This was the mail from Professor of Finance, Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. If you skip this you are the loser.
Since we all know so much about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs –let us know something about our own first generation billionaires.
Interesting talk by Ashok Kurien—about his “ education” /childhood and his tackling his own dyslexia [ realized much later in life!] –
the co-promoter of first private Television and the largest in India [ Zee]
. He is also well known in advertising field.
R. Vaidyanathan
This pioneer is proud to acknowledge his dyslexia;
says he only learned differently
There was almost pin-drop silence at the last meeting after the guest
speaker, Mr. Ashok Kurien – cofounder of India’s first private television
entertainment channel Zee TV launched in 1982, and who is equally
responsible for the success of Playwin, India’s first online lottery,
and the popular Dish TV service –stated at the beginning of his talk that
he was dyslexic.
Although his subject, “Learning Differently”, had given a hint, few
members expected that he would turn out to be so simple and humble as a
person and his presentation so unique and extraordinary.
He was introduced by Aliakbar Merchant as a class fellow from Cathedral
School who was now “60 going on 16 and who still possesses
his mischievous smile”. But, he added, his friend used to be quite a
terror in his youth, “devastating in the boxing ring and a great all-round
sportsman who excelled in rugby for years at the Bombay Gymkhana”.
Married and the proud father of two daughters, Mr. Kurien started his
professional life selling media space and had been in the business of building
brands, especially in the fields of media and communications, for the
last 35 years.
Ali pointed out that Mr. Kurien’s advertising agency, Ambience, was
responsible for the evergreen Thums Up campaign, “Taste the Thunder”,
and handled Garden Vareli, Kamasutra and Lakme.
Beginning his talk, Mr. Kurien immediately ribbed the bashful Ali by
thanking him for “the first kind words I have heard from Ali, who was my
school prefect forty years ago... (but) I will tell you about that a little later”.
Pointing out that he was more a backroom operator than one who
basked in the limelight, he said that as opposed to those who came from
business families and those who spent years in business schools, he fared
very poorly at school and had not managed to complete his college education.
That was because he learned differently.
There were many people who could not learn through the conventional
educational system “because they are differently wired” and
who had to find their own method of learning. Sadly, this fact had not been
recognised in India over the last 60years (but things were beginning to
change).
Those who learned differently had to spend many years trying to figure
out what exactly was being taught.And those years of learning differently
were extremely painful, they were years of extreme struggle and of
extreme hardship.
“I did no’t know how to spell the word dyslexia till a few years ago.
Then someone from the Maharashtra Dyslexics Association came to my
office for some advice; however, I had to interrupt the meeting, request the
lady to wait and call my accountant and secretary for something else.
“She (the woman from the Association) listened to the conversation...
and the moment my accountant and secretary left, she
turned to me and said, ‘You a’re dyslexic!’
“I was seriously offended. It’s a word we tend to throw at people in
an insulting way. But she said, no, she had been listening to the way
I had been talking to my accountant– and, for starters, she had
observed that I had been holding the balance sheet upside down!”
The woman left him some books and leaflets and he devoured them all
–and that was when he realised that he was, indeed, dyslexic. Fortunately,
he was not acutely dyslexic otherwise he would not have managed to
move ahead in life.
Rather than using a negative term like “learning disabilities”, he said, he
preferred the expression “learningdifferences” since it was positive and
meant that a person could learn; such a person would have a different way
of doing things, but that person could learn.
Mr. Kurien recalled that he hailed from a very low middle class family.
His mother was a teacher and a strict disciplinarian in the 1960s. She was
the Head of the English Department of Bombay University and helped
churn out graduates.
For her to have a son who could no’t get through school and who kept failing,
seemed as if God had given her a terrible curse, saying, “Take this son
and suffer!” But he could no’t blame her because nobody knew about dyslexia
in those days. Even his mother did no’t know; so there were conflicts
between them.
Although he was a poor Christian student, he became eligible for free
education at the elite Cathedral School which was regarded as one of
the best in India, because he used to sing in the St. Thomas Cathedral Choir
at Flora Fountain. He would sing every Sunday morning
and evening – it was like singing not for his supper but for his education!
But even the best education in the country could no’t teach him anything
and he ended up at the bottom of the class.
Looking back at those days many years later, he realised that
his problems arose because of his inability to understand maths. He
just couldn’t complete processes. “I still can’t, but I use people to
help me out; I also have a method to do it which is the big picture
method.” He never went into every little detail but developed a
mental picture which enabled him to see what he called the big picture.
