Book Review: 2

Submitted by: reena

Class: F1 Roll No.: A-03

Submitted to: Prof. Debjani Ghosh

Book Completion: 100%

17 August 2010 A) Background of the Author

 Go Kiss the World

Author: Subroto Bagchi

Career Focus: The high- Performance Entrepreneur
Nationality: Indian
Subject Area: Life Lessons for Young Professional
Published: June 1st 2008 by Penguin Books India
Description: ‘Go, kiss the world’ were Subroto Bagchi’s blind mother’s last
words to him. These words became the guiding principle of his life.

Subroto Bagchi is best known for co-founding MindTree in 1999 where he started as the Chief
Operating Officer. MindTree is among India's most admired companies across industries. In
2008, Bagchi took on the role of Gardener at MindTree.

In this role, Bagchi spends one-on-one time with the Top-100 leaders at MindTree on their
"personal-professional" issues to expand leadership capacity and build readiness for taking
MindTree into the billion-dollar league.

In addition, Bagchi works at the grassroots by making himself available to its 45 Communities of
Practice that foster organizational learning, innovation and volunteerism within the
organization. Bagchi serves the Board of MindTree as Vice Chairman.

Bagchi has written extensively in leading newspapers and magazines, and spoken at industry
platforms and educational institutions the world over. His Business world column - Arbor
Mentis - and Times of India column - Times of Mind - were widely read and discussed. Many of
these are archived at www.mindtree.com/subrotobagchi.

His first book, The High Performance Entrepreneur was released in 2006 as a Penguin Portfolio
publication to great critical acclaim. His second book, Go Kiss the World was released in 2008 as
a Penguin Portfolio. Mark Tully hailed it as “a remarkable story of courage, integrity and
enterprise”. His third book The Professional was released in September 2009.

B) Summary

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 Go Kiss the World

Go Kiss the World by Subroto Bagchi the co-founder of MindTree, captures the focal theme of
the book, the concepts discussed by the author and the 'words of wisdom' as presented by the
author.

Go Kiss the World is an ideal read for Students, Young Professionals, Managers and Business
Leaders, Budding Entrepreneurs and Young Indians.

This book, Go Kiss the World is an inspirational book for young Indians to struggle against all
odds to succeed in life.

Subroto Bagchi traces his life in three distinct phases. .

Part I talks about his birth, childhood days , his first job as a clerk in Orissa government and
then his first corporate job in DCM.
Part II is about his career with many IT companies culminating with a 10 year stint in Wipro
Part III deals with founding of MindTree and shares his views on leadership, management and
life in general.

Subroto Bagchi also discusses various concepts like physical displacement, keeping faith in
adversity, grace under pressure, power of mentoring, amongst others. Go Kiss the World is
punctuated with memorable quotes and handy lessons from successes and failures from
Subroto Bagchi's life

Phase 1
Subroto Bagchi was the last child of a small-time government servant, in a family of five
brothers. His earliest memory of his father is as that of a District Employment Officer in
Koraput, Orissa. It was, and remains as back of beyond as you can imagine. There was no
electricity; no primary school nearby and water did not flow out of a tap. As a result, he did not
go to school until the age of eight; he was home-schooled. His father used to get transferred
every year. His parents set the foundation of his life and the value system, which makes him
what is he today and largely, defines what success means to him today.

Government houses seldom came with fences. His mother and he collected twigs and built a
small fence. After lunch, his Mother would never sleep. She would take her kitchen utensils
and with those she and he would dig the rocky, white ant infested surrounding. They planted
flowering bushes. The white ants destroyed them. His mother brought ash from her chulha and
mixed it in the earth and they planted the seedlings all over again. This time, they bloomed. At
that time, his father’s transfer order came. A few neighbors told his mother why she was taking
so much pain to beautify a government house, why she was planting seeds that would only
benefit the next occupant. His mother replied that it did not matter to her that she would not
see the flowers in full bloom. She said, “I have to create a bloom in a desert and whenever I am
given a new place, I must leave it more beautiful than what I had inherited”. That was his first

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lesson in success. It is not about what you create for yourself, it is what you leave behind that
defines success.

Subroto’s mother began developing a cataract in her eyes when he was very small. His mother
was having problems reading and in any case, being Bengali, she did not know the Oriya script.
So, in addition to the daily chores, his job was to read her the local newspaper – end to end.
So, after reading her the newspaper, every day Subroto would land up near the University’s
water tank, which served the community. He would spend hours under it, imagining that there
could be spies who would come to poison the water and he had to watch for them. He would
daydream about catching one and how the next day, he would be featured in the newspaper.
Unfortunately for him, the spies at war ignored the sleepy town of Bhubaneswar and he never
got a chance to catch one in action. Yet, that act unlocked his imagination. Imagination is
everything. If we can imagine a future, we can create it, if we can create that future, others will
live in it. That is the essence of success.

