A man from Chicago with an Italian sounding name refused to meet then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi for ten minutes demanding that she give him an hour’s time to show, in right perspective, his ‘Big Dream’ for India which would bring Indians together through total connectivity. A tremor was felt in New Delhi when Mrs. Gandhi not only agreed to meet Sam Pitroda for one hour but also invited her whole cabinet, secretaries of various departments and parliamentarians to listen to Sam’s plan; his big dream to bringing telecom system via indigenous development to India with the help of young local Indian talent; to providing total accessibility, including rural telecom connection to all of India by digitalising of network. This plan would in turn create new industry making ‘made in India’ products that are needed for the telecom system.
Every Indian cabinet minister, technical person as well as experts from various departments and fields were ready to embrace Sam’s plan, eager to know how it would work for their area or department. Sam had an ally on his side – Rajiv Gandhi, who helped him jump the hurdles and move swiftly around bureaucratic speed bumps.
Sam’s work in the telephone automatic switching system in the US had made an impact, brought telecom revolution and propelled him into fame and popularity, giving him a chance to carve out a pioneering role for himself. His memoirs, Dreaming Big tracks his journey from Orissa State in India to the United States, and takes the reader on a safari to see how he achieved his dream developed in the US, taken to India and finally transplanted in India and brought to realisation.
Abdul Gani Shaikh of city of Cypress, California, my friend of 52 years, always talked about his friend and classmate Sam Pitroda, his achievement and celebrity status in India. He was gracious enough to lend me Sam’s memoirs Dreaming Big to read.
Decades ago, Shaikh heard an Indian keynote speaker at an engineering seminar in the US, and later during a telephone conversation with his friend Bharat Thakkar (Sam talked about Thakkar in his memoirs), told him how he enjoyed the technical talk by the keynote speaker. Thakkar told Shaikh, “He is our friend, our Baroda classmate Satu.” He was shocked because he could not recognise Sam at the seminar. Later, he and Sam Pitroda got in touch with each other.
I am not writing a review of Sam’s book but only some of those accounts and portions that have really impressed me.
Satyanarayan Pitroda, Satyan to his family and Satu to friend became Sam when a Secretary at his place of work in the United States decided that his name was a tongue twister and changed it to Sam by opening a bank account and placing it on the pay check. At that time, Satu thought for a minute and made a decision to accept it.
Engaging readers with the quality of pure rather than the vestiges of his celebrity, Sam takes us on a safari with his Dreaming Big attitude, a memoir that tracks his journey from living in Orissa to achieving his dream in India and then moving on to consolidate his desire to help humanity at large. A Gandhian at heart, who kept his eyes open when dreaming and treaded through difficult paths to open a new path for India and Indians, never giving up and never shutting his eyes, believing a shut eye would turn the dream into a nightmare.
Sam gave a detailed account of his travel on a ship from Bombay to Genoa, Italy, which took him from Bombay to Karachi, then Aden, then Egypt, finally arriving in Genoa. From there he took the train to London going through Paris. From London Sam flew to New York and then took the bus to Chicago. When I was reading this, I thought Sam was talking about me. I had also taken a ship on 10 August 1962 from Bombay; five days later arrived in Aden, then Egypt, and through Suez Canal into the open Mediterranean Sea to Naples (Italy), and Marseilles (France) and finally arriving in London on 29 August 1962. From London flew to New York, took the bus to Cincinnati, Ohio, stayed with Bisheshwar Rai, my friend from Hyderabad, who was a student at University of Cincinnati, finally arrived in Los Angeles, California on 19 September 1962. Reminiscing about travelling from Bombay to the United States, while reading Sam’s memoirs, is spine-tingling. Sam is a dreamer and a story teller. He has the capacity to not only tell his own story but also to tell your story and in the process inspire you to dream big.
My father, Abdul Khader, an Army contractor during 1930’s and 1940’s, whose business card printed in Hyderabad shows R.I.A.S.C. Contractor (Royal Indian Army Service Corps, Contractor), had once inspired me by saying in his own words as to how to be creative. He said, “Beta, do something which no one else has done.” I was thinking about my father while reading Sam’s memoirs.
