When I Was 25 , livre ebook

Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd. - Shaili Chopra

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

78 pages

English

Vous pourrez modifier la taille du texte de cet ouvrage

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Adi Godrej * Shashi Tharoor * Rajdeep SardesaiK.P. Singh Zia Mody Dimple Kapadia Jay PandaP. Chidambaram Kalpana Morparia Sadhguru Sandeep Khosla Uday Shankar Vikram TalwarWhat do you dream about when you envisage your future?In When I Was 25, Shaili Chopra traces the youth of eminent personalities like Adi Godrej, K.P. Singh, P. Chidambaram and Dimple Kapadia. These successful people open up about the challenges they faced and the choices they made to reach where they are today. They also part with invaluable advice to the young, based on what they have learned in their careers. Honest and refreshing, this book will inspire you and point you to the path of greater glory.

Sujets

Gestion et management

Informations

Publié par	Random House Publishers India Pvt. Ltd.
Date de parution	15 décembre 2014
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9788184006773
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0420€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

SHAILI CHOPRA

WHEN I WAS 25
The Leaders Look Back
RANDOM HOUSE INDIA
CONTENTS
Introduction
Uday Shankar
Adi Godrej
Dimple Kapadia
Shashi Tharoor
Rajdeep Sardesai
Sadhguru
Zia Mody
P. Chidambaram
K.P. Singh
Jay Panda
Kalpana Morparia
Vikram Talwar
Sandeep Khosla
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Author
Follow Random House
Copyright
A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

Shaili Chopra is an award-winning journalist who reports on business and economic affairs. She has worked with ETNOW, NDTV and CNBC. She was presented the Ram Nath Goenka Award for the best in business journalism for 2010-11 and the News Television Award for Best Reporter for 2007. She is among the most trusted faces in Indian journalism and known for breaking news and her incisive interviewing style. Industry chamber FICCI conferred upon her their Young Leader Award. CNN-IBN counted her among the 30 witty, intelligent women to follow on Twitter.
She is currently working on digital content platforms in her new avatar as a young entrepreneur. In a career of over fifteen years, through her interactions, she has been a keen observer of leadership and success stories.
When I Was 25 is Shaili's third book. Her second book, The Big Connect: Politics in the Age of Social Media, was published earlier this year by Random House India.
Also by Shaili Chopra
The Big Connect: Politics in the Age of Social Media
Mom and dad for loving me unconditionally and for putting up with all my madness
Introduction
It s not magic but madness which precipitates the success of the best leaders. The stories of these thirteen people completely shattered my assumptions about leadership, success, and wisdom. And for good reason. They didn t need career counsellors, they didn t chase mentors, almost all of them studied something they wouldn t pursue later in life, they were lost and okay with that, and they did well in life by eliminating those who doubted their passions. Most of their best laid plans in their twenties stayed just that, plans. In their youth, few of these amazing personalities had any inkling of their eventual success stories. These fascinating accounts of their lives are not career graphs, they are about how they learnt from experiences, travel, people, the mistakes they made, and how they embraced failure. They show why madness is a necessary ingredient in dreaming big and how every success must be savoured and enjoyed. These people were not born leaders-they shaped their destiny to become spectacular achievers.
I wrote this book for many reasons. Our country is changing, it s being shaped by those who make up its majority-the youth. There is hunger for opportunities with pangs for success. To make it big. At 25, a lot of people in India are taking risks and starting up. These millennials are running businesses. They are leading teams. Many of them have a number they are chasing-50 crores, 100 crores, a million dollars, or some such other. The reason I wanted to write this book is because I believe life at 25 isn t only about valuations. It s not only about successes. It s actually about challenges, failures, confusion, chaos, and madness. And through all of that emerge leadership qualities and personal character strengths that allow many a summit in people s lives. Through these stories I have been able to capture the journey and excitement of these leaders and what inspired and determined their plans in their twenties. It s a book that establishes that success isn t dependent on technical, educational, or marketing skills. It s something deeper in the bone marrow. It s strength of character and not just the pursuit of winning.
Adi Godrej worked as a bellboy in a national park in the US, it taught him how to live on a shoe string budget and respect for labour. Rajdeep Sardesai interviewed the PM at 24, but later regretted that he might have been too young for it. Lesson learnt-no replacement for knowledge and experience. Chairman of DLF, K.P. Singh was fairly distracted when he was young. In his early twenties, he fell in love with a girl of high birth and imagined an aristocratic future playing polo in England. Why did he return to India and how did he transform his life? Former Finance Minister P. Chidambaram escaped the family s textile business to do law but returned to be a leftist for his decade of the twenties. What did those experiences-when he was armed with pink communist ribbons in protest-teach him about trade unions and the economy? What did such diverse incidents do to his character and life?
Being a great leader is about personal relationships, connecting with people, learning from mistakes, and going beyond success as the sole benchmark in life. All these leaders were seeking direction, looking for big ideas, collaborating, struggling, and challenging the status quo around them. The book articulates that they learned a lot in their twenties. And after all those decades and accolades, they are still learning.
UDAY SHANKAR
U day Shankar, the CEO of Star India has launched many a career but he started his own life playing luck by chance, steering his passions, being a bit arrogant, questioning the status quo, and going after politics. A postcard launched his editorial dreams as it carried a job offer. The gulf war got him hooked on to television. He joined television willing to carry tripods for others and later went on to build news empires. He was driven by the idea of being the decision maker at a news organization and not by being a face instantly recognizable to bouncers outside a disco. For someone who went through college life as a leftist jholawala, his career took him to serious capitalist heights where delivering the goods and TRPs drove his business. Today Uday goes down in media history as someone who stuck his neck out, broke new ground, built media empires, and threw original ideas up in the air. How did he do it? Did he suffer from the usual dilemmas in his twenties between ideologies and reality? How did journalism change him? After so many years-most of his twenties-of being in news television, what prompted him to write off the news industry?
I am to meet Uday Shankar at the exclusive lounge of a five-star hotel in Mumbai. Of all the things I could expect of Uday Shankar, I didn t think he would walk in wearing a comfortable pathani suit and Pakistani chappals. During the course of our conversation, I find that Uday is just as unperturbed and calm as his dressing style. He is comfortable in his skin. His role as the powerful chief executive of Star TV, if nothing else, has made him a little more reclusive and private.

