A Tribute to my Teachers

Today is 5^th of September (2023), the day India celebrates Teacher’s Day as a tribute to Dr. Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, independent India’s first Vice President and later second President. He was essentially a noted academician and philosopher, and had held distinguished positions in the Universities of Mysore, Calcutta, and Oxford. He had also served as the Vice Chancellor of the Banaras Hindu University (1939-48).

As a story goes, after he became the President of India in 1962, a few of his students requested him to allow them to celebrate his birthday. However, Dr. Radhakrishnan asked them to observe it as Teacher’s Day instead. Since then, September 5 has been celebrated as Teacher’s Day.

On this day, the general trend is to meet, felicitate and honour one’s school or college teachers throughout the country. But life is life and it has many teachers - they come in all shapes, sizes, and temperaments. Today I plan to remember and honour some of my life’s teachers.

The first person who comes to my mind is the lift-man in a high-rise residential building in which I then lived – a short, quiet, diminutive man with a shy smile. It so happened, that while travelling in the lift, one of my fellow passengers casually mentioned as to why do we need a lift-man in a fully automatic lift. Prima facie, a most logical question. But I noticed that the lift-man cringed on hearing this and in his soft spoken manner replied in chaste Hindi – “it gives employment to one man”. Later I came to know that the person had an MA in Sociology and had come to Hyderabad (from a small place near Varanasi) in search of employment and with much difficulty the only work he had been able to find was that of a lift-man. He worked 12 hour shifts and lived in a room which he shared with five other men in similar circumstances. I soon moved away from that city, but the lesson I got from that one sentence remains with me.

The second teacher who comes to my mind is a truck-driver I befriended while I was doing my rural assignment in the back-of-beyond small village in Bihar. Against normal practice of most bankers in similar predicament, I had decided to live in that village rather than commute from the nearest town (see A Rural Sojourn). I got acquainted with this man at the small eatery in the village which we both frequented. He was about 40 years old, dark, short, wiry, used to have a permanent salt and pepper stubble on his face, and invariably wore just a lungi with a singlet. He used to drive someone’s ramshackle truck on some kind of commission basis and just about managed to keep his body and soul together. It is more than 35 years and I do not remember his name but his image remains crystal clear in my mind’s eye.

One day, this man very hesitatingly approached me with a request to help him open a bank account. Thirty-five years ago, having a simple savings bank account used to be a prestigious affair which also involved battling a major exercise in bureaucracy. This man’s main worry was that he did not have a “guarantor”. The local practice was that the introducer was referred to as a guarantor and few people wanted to take the responsibility of that risk. However, since I had become fairly well acquainted to this man, I readily signed the account opening forms as introducer and arranged for opening his account the next day.  He used to regularly drop into the branch to deposit small amounts and we would greet each other. Around six months after the account was opened later, he came to get his pass-book updated which then came to me for initialling. I was surprised to note that he had a balance of around Rs.10,000/- in his account! While handing his pass-book to him I joked, hey you are a rich man. After nearly three years of service I had never had so much money in my SB account. The man looked at me with folded hands with a look of utter gratitude in his eyes and replied, “Huzoor, if someone had opened this account for me ten years ago, the truck that I drive would have been mine”. This was my first lesson on the importance of promoting savings habits for equitable economic development of a society, and the role that financial intermediaries can play in it. It was later that I read and started understanding the various implications of this seemingly simple intervention. I have written about it in my blog “On Financial Inclusion”, and the article, “Savings - Banking Industry’s Step Child”, published by Money Life. I also have some lovely memories of my trip to Siliguri (see, Kursela Days 11 – A Trip to Siliguri) with this man on his truck!

Having studied in seven schools and three colleges, I have had innumerable formal teachers but only a couple of them have left any kind of lasting impression on me. One was Sister St. Pius – a Keralite nun and Principal of the small school from where I did my 9^th and 10^th years of school. I was in the incorrigible habit of getting into all kinds of scraps and being sent to the Principal’s office for punishment – at all the schools I went to. This kind of affair was ordinary and boring until I got to meet Sister St. Pius. She did not scold me but got me to first tell her my side of the story. This was a major shock to me, as I had never encountered anything like this before. After I had mumbled my side of the story, she kept quiet for a few moments and then softly asked, “Why do you think you are justified in doing what you did?” I had no reply to give. She then asked me to think about it and let me go. Forty-five years later, I am still thinking.