Sam did something for India which no one had done or even thought of before; a trail blazer, who used best of the East and best of the West to produce a sangam that enabled India to move ahead on the super highway of progress. He was the first Indian, who while working realised his big dream, gave the idea – Made-in-India.
Sam wrote in his memoirs, “My plan was to create a new native Indian industry from the ground up. … One day at the Hyderabad Airport a young man came up to me. ‘Mr. Pitroda, I’ve read about you, you’re doing wonderful things. I’m a mechanical engineer. Do you think I could do something?’ I happened to have a connector in my pocket, a telephone jack – a dime a dozen in America, but hard to come by in India. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘make this in India.’ Six months later he was making connectors.”
Moving beyond engineering side of the project and while managing project of gigantic proportions, Sam never shied away from employing his humanitarian traits to push Indians from the “Sub Chalta Hai” culture of India, to helping themselves to attend to things important but neglected, is very inspiring.
Sam is a man with experience and gut feelings. He put to work everything he knew for the indigenous development and establishment of “Centre for the Development Of Telecom (C-DOT).” He acquired in Delhi Akbar Hotel, with air conditioning that needed a new layout and furniture, as the office building for the software engineers, to look like an office for engineers. Sam employed ingenious methods to provide offices for the engineers in hotel bedrooms. Each engineer had a chair, a bed, a night table and a little desk. During the orientation and training, he inspired the engineers for taking charge of their own destiny and to become more responsible by telling them to be creative and flexible in their working hours and timings. The young engineers loved this new setting that in turn encouraged many to work as late as 10 O’clock at night to finish their tasks and assignments. He hired hardware engineers in Bangalore city, now Bangaluru, and kept on commuting between Delhi and Bangalore to keep these engineers focussed on the project which he had promised to complete in three years.
He even solved the cultural difference of South Indian and North Indian. Even when he was on his way to the States, he thought that he is on an escapade and a journey. He talks about how he ended up eating beef steak, when his plane was diverted to Montreal because of snowstorm in New York. He took the slip for dinner provided by the airline to one of the restaurants in Montreal and ordered a beautiful sounding specialty called steak.
Sam discovered early on that there were no women employed in the organisation, either in New Delhi or Bangalore. He told the management leader of C-DOT to hire women as engineers, administrators and secretaries and assign at least one to each team leader of the project. All the women who were hired complained a month later to Sam that they are being ignored by their bosses and have not been given any work assignments. He took full responsibility for this state of affairs. He says in Dreaming Big, “The men didn’t know what to do, and the women didn’t know how to deal with their silence. I thought, I would have to get this out in the open.”
Sam gave a presentation about problems with Indian phones and how telephones work, adding details about digital switching, telephone lines and added features. He took the initiative to change the sub chalta hai old Indian culture; he explained the technical language in the most beautiful and simple terms which the women loved. He lectured men too about workplace ethics and the new culture they should adopt to accommodate women in the workplace. My teacher, retired Professor Mohammad Ali, Osmania University, Hyderabad-Deccan, during a Friday sermon at the Secunderabad Mosque, more than 66 years ago said, “We must work for the welfare and improvement of Humanity.”
Sam worked for the welfare and improvement of humanity using both the best of the East and best of the West. As an engineer and a technical person, his simple explanations of the processes involved in building a telecom system in India reminds me of Sir C.V. Raman, Nobel Laureate, who always used simple language to explain the scientific properties of scattering of light and Raman Effect phenomenon. Once he told his mother about his discovery and how light works, she understood the explanation. I was thinking of C.V. Raman when reading Sam’s memoirs. I would like to say, “Sam is not an American Indian, nor an Indian American, he is a real Indian.”
[MOHAMMAD YACOOB is a retired Industrial Engineer and Engineering Proposals Analyst who lives in Los Angeles, California]