Sunil Mittal

http://inhome.rediff.com/money/2006/mar/29mittal.htm

Mittal has successfully demonstrated what I've been crying loud to follow passion for a while.

When he began his entrepreneurial venture in 1985, he was "ignored" and "laughed at" thereafter, before the "fight" erupted in the telecom sector leading to what he calls "mother of all battles" from which he came out "fairly successful," he said.

"When I came out of college in 1976, I was told by all my friends and people generally older and guiding me in my hometown in Ludhiana that the pole-positions...the grand-stand positions have already been taken up by those who mattered."

"But somehow the heart was not willing to accept. And one had to push on and push forward with every little opportunity that one got in one's life."

"Mahatma Gandhi once said: 'at first, they ignore you'; these were the times when I was being ignored."

"Gandhiji also said: 'then they laugh at you.'

"After three years of fight, we came out fairly successful out of this. As Gandhiji said, those who try hard with lot of passion, eventually win."

Small things

Assume all average and intelligent guys take to engineering, so who will take the responsibilities of becoming doctors, lawyers, applied sciences, economics etc. Problem here is not money we make being engineer, as the supply of engineers go up, salaries go down. We seriouly lack role models, we hardly hear a story of one becoming rags to riches, our role models are whom we see in ourselves, so when we become engineers, our younger siblings follow suit. now take USA, they all believe in American Dream, result, every 1 out of 100 americans is a millionaire.

Other is passion, we lack it seriously. We do BS followed by MS, we read what many others have read already, no improvement in knowledge levels of a nation (not personal level). So no intellectual knowledge is groomed. So we beg around for radars, figther flights, remember we are 100+ crores population, but can't even produce medicines our nation seriously needs. Without passion, companies and businesses can't be built.

Next is cretivity, this is long forgotten. I don't remember a single event in my life or seen others being creative of the USA grades. Our brains don't think beyond some blah blah C/C++ or hell. We take a solid stereotype life, even after studying at Berkeley univ. of Calif. We work for money and not for passion. We immensely believe that it is money, hence we become risk averse to settle at the lower end of value chain, doing some job, titles still allure us, like R&D engineer or technical lead.

As long as what we do is not addressing the needs of India, we barely depend on other countries because consumers are stationed there. That's a sad thing, but no person bells the cat, we want to be engineers to make some money, not to do some productive work to the development of our nation. We are value destructors and precisely chest thumpers because we fail to add any intellectual value or making headway in economy of the nation. I'm writing this to understand our inherent weakness, a starting point to make a leap if you don't fall prey to a vicious cycle of Indian life.