At the university, in course of my final graduation exam, I chose to answer a problem which involved deriving a fairly complex mathematical solution. This was in a paper in mathematical statistics. I was able to think out the solution and derived the answer using first principles. But as luck would have it, I had made one silly mistake because of which the answer was wrong. It so happened that the professor who had taught this course passed by on invigilation duty, peeked into my answer sheet and casually mentioned, “revise your derivation”, and then walked away. This man was an absolutely no-nonsense person, a stickler for discipline, and generally a very unfriendly person. I realised that I must have made some mistake in the derivation and slowly rechecked all the steps and figured out where I had made the mistake, which I then rectified. I can never forget this teacher.

Starting work brought another cohort of exciting teachers – bosses, customers, and colleagues. I have been extremely lucky to have the opportunity of working under a series of great bosses – gentle, calm, but politically adept - who mentored me to who I am today. There were also a couple of sadists – but one gets to learn some great lessons from them too!

I would like to share one good and one bad memory here – though in retrospect both were essentially educative.

I had a boss who was notorious for refusing leave. As luck would have, I had to attend to a pressing family affair and desperately needed three days leave. It was with great trepidation that I entered my boss’s chamber but before I could utter a single word, he barked without even looking up, “I can’t give you any leave”. I was more than perplexed as to how could he be aware that I had come to request for leave, and what was I to do now. The background was that my sister’s father-in-law had expired and I had to go to the funeral to represent my side of the family. It was a social need which I could not avoid. I finally screwed up some courage and blurted out as to why I needed the leave. He thought about it and immediately agreed to give me the three day leave (but not a day more), with the remark, “If you do not go, your sister would have to hear taunts all her life that no one from your family came for the funeral”. Later on in my professional career, I have always tried to understand my subordinate’s leave requirements and hardly ever had occasion to refuse one.

The second incident relates to my interaction with our Law Officer. There was a large loan proposed to a PSU which was backed with a Government of India guarantee and we were feeling quite smug about bagging this “safe” business. I had gone to meet the Law Officer to get the guarantee formally vetted by him.  He was a competent and genial person (a rare combination), and after he had done the vetting he cheerfully remarked, “if the loan goes bad, would the Bank have the guts to prosecute the President of India”. He said it in Hindi using very colourful language – “Kya iss guarantee ke bal pe aap President of India ke kamar mein rassi bandhwa payenge” (which translates to, “On the strength of this guarantee would you be able to tie up the President of India in ropes as a prisoner). At that point of time, I took it as a joke and laughed it off.

It was only over time that I realised that the best or rather the only viable security in any lending operation is a borrower who can utilise the funds and generate a positive return, along with ability of the lender to entrap the cash flows. All other kinds of security are not just secondary, but rather tertiary. Banks being highly leveraged entities, working on thin operating margins, have a low margin of safety. Depending on foreclosure of security as primary security for collecting its dues would push up transactions costs to the extent of making the business unviable. This was one mighty valuable lesson.

Customers can also be great teachers, and in fact the bad ones teach you more about banking and the politics which goes and can go in it, than the good ones.

One such memorable learning experience relates to the branch where I did my rural assignment. The branch had a tractor loan which had gone bad. In fact, the borrower had filed a counter case against the tractor dealer and the Bank for cheating him and selling him a second-hand tractor for the price of a new one! The logic being that when the tractor was purchased by him it showed an odometer reading of some 15 kms. Though lending operations were not under my purview, I sort of bull-dozed the Branch Manager and the Field Officer into letting me meet this borrower so as to try and recover the amount. POs in Patna Circle were held in pretty high esteem and my BM rarely, if ever, refused any of my suggestions (he was uncomfortable with most of them).

I took the Bank’s jeep and drove off to meet this borrower. The borrower was a fairly well-to-do farmer, and sarpanch of his village (Jhagduchak Panchayat in Katihar District). As soon as I reached this person’s house and introduced myself, I was greeted very warmly and with the deference due to some kind of high official (I would not have been more than 26-27 years old). After I had explained the reason of my visit, the borrower feigned as if I (and the Bank) were doing him a major injustice and insulting him. His primary take was how could the Bank even imagine that such an honourable person as him could default on his commitments. In his opinion, the Bank should worry on giving loans (under IRDP and other government sponsored schemes) to poor and marginal farmers who take loans and then disappear since they have no land to tether them. There was no way that he with his vast land holdings could disappear. Moreover, he was a just, respected, and honourable person and the sarpanch of his village. Then he went on into a tangent and started discussing all kinds of things. Every time I tried to bring up the subject of his repaying his loan his standard response was that the Bank should rest assured that he would honour all his commitments before going off on another tangent. I made at least two more visits and the same drama was repeated. Later while talking to other people in the area, I came to understand that this person was notoriously slippery in all his dealings. But the lesson, that one should know the borrower well before taking any kind of credit exposure, remains.

With warm and respectful salutation to all my teachers.