The man we know today as a media mogul, was occupied with an entirely different purpose-activism and left-leaning journalism-in his twenties. This is when television and media were new to the world and India was stuck with the sole source of news-the government-owned network Doordarshan.
Uday s twenties were marked with many diverse things, objectives, and opportunities. I asked him to describe his twenties. This is not an easy question to answer, he admits. The world was an entirely different place in the 1980s. I wasn t thinking much back then. Like any young person I was floating in ideas and smoke, he describes metaphorically. To think that this global newsmaker, rustic media thinker, behind the scene production whiz was just lost in oblivion is hard to imagine. But life in his twenties was indeed quite like that. He was absorbed in college life at Jawahar Lal Nehru University, which is considered to have leftist leanings, and had dreams and desires to do something worthwhile. I was unfocused then. I was just exploring life and one didn t have clear goals to pursue. Even though Uday wasn t sure of what he wanted, he knew exactly what he didn t want. I knew I didn t want to be part of IIMs. I did not want a job with Morgan Stanley. Life was fun and bindaas . There was so much going on. We were politically active in college. This was the 80s and political sensibilities were heightened. I mean you couldn t not have a political opinion those days. We were all in the thick of the debate on growth versus equity versus capitalism. These were the heydays at JNU, the institution that was looked upon as the conscience keeper of the country. That wave of socialism had everyone swept in. Uday was part of it. But his socialist genes were not developed at JNU, they came with him from earlier days. Uday grew up in Patna and did his schooling there. He grew up as the only son to his parents and came to Delhi to do an MPhil in economic history at JNU.
His upbringing was simple but at the time he was growing up, politics in Bihar was in full flux. The state was going through big changes. The entire JP movement in Bihar had roused the people during the anti-corruption drive in the state and there was a surge of demand for civil and citizen rights. These had shaped Uday s outlook growing up in Patna. My father was an engineer, mostly an apolitical man but had personal views. Both my grandfather and he had a heightened sense of right and wrong. My dad passed that on to me. This further helped shape my political views. And so the hangover continued to JNU. We had many concerns and ideas playing simultaneously in our minds. We had beliefs. We were opinionated. Wearing jeans and kurtas, with cloth bags full of books-he epitomized who later got to be known as jholawaalas. Of course I was one. I was a pure leftist. I was very active in the student union and even went to jail as an activist. This was an all-obsessive phase of my life. A student of liberal arts, Uday shares, A career wasn t something you pursued those days. It was something that would just happen to people. It was very different from today s generation that knows what it wants much before they are in college. Back then, I was unfocused. I wasn t lost but I was observing things without being sure of what and how I would approach