Over the next few years, his mother’s eyesight dimmed but in him she created a larger vision, a
vision with which he continue to see the world and sense through his eyes, she was seeing too.
As the next few years unfolded, her vision deteriorated and she was operated for cataract.
Subroto remember when she returned after her operation and she saw my face clearly for the
first time, she was astonished. She said, “Oh my God, I did not know you were so fair”. He
remained mighty pleased with that adulation even till date. Within weeks of getting her sight
back, she developed a corneal ulcer and, overnight, became blind in both eyes. That was 1969.
She died in 2002. In all those 32 years of living with blindness, she never complained about her
fate even once. Curious to know what she saw with blind eyes, he asked her once if she sees
darkness. She replied, “No, I do not see darkness. I only see light even with my eyes closed”.
Until she was eighty years of age, she did her morning yoga everyday, swept her own room and
washed her own clothes.
To him, success is about the sense of independence; it is about not seeing the world but seeing
the light.

Phase 2
The secretariat building, which houses the ministers and the bureaucracy, is the most imposing
structure in Bhubaneshwar. The less conspicuous legislative building is adjacent but separate.
There Mr. Subroto Bagchi started his professional life as a lower division clerk on November 1,
1976. As the junior most clerk, he had no real work for 8 months. However, he did get to see a
world very different from his own. Working in the secreteriate for 2 long years, he realized he
needed a proper job. A proper career which was not like civil services. So when he saw the
advertisement from the DCM group for management trainees, half unsure they would even
consider him with a political science degree, he applied. After aptitude tests, group discussions
and personal interviews, he got selected and needed to go to Delhi for the National level
selection. The final interview was conducted which began with a conversation on the power of
conflict and moved to the theory of Karma on Bhagvad Gita and then to Hegelian dialectics. He
felt it was his day, he was cruising. He returned to Bhubaneshwar to join the DCM group as
management trainee. After a year or so he started earning six times as much he earned in the

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Government job. By the spring of 1981, it had become quite clear to him that he had to move
out of DCM. He then explored employment possibilities with a start up named HCL. The only
position HCL was hiring was for entry level sales people and that guaranteed salary of 40 %
lower than what DCM was offering at that time. There were some problems, but silver linings
were there to the cloud. Switching over to sales would allow him to learn new job skills, and
give him a new life away from the politics of a decadent, smoke stack system that had already
condemned me to the electric chair. He worked with HCL very briefly. Though he liked the
informality of the place, but the company did not have the level of customer focus that he felt
was required. Frustrated with the company’s aggressive style and lower customer focus, a
dozen of them moved to join PSI Data Systems headquarted in Banglore. During his years in PSI,
he sold computers in places like Jaipur, Udaipur, Lucknow, etc. Despite PSI’s great R&D, the
company was not commercially successful with its line of products.

A time came when the company went into default in paying salaries to its employees. Later he
was asked by Mr. Satrajit Mazumdar, head of sales and marketing at PSI to join at MMC Digital
Systems. However his stint at MMC ended barely a year after he joined because the company
was wound up. His early years at HCL, PSI& MMC taught him sales, marketing; these became
solid stints in international business much later. After many job change, he eventually found his
life’s calling with the IT industry when fourth generation computers came to India in 1981. The
next job of Bagchi was Project 2.1. He was a co-founder of the business. They believed time had
come for an IT related training organization for corporate sector. He created course material
and managed business in Eastern India. At that time Wipro was looking to offer 3 days of
training for two people for every PC sold and wanted to outsource this assignment on a
nationwide basis to consultants who would impart the training. Project 2.1 was shortlisted and
Bagchi went to Banglore to make the final presentation. The Vice President at Wipro had a
desire of recruiting Bagchi in the org. Project 2.1 won the assignment and rolled out a
nationwide training program for Wipro. Later things did not work in favour of Project 2.1
because of some financial reasons and Bagchi left the job and went in search of his own destiny.
His job search got him to Banglore and he landed up in Wipro within few days. His job was sales
coordination. Eventually he started looking for additional opportunities in areas like leadership
development and soon his hands were more than full. Soon he got a chance to move to US as a
marketing manager in Wipro GE to start a ground up operation in US.

