transition from academics to business life. Music has also helped…I often spend quarter to half an hour listening to Bach in the midst of my day of business. It is an amazing, mysterious phenomenon, which like laughter comes closest to expressing the inexpressible.”
And I End with the Beginning
Gurcharan Das at the beginning dedicated ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ to “the happy few, who don’t take them too seriously” and writes in the opening paragraph- “I have discovered that relieving one’s life is even better than living it. The pattern most persistent in my relived life is of an unconscious struggle to break free from expectations. These expectations arose from my family, friends and colleagues and tended to become oppressive. The most tyrannical did not originate from without. They sprang from the demons from my ego-from such things as vanity, want to be somebody- resulting in a desire for premium treatment. Occasionally, I managed to liberate myself from these burdens and when I did, I experienced a certain kind of freedom expressed by the ancient Sanskrit word moksha.”
What a profound truthful truth.
For knowing and internalising the Gurcharan Das type of moksha, a reader must read and internalise ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ more than once, one paragraph, one sentence and one word at a time.
For the sake of brevity, as per Gurcharan Das, the best moments of his life have been defined by moksha, producing in him a spirit of lightness. Another Sanskrit word ‘laghima’ for him connotes the experience of living lightly, not like a feather but like a bird. He candidly admits that he has often experienced it when he takes his work and not his life seriously.
The Quartet
Though I first read ‘Local Memoirs of a Global Manager’ in December 1999, I was first introduced to the literary creations of Gurcharan Das on November 13, 2009, the 51st anniversary of my arrival on planet Earth, when Vinayak Chatterjee (the then Chairman of the organisation where I worked) and his wife Rumjhum presented me a copy of the book ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’. They had transferred me under a narcissistic micromanager of the worst order and wanted my goodness to rub on him.
The book ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ by Gurcharan Das comes after the trinity of his earlier creations – ‘India Unbound’, ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’ and ‘The Riddle of Desire’. For Gurcharan, ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ brings to a close, a quarter century of the search for a flourishing rich life based on the classical Indian ideal of life’s four goals, purusharthas. His first ‘India Unbound’ explored artha or material well-being while in the second ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’, he examined the goal of dharma, the moral well-being. His third ‘The Riddle of Desire’ was a biography of Kama, the third goal of desire and pleasure. And finally, ‘Another Sort of Freedom’, the fourth of the quartet, although a memoir, in a true sense, is about the fourth aim of moksha, offering an all-natural, non-religious, non-transcendental view of freedom.
Chalte-Chalte
Gurcharan Das, a philosopher by education (he studied philosophy as a major at Harvard) for the first 50 years of his life, was torn between “making a living” (desire of his mother) and “making a life” (his father’s mantra). At the age of two and a half, he realised he could run, and he has been running ever since. At the age of four and a half, the original Ashok Kumar became Gurcharan Das, a name given by the Guru of his grandmother. At the age of 16, he was a rare Indian in 1959 to get admitted in three Ivy League universities – Princeton, Yale and Harvard, with full scholarship.
He became an “accidental CEO” as instead of going to Oxford for a Doctorate in Philosophy, he took up selling Vicks. At the age of 50 (15 years before retirement age), he exited the corporate world with the conviction that “the problem with the rat race is that, even if you become first, you are still a rat.” And he entered the uncertain life of a writer. Of his own volition, the change turned into a soft landing for him while it could have been a hard landing.
Whether a corporate leader or a writer, Gurcharan Das has been an oddball of his own volition. He lives with two nightmares of what he calls the temporary lunacy – one is the childhood memories of him remaining enigmatically silent when his poor, innocent Muslim classmate in Lahore, Aayan was punished wrongly for Gurcharan’s fault of taking the spare pencil box of a rich boy and placing at the table of Aayan who did not have one and two, the lunacy of the partition of India in 1947 that killed and displaced millions in the name of the religion and made him a refugee.
Gurcharan Das also lives with a big scar inside his head and heart owing to the severe lifelong mental illness of his bright sister Mira, an illness that made her drop out of Princeton and live a life full of misery.
The Conversation that Was
With this, I come to the last part of this piece “my unrecorded conversation with Gurcharan Das” in the afternoon on October 29, hours before ‘Another Sort of Freedom’. I had only ten minutes to frame the questions, so I urge readers to read the conversation along with the relevant chapters of the book.
Here goes the conversation through a set of ten questions-
One, the very first question was about my impression of the book that in integrity, authenticity and impact was closer to the books of the genre My Experiments with Truth and Autobiography of a Yogi. How difficult it was to write the way the final product emerged.
He admitted that it was a one mammoth effort to try to relive the life he had lived with all the honesty. The only precaution he has taken is to change some names for privacy and has omitted what needed to be, but whatever he has written he has written truthfully. But he said humbly, he did not write to become immortal. ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ was his way of charting his journey to the fourth stage of life, his own type of moksha.
