How does life appear from a bed for someone who is staring at Heaven’s door in front of him and looking back at life slipping out? What would he be thinking as his life hangs on the life support system and his family grapples with a decision that I wish no one ever has to make? He is my friend of years and I see him slipping out of my reach. I feel very sad today, mixed up in emotions that are difficult to share. However, what matters most is what he would want me to think today? Somehow I know the answer, thus this mail is to share the story of my friend, while he battles for his life in a hospital in California.

This story started 23 years ago, in 1986, when at HCL we decided to be the first to introduce UNIX in India. I walked into the R&D center in Chennai (Madras then) to meet the man who was leading the development initiative – his name was M. N. Divakar (MND to his friends). If my memory serves me right, I walked up three floors and knocked on his room with anticipation.  It was a small no nonsense room, with a whirlpool of energy and MND sitting right at the center. That is the way MND is – always in the center of action. 

Many long strategy sessions later, we became friends and spent significant time on Marina Beach after office, talking about our passion and life in general. I came to know the real person behind the super intellect.  He was a man with a mission and wanted to move ahead in the technology race and truly believed that everything was “possible”. That made him the center piece with HCL gaining No. 1 position in Indian IT landscape led by the UNIX products he rolled out. That was the golden period for HCL and he was leading it from the front. He navigated his team through complex technologies and market challenges with his approach and he won. 

Life took us in different directions – he went to the U.S. to head a business and I got busy doing other things. A few years later, I heard of his first brush with cancer. I met him during those days. He had not lost his spirit, nor his focus on work and was 100 percent sure that he will beat cancer.  He systematically and clinically went after cancer and won the battle just because of his positive attitude.  

Our journey connected us again in 2005, when I had the first long chat with him after many years and I saw the same hunger in his eyes. He told me “give me something very difficult to do, I want a new challenge”. I saw that he had not changed one bit and was ready to chase the impossible dream. We started the journey of transformation within HCL. Once again, he was core of the think tank and the biggest champion of change, as my friend, philosopher and guide.  

It was too good to last. Summer of last year the cancer reappeared, bigger and meaner this time. He called me and shared the start of a new battle in his life. I asked him how he wants to deal with it because doctors were throwing not-so-good statistics. He said he wants more challenges.  Forty eight hours later, we had a conference call with all leaders at HCL to share that MND has decided to pursue two battles – one for his life and one to transform a part of our business that needed significant change. He was excited, charged and full of hope that he will beat it again.  

The cancer treatment was tough and unpredictable. However, MND had made up his mind that he will fight it and not stop working. So he would be on conference calls while in the hospital, he would send mails while the blood transfusion was going on. He was completely in charge and in control, irrespective of how bad he felt. He was focused on his promise to transform the business he was leading. He would attend conference calls with me at odd hours even if he had no energy to speak. He would only listen and you would see a clear mail from him after few hours on what he will do. Any suggestions that he takes it easy were met with “Don’t be ridiculous”. 

We stopped talking about cancer, other than his emails that gave me status updates where he would celebrate small victories and talk about resolving to fight the setbacks.

January 15 was one such day and he wrote “the results of the first scan after two months of radiation looked positive with substantial improvement in the tumor. This is a significant milestone in the treatment plan.”

We both thought that he had won it again and planned his trip to India to start a new challenge and to celebrate his 30 years in HCL. I guess that was not meant to be, as his situation deteriorated with each passing day and at a speed which no one anticipated.  

Today, he is in the hospital on life support, knocking on Heaven’s door. I think he has won again. He has taught me and many others, the art of fighting impossible battles and winning. Everything is really possible and he is right. These may be the last few days he spends with us and I want to take this opportunity to spread his message to as many people, as I can as I see his victory in that message. Let’s learn from him and pray that God gives us more spirited people like MND who have shown the world a new dimension to life and how to live it. It is not important whether you live it or die; it is how you live which really counts.

I enjoy reading Jonathan Schwartz’s Blog – a link of long standing on my blogroll. Some months ago, when I was among a few lonely voices talking about opportunity in what was being pronounced as gloom, Jonathan wrote on his blog: “There’s opportunity everywhere I look.” He reminded us of the time when the internet bubble burst and pointed out “That same zeal for breakthrough, game changing economics is back with a vengeance … And the title of his post? ‘Innovation loves a crisis’.”

We in India have been bred on the adage: Necessity is the mother of invention. On a lighter vein, is it also often referred to as jugaad. But seriously, we have seen scarcity breed innovation all around us.

The Maruta tractor-trailer that runs on a water pump in the villages carrying villagers across long distances is one such innovation. The Nano car is saluted as a manifestation of innovation or ‘frugal engineering’ with the power to find more in less. Our parents have always sensitized us to consider every drop and every grain as precious. Our culture revolves around an attempt to get best out of the least. And innovation is the key to this.

Fortunately, our generation has seen growing prosperity. So, the kind of scarcity we see today in the cities where we operate is a different kind of scarcity – that of skilled talent, capital, and now of an appetite for risk.

It is only innovation that can and will drive us out of this. This innovation I am referring to is not just about new products. I am talking about disruptive, transformative innovation – a whole new approach to business.

Sure, the ground under our feet has shifted. But isn’t that what we had been saying all along: that change is the only constant? These times should be seen as an opportunity to transform – both organizationally and personally. It will certainly separate the grain from the husk. But, more importantly, it should change the way we all think.

Now I am going to set a ground rule in my blog. I am not going to use words like crisis, catastrophe, depression…so freely brandied around to describe these times. These can only get us deeper into a hole as I honestly believe our biggest obstacle right now is our collective psychology.

We need to go on the offense, not on the defense. Rather than worrying about the impact on our company, we should be focused on innovative approaches to reduce the impact on our customers, our employees, our shareholders. That will take care of our company automatically.