And when he noted that he could no’t spell words, he realised that
he had a memory problem. Therefore, he started using notes to remember
things. Back in school, Mr. Kurien recalled, he had attempted to use
American spellings such as color for colour. But he was beaten for this
transgression.
“Education at school level really became irrelevant and boring. What
was I going to do by remembering the length of the Amazon river? I wasn’t
going to swim the Amazon! But if I
did not know the length of the Amazon, someone was going to bash me.
And that theorem, the Pythagoras theorem... I can cross the road without
understanding the theory of the Pythagoras theorem!
“So I started dreaming in class. Today there are educational systems
which say, oh, there is a creative product in there! This is a kid with some
amazing imagination. There are people who pick up that imagination and take
the child in the right direction. “But in those days if you were a
dreamer then you were not good, because nobody knew what was dyslexia,
what was ADS (attention deficiency syndrome) and nobody
recognised creativity.”
Moreover, that was also the time of corporal punishment. At school he
was caned by a teacher. When he returned home to his mother, it turned
out that she also believed that the rodwas the best way to teach mathematics
and spellings to a child. He was beaten at home, he was
beaten at school. At school he was told that he was dumb, stupid and a
failure and at home he was told the same. “It simply destroys your soul.”
Mr. Kurien then turned to Ali Merchant who was his prefect at Cathedral
School and said that the prefects were also allowed to use corporal punishment.
He recalled being taken to the prefects’ room, being told to bend
and touch his toes and then being hit with a hockey stick.
As the house gasped at this, a bashful Ali said he recalled only one such
incident.
Regular beatings turned him into a rebel, an aggressive one at that.
He first failed in the Seventh Standard and then in the Ninth. His rebellious
streak and aggressive nature soon led him to alcohol and drugs. He was
even jailed on a few occasions. But he harmed himself the most
when he started looking at himself as a failure. As a result, he failed even
before trying and did not even attempt anything. Instead, he tried other things
in order to get attention.
He was not thrown out of school because he was the sports captain, the
gym captain and the boxing captain as well. He was liked and recognised on
the sports field, but otherwise no one cared for him or spoke to him.
‘
Once out of school, he somehow got admission in Elphinstone College
because someone had told him that itwas the easiest place to get a degree –
and that there were a lot of girls there. However, he failed the Inter exams
– and that became the breaking point.
Mr. Kurien recalled that he was 18 or 19 years old when he said to himself
that he was good for nothing and ran away from home. He got a job
with a coxswain company, Helicopter Services, where his job was to bribe
government employees everyday for different kinds of certificates.
He lived in villages for three years, sleeping on the floor, at the back of a
truck or under a truck. It was a tough life and by the end of
the third year he was so depressed that he was ready to jump into a river
and end it all. He saw no future for himself and was of returning to the
city a failure.
However, he saw light and thought the better of committing suicide. He
then realised that the only way to achieve anything was to get a degree.
Finally, he returned to Bombay and enrolled himself in a morning college.
To cut a long story short, since he knew that he had short-term memory
and could no’t study for five papers at a time, he decided to attempt one subject
at a time. Thus, appearing for an exam twice a year, in October and
March, he finally managed after five to seven years to get that elusive degree
at the age of 27.
Of course, Mr. Kurien admitted, he copied and cheated to pass his exams.
But finally he had a degree. What did he do during those five to
seven years? He did several odd jobs. He stuck stamps at the Institute of
Bankers for Rs. 7 per day; but he was thrown out (“I can’t remember why;
ah, yes, I stole the stamps!”) Finally, he ended up with the job of
selling advertisement space for “Debonair magazine (“which had a
centre spread of a girl with no clothes...nobody would take the job, so I
ended up doing it”).
He learnt how to sell. This led him to advertising. His first job was with
the then nascent Rediffusion which was his “first school of learning”.
There, for the first time, he heard words like marketing strategy, brand
building, research and so on. Sometime later, he had to work under
a boss who told him that he was dumb, stupid and a failure. He had no
MBA, could no’t understand complex problems or intellectual concepts.
When he threw a big fat book on marketing at him, he took it home and
tried reading it. But he did not understand anything.
Once again, the old feeling of being completely useless and inadequate
started to surface. But this time there was a difference.
He was aware of his ability to come up with a creative solution for a
problem.He also knew that he was not a
creative person. At the same time, he was a lateral thinker (nobody had
told him so in so many words) who had been trained to think vertically.
