A favourite movie

 The Infosys chairman and I have something in common It was only the other day, while flipping through a magazine, that I realised that the founder of one of India’s most innovative corporates and I had something in common, apart from living in Bangalore. “Why can’t you learn from him?” has been the constant refrain at home ever since N R Narayana Murthy rightly became an icon after starting a company which, in the space of 25 years, has become a household name all over the world. The question of “Why can’t you learn from him?” has been reiterated with each magazine story on the simplicity of the guy who thinks nothing of picking up a broom to clean the toilet on a daily basis. I have been known to pick up a broom but that is only when there is a cockroach to be disposed of late in the night when there is no maid to do the needful. Magazine stories on how he queues up for his meals at the self-service office-canteen have evoked caustic comments on my habit of parking myself in front of the TV during one-day cricket matches telecast in the evening and insisting that whoever serves me tea does not stand between me and the idiot box when a ball is being bowled. And there is no getting away from the guy even when one is holidaying overseas in Sri Lanka on one of those few-days-and-some-nights tours which seem economical when you read the advertisement. After checking in late in the night at a Colombo hotel, I was irritated at how long the process seemed to take for a reservation which had been made on the phone from India. Without quite calling the chap at the counter an idiot, I was trying to make him feel like one when he looked up and said, “We had another gentleman from Bangalore staying with us called Narayana Murthy and he was so well-behaved, so well-behaved.” And the guy at the Colombo hotel counter sighed as if to wonder why not all Bangaloreans could be counted on to be well-behaved! So it was with a feeling of ‘Here we go again’ that I picked up the June 4 issue of ‘The Week’ and realised that Narayana Murthy was one of the icons featured in the cover story. As expected, the snippets mentioned that he was uncompromising about simplicity, had refused Z-category security, lived in a three-bedroom house bought in 1986 — one bedroom more than the flat I had bought in 1995 and called Deja View and don’t ask me why! — and took the company bus to work. If my company had a bus and I could be sure of a seat, so would I, I told myself. It was the next bit which grabbed my attention: “Hasn’t watched a movie for 20 years, except The Titanic.” And then I realised that Narayana Murthy and I finally had something in common. And I’m not referring to the bit about not watching a movie for two decades. If I haven’t watched a movie in a theatre for 20 years, it’s not because I have been busy starting a company and making it a household name and not just in terms of M-cap. It’s just that the sound level in movie halls gives me a headache. And it just doesn’t make sense to pay for a headache when you can get one free! It was the bit about the ‘Titanic’ which caught my eye. If I have seen a movie 20 times in the last decade on a late-night TV channel, it is the ‘Titanic’. ‘Titanic’ is one of the most classy films ever screened even if it is all about class, with the ladies and gentlemen aboard the world’s most exclusive luxury liner not expected to fraternise with the hoi polloi in the steerage. And yet Leonardo di Caprio’s eternally young Jack Dawson is able to reach out to Kate Winslet’s winsome Rose Bukater who doesn’t quite know how to escape from the impending marriage to a millionaire which her mother has arranged. Dawson, as the young artist who lives for the moment and asks for nothing more than blank paper to sketch the daily inspiration on, comes across like a breath of fresh air on a ship full of millionaires who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. Yet ‘Titanic’ is much more than an impending marriage on the rocks and a shipwrecked 1912 romance! There are moments of incredibly moving heroism like the musicians playing “Abide with me” even when the ship is going down. And if, while inputting this, my mind hums “My heart will go on”, it is because we Indians are not just moved by M-cap, whether we are Narayana Murthys or scribbling scribes!

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