This is a compilation of 38 speeches that are not at all a treatiseon business and profit as one would expect from the Information
Technology Czarand Founding CEO of Infosys. They are essentially a scattered bunch ofthoughts, concerns and ideas about bettering
India, bettering the world. In theIntroduction, the author N.R.Narayan Murthy wonders, “When you see world classsupermarkets and food chains in our towns, and when our urban youngsters gloatover the choice of toppings on their pizzas, why should 51 percent of childrenin the country be undernourished?” Such comparison that underscores disparity,economic and otherwise, sets the tone of the collection of speeches.In the opening chapter Narayana Murthy talksabout the time when he was on a train along the then border of
Yugoslavia and
Bulgaria and when he got weanedaway from leftism and got hitched to
compassionate capitalism. He asserts theimportance of this compassionate capitalism, as against the laissez fairecapitalism. The author’s speeches are divided into sections under headings like“Leadership Challenges”, “Address to students” and “Values”. The speeches seemspontaneous and springing out of the heart rather than from the thinking mind. Hisunshaken faith in the present regime gets easily passed on to the readers. Heoften is found to address a complex set of questions and arrive at answers andsolutions which, amazingly, seem very simple and quite predictable, too. Throughoutthe book the author keeps giving advice on several issues. The final andconcluding advice tends to be around virtues such as honesty, hard work,discipline, ethics and values. So much that it begins to interestingly appearto be a book on Corporate Social Responsibility. Narayan Murthy is quiteliberal with citing a wide range of personalities. Right from Mahatma Gandhi toThomas Friedman.