If Infosys were India, we'd be in good hands. Not even the company. Just the campus in Bangalore. It houses 20,000 employees, who have an average workday of nine hours 15 minutes. It has five food courts but no litter. It has efficient workspaces where the only sound you hear is that of minds at work. And oh yes, its facilities team manages a wide swathe of activities-from ensuring the plants are kept moisture-controlled to keeping disturbance from renovations down to a minimum. The campus has 34 per cent women, the average age of the company is 29, and staff are encouraged to cycle between buildings.
In no small measure it is because of N.R. Narayana Murthy, one of the five founders and its CEO for 21 years. At 69, having quit Infosys after a controversial stint with it last year, he believes a new civic awakening is the only way India can move forward. And indeed, if he could do it at Infosys, why can't Narendra Modi do it for India? As he sits in his tree-trimmed office of Catamaran Ventures, a private investment firm run by son Rohan Murty, Narayana Murthy seems at ease with his new role of Ideator-at-Large.
But it pains him that people don't recognise the importance of the seemingly small stuff. That the rule of law applies to all equally and doesn't diminish the higher you go or the later it is in the day.
Management guru Peter Drucker once told Narayana Murthy that culture eats strategy for lunch. Never more so than in India, where institutions tend to leave change behind when heads change.
Making values sustainable isn't easy, and any attempt to do so is immediately tagged as fascist, part of a creeping totalitarian regime, whose eventual goal is the stifling of marginal people.
India is not used to social revolutions. The last one that ousted the British had to be sustained over almost a century, beginning with the First War of Independence in 1857 to the eventual departure of the British in 1947. The anti-corruption movement of 2011 turned into the unlimited political ambition of a band of well-meaning but clueless brothers and the anti-rape agitation of 2012 was limited to a weekend convenience. The new consciousness that Prime Minister Narendra Modi tried to rouse from the Red Fort may well go the same way, despite its honourable intentions of gender equity, public service and personal hygiene. Every ideology needs action, and action does not take weekends off and rule-of-law breaks.
As Dipankar Gupta points out in his remarkable book, Revolution from Above: India's Future and the Citizen Elite, planning can be of two types: one that maximises the given and doesn't question the ground rules; and the other that changes the rules of the game. He believes only a citizen elite can do the latter. Indeed, only if the old durbaris of Delhi are restrained can a new citizen elite emerge, that is not limited by the zip code of one's birthplace or the email address of one's school. It is defined by the work ethic. A democracy that delivers, says Gupta, does not need heroes or Mahatmas. It does not need sympathy. It needs an aware citizenship that has empathy. Democracy, according to Gupta, begins with a commitment to shape a world that does not conform to 'what is' but to what 'should be'. It needs its elite to make people realise that aspirations for the future are grander than the needs of the present.
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