Two, when I asked the book was full of such one-liners/two-liners, sometimes borrowed from others but made his own, but mostly own creation of Gurcharan, which indeed have the capability of becoming quotable quotes for generations to come. Did he realise what he was creating while writing the book or now?
Truth beckons that as part of my reading ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ thrice, I have listed 500 such one-liners in a 274-page book. All someone has to do is tabulate them as Gurcharan Das quotes on Wikipedia. And the answer I found when he told me Gurcharan way of writing in which he goes back and forth to what he has written umpteen times, and revises and changes the individual sentences and words, till he is satisfied they have turned right. He has exacting standards.
Three, the third question was about the journey of his life in quest of moksha different than the spiritual moksha of his father. How was the search for his type of moksha different from that of the “self-realisation” of Bhagawad Gita or Mahatma Gandhi and the self-actualization of Abraham Maslow?
He told me that he is agnostic and a rationalist and not religious or spiritual like his father, but nonetheless his moksha was somewhat if not akin then closer to that of “self-realisation” of Mahatma and Bhagawad Gita, a text which he read extensively for his book ‘The Difficulty of Being Good’ (emphasis supplied).
Four, from whom he had learnt most, Harvard or Kamble was a tough question but Gurcharan Das’ answer to me was he learnt a lot from both Harvard and Kamble. I, who has not gone to Harvard but has been educated with the staple diet of Harvard case studies can understand the impact Harvard had on Gurcharan. But if there is any one individual who had maximum impact on him, it was Kamble from Akola district, night guard at his office, who lifted him from the “station of his birth”. The growth of Kamble was substantially due to the generosity of Gurcharan Das for which he refuses to take credit. It is the same pursuit of “forgetting self” due to which Gurcharan just gives a mere passing one-line reference to his article published in Harvard Business Review in 1993 only three years after the seminal piece of C K Prahlad. When it happened Gurcharan, an action manager was barel7 51 years of age.
Five, the next question was whether could he explain his type of laghima to readers, and how it impacted him in living life in the light.
Gurcharan Das has explained it both in the beginning and towards the end of ‘Another Sort of Freedom’ and his pursuit of laghima is enshrined in every chapter of the book. I have elaborated on this in earlier paragraphs of this piece.
Six, I confessed to Gurcharan my life-long fight with the incurable mental illness manic depressive insanity and asked him what his biggest lesson was from the lifelong fight with the mental illness of his sister.
He admits that the biggest scar on his life and mind that has troubled, torn and shattered him has been the lifelong fight of his sister with mental illness, something which his mother could never accept due to stigma. When I confided mental illness has genetic liability affecting my family through generations, he too confessed the same as a matter of fact, particularly on his mother’s side.
Seven, I asked him, now at 75 years of age, among the wall flower, whether Elanor Roosevelt, Duke of Windsor and John D. Rockefeller what he would like or he is happy being Gurcharan Das.
Readers will find the reason for asking this question in the dance school where Gurcharan Das worked in the summer while he was a student at Harvard. Suffice to say today, Gurcharan is contented and happy to be simply Gurcharan Das. He does not want to be anyone else.
Eight, to the difficult question, between his friends Donald J. and Mati Lal his Harvard maters who had the maximum impact on him, it was easy to choose. For Gurcharan Das- Donald J. (a fictitious pseudo name), once his Harvard roommate has the maximum impact on his life, he calls it the ‘Donald J. Effect’. His friend Bimal Krisha Matilal (real name) was a famous Indian philosopher and Indologist and was elected in 1977 to the Spalding Chair of Eastern Religions and Ethics at Oxford University ( previously occupied by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan), which he occupied until his early death. It was Matilal who gave Upanshadic interpretation of “two birds” both inside him to the voices that troubled Gurcharan since Mexico. One bird was the “I” who was acting and doing things. Other “I” was looking at judging what was happening. I can relate the voices which have always troubled me in life particularly in a psychotic manic phase, to the two birds’ theory too now.
Nine, I asked a very pointed question to Gurcharan – is he now at war with his voices, his two birds or has made peace with them? He admitted that voices first hit him in Mexico, and they went much worse before they got better. If my memory serves me right, he also admitted to being taken to a doctor for his voice by his wife. But he also admitted that his voices have subsided now. I as one who has been troubled by voices for a lifetime, more particularly at the time of my psychotic worst mania, have my own explanation of the voices. I have now befriended my voices and get less troubled by them.
Ten, when finally, I asked to give one lesson from the philosopher Gurcharan for the “Business” and “Business of Life”, he candidly admitted that he turned a writer to “become a better human being” but after 25 years, he has this realisation “He is no better today”. He philosophizes the writer is lonely and inward-looking, while the business people are better human beings because of the interdependence on their staff and customers for their growth and success.
Akhileshwar Sahay, is a Multi-disciplinary Thought Leader with Action Bias and India Based International Impact Consultant. He is an avid reader and independent book reviewer. He works as President Advisory Services in Consulting Firm BARSYL. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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