I teach a course on storytelling at SP Jain Institute of Management and Research in Mumbai and had asked my students to find stories. Amruta found this beautiful story that I want to share with you today. It was around April 1974, a young girl called Sudha Kulkarni was studying at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, then called the Tata Institute. She was doing her Master’s in Computer Science and she was the only girl in her class, but she was bright. She was the topper in the class and stayed in the ladies’ hostel where the other colleagues and other students stayed and were doing research in other branches of science. One day she was returning to the hostel from the lecture hall complex and she saw that there was a new job notice on the notice board. It was a standard job requirement notice and it said that “Tata Motors, (then called telco) Telco was looking for engineers. They were looking for people who are bright, hard-working and with great academic record”. She fulfilled all of them but at that point she was not really looking for a job, she wanted to go to the United States and complete a doctorate and she had already got offers of scholarship from many universities in the US. But still she decided to pause and read it and she finished reading it and the last line said, “lady engineers need not apply”. This upset her. This was the first time she had really faced gender discriminations. She was fuming when she reached the hostel and while she wasn’t looking for a job she took this up as a challenge. She took a postcard and decided to write to Telco, to the senior management in Telco. As soon as she started writing she realized she did not know who headed Telco but she thought it must be one of the Tatas and the only name she had seen in the newspapers was JRD Tata. So, she addressed the letter to JRD Tata and then this is what she wrote in it, “The great Tata’s have always been pioneers. They are the people who started basic infrastructure industries in India such as iron and steel, chemi-cals, textiles and locomotives. They have cared for higher education in India and they have been responsible for creating establishments like the Indian Institute of science. Fortunately, I study here but I’m surprised how such a company, such as Telco is discriminating on the basis of gender”. She finished writing the postcard went to the post box put it in and promptly forgot about it. Ten days later she received a telegram saying that she was she was to report for an all-expense-paid interview at the Telco plant in Pune. She was taken aback. She hesitated because she wasn’t sure if she really wanted the job. She had just taken this up as a challenge but her peers, students in the hostel said, “Hey, come on this is a great opportunity for a paid ticket to Pune, so that you can go and buy some of those great Pune sarees for cheap. She actually collected 30 rupees each from every student who wanted a sari and went off to Pune as instructed. She reached Telco’s Pimpri, Pune office and as she went into the interview room. She saw that there were six male officials waiting to interview her. That’s when she realized this was serious. As she started settling down, she overheard someone say in a whisper, “This is the girl who had written to JRD” and immediately she thought this is over, they are not going to recruit her. When that fear of not being recruited went up from her head she became very confident in fact. She regrets that she made a very arrogant statement then and said, “I hope this is going to be a technical interview”. They were taken aback by her rudeness but they kept asking her questions all technical and she maxed all of them. At the end one of the gentlemen there, an older person with a very soothing voice said, “Do you know why we don’t take women in our factories? This is not a co-ed college; this is a factory. We don’t have any place for women, we’ve never taken women before that is. We believe women should be in research labs.” Sudha said, “but you’ve got to start somewhere. If you don’t start somewhere, you’ll never have a woman working in your factory ever.” When the whole process got over, she was told that she was successful and she was selected. She realized that this is what she wanted to do so instead of pursuing her doctorate, she decided to take up that offer and move to Pune. She moved and she was doing rather well and that’s where she also met a shy boy from Karnataka called Narayan. They became friends and then they got married and finally Sudha Kulkarni changed her name to Sudha Murthy, the wife of Narayan Murthy. What a wonderful story! #storytelling #business #bestseller #stories #storiesatwork #initiative #discrimination #genderbias #challengeaccepted #everydaylearning #Confidence #genderneutrality #Challenge #Takematterintoownhands #sudhamurthy