And this turned out to be an amazing combination, because he was able
to think of out-of-the-box solutions and could come up with unusual and
imaginative solutions.
Since he couldn’t do anything complex, he had to be extremely simple in
approach; he was thus able to “cut through the fog”, cut through complex
problems and arrive at a solution. What helped him most, Mr. Kurien
said, was the years spent observing people, their reactions, responses and
purchase decisions. He could see the value of a ten-paisa coin in the hands
of a poor villager (who would buy some pickle to spice up his bland fare
of one onion and one green chilli over his rice for three to four days).
He understood the people at the bottom of the market and later also
studied middle class families and the more affluent sections of society. Put
together, all this gave him a rare insight into people’s responses and purchase
decisions.
“Use communications tools to attract people – to attract the right kind
of people – and to convert people into buyers.” This was what turned out to
be his strength and this was what he delivered to the partners with whom
he worked.
He never adopted a textbook strategy because he had never read any textbooks
and always preferred the bottoms-up approach.
“If you know your consumers and you have worked bottoms-up, then
you have a solution that invariably works. But clients or customers don’t
buy bottoms-up solutions, because if you come up with creative answers
they’ll think you’ve been smoking something. However, if you are able
to turn a bottoms-up solution into a vertical, top-down strategy, then
people buy it – and that’s what I do even today.”
Mr. Kurien said that it was one moment in 1987 that changed his life.
One of his clients, Shilpa Shah who owned Garden Vareli, told him that
she trusted his judgement and would give him her account if he started his
own agency.
“For anyone who has problems like mine... it needs that one person
to say, I believe in you, because it helps you to believe in yourself.
And the day you believe in yourself, you can do anything.”
The agency, Ambience, had many clients... Thums Up, Saffola, Lakme,
Parachute and P&G. It was extremely successful, but it was an agency that
took only two clients a year. Mr. Kurien and his team had the
courage to take only two clients so that they could operate with bigger
and more profitable clients and to deliver differently. It became one of the
most successful and profitable agencies in the 1990s; and then it was sold
off; but even today it was the sixth or seventh largest agency in India.
Three years after he started his agency, one of his clients, Subhash
Chandra of Essel World Amusement Parks, was talking about television
when he suddenly said, “Why can’t we do something like this in India (start
a private television entertainment channel)?”
He invited Mr. Kurien to join him as a partner and to look after the marketing
and sales. Zee TV was launched and went on to become a big success.
As had Dish TV and the other ventures that the two collaborated on.
“So it looks as though I have ended up being a serial entrepreneur! Over
the last 20 years, every three years Ihave found something to do... but I
never do anything on my own. I always have a partner; the one truth in
partnership is that if your partner’s strengths are your weaknesses and if
your partner’s weaknesses are your strengths, then you have a team that
is extremely powerful because there is no conflict. I have been blessed with
more opportunities than most people in this country. And I have been
blessed with more success.”
Mr. Kurien then made a pitch for the youth. If somebody said of a
young person that he was a dreamer, what they meant was that he was an
imaginative person or that he was creative. And the future was for creative
persons. While everything else could be done by a computer, a person
with creative talent could make more out of it.
“These kids may be indifferent, but they are not stupid, they are not
useless. Everyone is useful, everyone has got talent; it’s about spotting
that talent and giving someone a chance which can change that
person’s life.
“No one is useless – that’s one of the most hurtful things that you
hear. Be patient with them; everyone doesn’t know what they’re going
to be doing in life when they are just 18 or 22; some people take
up to 40 years. Patience, respect and understanding, that’s what
people need.”
Finally, Mr. Kurien said, he was often asked what was it that kept
him going and what did he do with his money.
He said he kept going for the thrill of winning and for the thrill of success.
As a sportsman, he used to run on the track and attempt to overtake
those who were ahead of him. He was still doing that. As a boxer and a rugby
player, he was accustomed to taking punches and being knocked down.
But he always got up and kept going. It was this attitude that he put into
everything that he did even today.
“Give me a new mountain every couple of years and I am going to
climb it, because without that thereis no challenge for me; I enjoy
myself...”
Don’t leave your children so much money that they don’t do
anything for the rest of their lives, pleads Ashok Kurien
One final piece of advice from Mr. Kurien:
“If my children are inheriting my business, I will leave them a cashrich
business which is sound, on solid foundation and which they can continue.
But if they are not going to inherit and run my business, then I
won’t burden them with tremendous wealth.