One fine day he got a call from his eldest brother that his father had suffered a third degree
burn injury and was admitted in the Safderjung Hospital in Delhi. He flew back to attend to his
father who remained for a few days in critical stage, bandaged from neck to toe. The Safderjung
Hospital is a cockroach infested, dirty, inhuman place. The overworked, under-resourced sisters
in the burn ward are both victims and perpetrators of dehumanized life at its worst.

One morning, while attending to my Father, Subroto realized that the blood bottle was empty
and fearing that air would go into his vein, he asked the attending nurse to change it. She
bluntly told him to do it himself. In that horrible theater of death, he was in pain and frustration
and anger. Finally when she relented and came, my Father opened his eyes and murmured to
her, “Why have you not gone home yet?” Here was a man on his deathbed but more concerned

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about the overworked nurse than his own state. He was stunned at his stoic self. There he
learnt that there is no limit to how concerned you can be for another human being and what
the limit of inclusion is you can create. He learned that his professional growth was a plain after
a certain point of time. He was at the similar level since many years. Then Lucent got in touch
with him and offered him a position like that of Chief Operating Officer. But he found his
decision was wrong.

Dropping out of college continues to promise good 'degree' of success. Bagchi joins the elite list
after dropping out of international relations & political science courses. He was fortunate not
only to work in not just different kinds of organizations but also for leaders with contrasting
styles.

Phase 3
It was not difficult for Bagchi to say goodbye to the seniors at Wipro but at hundreds of juniors
who looked up to him. Unknowingly he was a mentor to hundreds of people. In July 1988, he
met a colleague at Wipro who was chief executive of the newly formed Electronic Commerce
division. He felt the two of them would make a great team. He realized that they were destined
to do something much larger than what they both were doing and decided to create an
inspirational organization that would be higher up the value chain. An organization that would
be value centric, socially connected and based on the principle of shared wealth creation. The
idea of MindTree germinated that day. For Bagchi MindTree became the bridge between who
was he and who he wanted to be. Then he took up the idea seriously and decided to expand
the co-founders. They also reached out to a couple of venture capitalists. He brought a strategy
and finance knowledge that the team would need in days to come. They decided to get down as
a team to flesh out the mission, vision and values of the company of their dreams.

At the age of eighty-two, Bagchi’s Mother had a paralytic stroke and was lying in a government
hospital in Bhubaneswar. He flew down from the US where he was serving his second stint, to
see her. He spent two weeks with her in the hospital as she remained in a paralytic state. She
was neither getting better nor moving on. Eventually he had to return to work. While leaving
her behind, he kissed her face. In that paralytic state and a garbled voice, she said, “Why are
you kissing me, go kiss the world.” Her river was nearing its journey, at the confluence of life
and death, this woman who came to India as a refugee, raised by a widowed Mother, no more
educated than high school, married to an anonymous government servant whose last salary
was Rupees Three Hundred, robbed of her eyesight by fate and crowned by adversity was
telling me to go and kiss the world!

Success to him is about Vision. It is the ability to rise above the immediacy of pain. It is about
imagination. It is about sensitivity to small people. It is about building inclusion. It is about
connectedness to a larger world existence. It is about personal tenacity. It is about giving back
more to life than you take out of it. It is about creating extra-ordinary success with ordinary
lives.

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 Go Kiss the World

B) Key Learning’s:

1. It’s all in the mind: lf we believe in our idea strongly enough and are willing to give it our
very best, everything is possible.

2. To get, you must first give: People who give are the people who get. Leaders must
develop a mindset of abundance, not scarcity.

3. The key to happiness is not money: Keep low expectations that your money will give you
lasting happiness. It is important nonetheless.

C) Personal Applications:

1. Even if most of the conditions are against a particular thing, and if I have a strong feeling
in my mind that it will work, against all odds I will be in the position to achieve the goal.

2. There should be a giving mentality developed. A thing which I posses and is required / desired
by some other friend of mine, I should be happily giving it.

3. I believe in doing things out of happiness / because I am happy, eventually success will
follow. Money is not the only happiness.

D) Professional Applications:

Three Great Ideas I Can Use:

1. Even if my health or any other conditions are not favoring me, but there is a passion in
my mind, against all odds I can do it.

2. I as a leader / manager will not create followers but will create leaders. A true leader is
the one who creates leaders, not followers.

3. If I am getting a good profile or some good learning out of the job, even if the the pay is
not so good, I must go ahead with the job profile.

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