Reflections on life and success, without flashy mantras

Ashok Ganguly's recently released memoir is refreshingly different from the standard autobiographies. A lot like the man himself - unpretentious, matter-of-fact and pulling no punches

Afterness: Home and Away

Author: Ashok S Ganguly

Publisher: Penguin India

Pages: 284

Price: Rs 599

Most corporate leaders tend to exaggerate their impact and role when writing their biographies or memoirs. Ashok S Ganguly does the opposite. He downplays his own contributions and tries to give the impression that everything he achieved — from becoming the chairman of Hindustan Lever (now Hindustan Unilever) to his stint as a nominated Member of Parliament — was entirely serendipitous. Afterness, his recently released memoir, is a lot like the man himself — unpretentious, matter-of-fact and pulling no punches.

After a brief prologue, where he looks at the hopes and aspirations of his generation in a newly independent nation to the conditions that worry him today, the story of his life is told as a series of short chapters, largely in chronological fashion. We learn about his grandparents and uncles, the joint family which made a home for itself in Benaras (now Varanasi) and his father’s move to Bombay (now Mumbai) in search of a living.

His father found a job in Bombay Electric Supplies and Tramways (BEST) with the help of a relative and the nuclear family (Ganguly senior, his wife, the author and the author’s elder sister) settled down in one of the Parsi colonies.

The author’s father was undemonstrative and stoic — but always tried to do the best he could for his family. He was, in turns, modern and conservative. He ensured that both his children had equal educational opportunities — both going for higher education in one of the better schools of Bombay and later to the same college and finally for higher research. But though his daughter was the apple of his eye, he cut off all relations with her when she married someone from another community. He would reconcile partially with her only towards the very end of his life.

The author says he was not particularly good at academics in school, unlike his sister who was always diligent and did well in everything she tackled. He had to repeat a year in SSC because he failed in Sanskrit. But once in college, he started doing very well — he gives credit to being taught in college by excellent teachers with a passion for their subjects.

His father encouraged him to go to the US for his doctoral studies, though it required a huge financial outlay for Ganguly senior — the ticket to the US alone was equal to his annual salary.

Dr Ganguly did his PhD in record time and obviously left enough of an impression to be offered a teaching job in the US. But he returned to India where he was immediately offered a job in the government as a scientist. He was also called for an interview with Hindustan Lever — and was offered a job, which he accepted.

Dr Ganguly joined and resigned almost immediately after finding that he had been taken in the management side of the company and not the research division. He got a dressing down from one of the senior Hindustan Lever executives who had interviewed him but was offered a new job in the company in the research division, which he happily accepted.

The book follows his journey through life — his marriage (arranged), his various postings in the Netherlands and the UK, and the colleagues with whom he worked.

Dr Ganguly’s memoir offers a great look at post-independence India and the idealism of the youth, many of whom chose to come back to the country after studying abroad in order to help build the nation. Over time though, the bureaucracy and Licence Raj began making life difficult for corporations, developments the author captures as well.

Dr Ganguly loves science and quite a bit of the memoir is devoted to the projects he worked on — both while doing his PhD, and later at Hindustan Lever and Unilever laboratories.

His colleagues, many of whom became his close friends, flit in and out of the book. His promotions and new assignments are treated as routine events that came through in the normal course of time. His encounters with union leaders get a passing mention. Dr Ganguly’s great love — his wife Connie — passed away a couple of years ago and one can feel the author missing her presence in his life all through the book.

People who pick up this book to get management tips of the kind that one finds in Western and Indian corporate biographies — think Jack Welch —will be disappointed. The lessons are there in the book all right but they are not flashy mantras. You get them from Dr Ganguly’s approach to life and work — hard working, willing to take on any challenges without fuss, always willing to learn and try something new.

A life as rich as Dr Ganguly’s cannot be captured in a book of this size. Each chapter reads like a concise summary of a particular phase of his life with a few anecdotes and observations thrown in. There are interesting passing observations where the reader is left wishing for more details — for example, where the author refers to the differences between the Dutch and the UK way of looking at things as well as the subtle tensions between them in Unilever. But then, there is only so much you can cram into 300 pages of a book that is a delightful read and refreshingly different from the standard autobiographies.