“People don’t know what to do with tremendous wealth. Leave
them enough so that they can do what they want to do in life, don’t
leave them so much that they don’t do anything for the rest of their
lives. That is a curse rather than a blessing.
“Experience the joy of giving the rest away. Try and do it sensibly; it
is a huge joy and it is my work-life balance. The harder I work, the more
I seem to have to give away. And that’s a pleasure,” he concluded.
When the floor was thrown open for questions, Mr. Kurien warned
(tongue firmly in cheek) that he never knew the answers to questions and
that irrespective of the question asked, he gave the answer that he wanted to
give.
Dilnavaz Variava said her family had started a school near Deolali for
children from economically backward classes. However, most of them were
not interested in studies. While some said they would copy, cheat and
somehow pass their SSC exams, others appeared to have the problems
that he had talked about. It was planned to start vocational classes at
the school, but the teachers and the management first wanted to understand
the children.
Mr. Kurien said the vocational option was a laudable one because some
students could turn out to be better at vocational rather than conventional
studies. “The educational system needs questioning. It was created
years ago and has hardly evolved.”
When PP Arun Sanghi asked how he had reconciled with his mother,
Mr. Kurien said he first had to accept that “it wasn’t her fault that she didn’t
know any better”. Secondly, he had to forgive himself because his response
to her was one of animosity, anger and rebellion. He, too, had broken
a neighbour’s car (as shown in the film “Taare Zameen Par”) and
done all kinds of things.
Once he accepted the fact that his response to her had been wrong, he
went and hugged her and asked her to forgive him for not having been an
ideal son. But before that he spent many
months pondering over the situation before finally dealing with it in such a
way that it left no bitterness. “Even then, it took me a number of years
before we were able to sit together on the same table. But it had to start
with me.”
Sitaram Shah asked how he made the crucial turn that changed his life
from one of negativity to one where he had attained a positive position.
People often complained that they failed because they had not received
enough positivity in the early part of their career.
Mr. Kurien said any person could succeed if he or she was honest.
“You have to be able to look at yourself in the mirror, without any
pretensions, without believing that you are terrific or that you are right.
You need to start by saying that you are wrong, that you are zero... it’s a
long path and it isn’t something that will happen overnight. I used to wake
up every morning and say that I want to change.
“I am not saying that I am a saint or anything; I have been a bit of a
rascal for many years. But you can change certain parts of your life one
at a time. If you try and change 20 things, I don’t think you can do it.
Pick one at a time and work on it.
“I made a black dot with a ballpoint pen on my right thumb so that every
time I wrote, I could see it. I had a terrible temper, I was violent, and this
was when I was 35 or 36 years old. I used to beat up people. I was last in
jail for beating up a policeman and a bus driver, for hitting a public servant
on duty.”
But the black spot on his thumb reminded him all through the day that
he had to change himself, that he had to stop being angry, to stop lying.
And it had worked.
Burjor Poonawala wondered whether it was a higher IQ that had
helped him conquer all the problems that he faced as a child and during his
educative years.
Mr. Kurien said he did not have a high IQ. But he believed that difficulties
and hardships could do one of three things: “One, they can break
you. Two, they can twist and warp you into a terrible human being.
Three, you can overcome them.
“The only way to overcome anything is with compassion. If you are
overcome with compassion and understanding
of other people, and if you understand that your role in life is beyond
looking after yourself, I think you have a chance of getting there.”
Roda Billimoria said while she was happy to note that according to Mr.
Kurien learning differently did not come under “disabilities”, the
Maharashtra Dyslexics Association wanted it to come under “disabilities
” to take advantage of the Persons with Disabilities Act of 1995.
Under Clause 26B of this Act, teachers would have to learn remedial education
so that they could become more sensitive to the needs of children
who learned differently.
Mr. Kurien almost brought the house down when he said, “I just
hope that teachers learn how to teach before they try to get
sensitised”.
Priyasri Patodia wondered whether Mr. Kurien could design a programme
for the introduction of art and creative thinking at the primary school
level. Some private schools arranged speakers and others to expose children
to creative professions but not all.
“It’s not just about people with disabilities... they (the teachers) just
push you not to be creative.”
Mr. Kurien agreed and pointed out that there was another big problem,
viz., the parents.
“If you tell a parent from a lower middle class family that your child
could be an artiste or something that could lead to a creative field, they
would say no! So the job is huge, first educating society, then the parents
and then the teachers. I take my hat off to all those who are working
in this area.”
hvaidya said...
