Ram Purohit gave a speech to management students about living your dreams and having conviction in yourself and your goals. He shared two stories from his own life. In the first, financial hardship led him to pursue an MCA instead of IAS, which ultimately contributed to his successful career in technology. In the second, he followed his passion and returned to India from a comfortable job in the US, which also led to professional success. He encouraged the students to discover their passions, believe in themselves, and follow their dreams, as great leaders like Steve Jobs and Mahatma Gandhi had done.

1. Live your Dreams
Address to Management students by Ram Purohit, Managing Director, Udanda Technologies at
SYNECTICS 2010, a national level management festival organized in Bangalore on 19th and 20th
March 2010.
Dear students and academia, let me say what an honor it is to be invited to speak here as Chief
Guest at this great Management Festival. Thanks to Fr. Josekutti and management of Kristu Jayanti
College.
I thought of many topics starting from today’s economic environment to India’s financial prospects
and the future of IT Industry in India. But these are better left for knowledgeable Analysts, you can
buy their reports to get insight. Then I thought of talking about something that is more relevant for
you today – Leadership Skills. You, being the future leaders of the industry and the country, need
these skills more than anything else. But this is not easy to break. Can we describe leadership in
brief? There will be hundreds of definitions, all true, but none complete. So I picked mine.
Leadership to me is 3 things: First, In-depth knowledge in your field. This is to possess a rounded
and comprehensive knowledge of the subject matter with which you are dealing and about which
you want others to act in a particular way. Second ingredient is the ability to articulate. This is the
ability to express one’s aim not only with clarity but in a highly persuasive way, so that others can
follow. But to be persuasive, perhaps even aspiring, there has got to be, behind the rhetoric, a firm
belief in the correctness of the course which you are advocating. This is the third ingredient of
Leadership.
All of you have perhaps gained or are soon going to gain first and second ingredient through your
management education or during your formation years with the Industry. But big question remains

2. the third ingredient – firm belief in yourself, your goals and your plans, which I think is the most
important aspect of Leadership can not be learnt from outside. This conviction has to come from
your experiences and from within your inner-self. I will share two incidents from my past to give
you some insight into this aspect. These are just two common stories of life, but we can learn big
from them.
First one is from my college days, around 20 years back. I had just completed my bachelor’s degree
and was preparing for IAS with Physics and Mathematics as main subjects. Strange decision, I
don’t see many people appearing in IAS with Physics as main subject. Just when I was confident of
clearing the exams with several months of preparation backing me, my father, who was Inspector
with Rajasthan Police, met with a road accident. With severe head injury, he was hospitalized for
months. Being the only son in an average Indian family, I took the responsibility to support my
mother for my father’s treatment and running the household. He recovered but never became as fit
and took retirement. I had skipped IAS exams and my mother was to retire next year. Financial
pressure was mounting. This is the time when one of my cousins had bought MCA Entrance form of
MBM Engineering College. But he resigned after looking at the tough syllabus of Physics and
Mathematics in the entrance exam and considering the fact that there were only 20 seats in all. I
wonder these days, why would they have such a difficult question paper of Physics in MCA
entrance? But, then I applied on the same form and cleared it without much difficulty, thanks to my
preparation of IAS with same subjects. That was difficult time for us, with no source of income.
Still my mother insisted me to join the course, and I took it up because I loved the subject, and I
wanted to do it.
It was a very difficult time for our family, I was despaired with these events, one after the other. I
could only see darkness, no light for future. But when I look back today, everything, every single
event seems to be linked from my preparation of IAS and taking Physics and Mathematics as main
subjects to my father’s accident, to my cousin buying the entrance form and not appearing. Each
one of these events have contributed to what I am today and where I am today. I could never link
these things to my future at that time, but now everything seems to be linked.
Have faith, everything is linked. Believe in what you are doing today and that it will link back to
your future in some way.
Second incident is from a few years later, when I was in USA managing data warehousing and
business intelligence project of GE Capital. Me and my wife, both started liking the salary I drawn
in dollars, the comfortable environment and the luxurious life. But my passion was somewhere else.
I wanted to do more than just that. So one fine day, we were back to India with our 4 suitcases. I
worked with TCS, Accenture and GE in more intense jobs, learnt managing a delivery
organizations, building a practice and closing a big outsourcing deal. This experience took me to the
positions of General Manager at keane and later Head of India division of Volvo Information
Technology. Then, it was a tough decision for me to leave that comfort and luxury of USA. It lead
to difficult time starting again in India as a beginner. But today, when I look back, I can derive only
one thing for myself, for you, for all of us. Follow your passion and dreams, everything starts
falling in place gradually, and finally the things that matters to you – money, comfort, satisfaction,
freedom, all will start following you.
This may be my personal example, but when I co-relate it to the examples of prominent leaders like
Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple Computers, it seems more relevant. He had to leave his graduation
from Stanford because of his financial conditions. He then joined a small Calligraphy course, where
he learnt different new ways of typography. How better effects and readability could be created by
working on the width of different letters and spacing between them. This in no way seemed related
to his future at that time. But he pursued it with all his passion, not bothering about his difficult

3. situations. And he loved doing it. 10 years later, these learnings contributed in the design of the
typographical fonts for MAC computers. And as Microsoft copied everything from MAC and Unix,
these fonts were incorporate in Windows. That changed the feel of personal computers in the world.
Steve was able to prevail and excel because he loved what he was doing, he was passionate about it
and believed in himself. In his words “ sometimes life is going to hit in your head with a brick,
don’t loose faith… you will excel if you continue to do what you love to do. This is true for for both
– your profession and your family and loved ones. Your work will fill a large part of your life and
the only way to feel truly satisfied is to do what you believe is a great work. And the only way to do
great work is to love what you do”.
We will not have Mahatma Gandhi, one of the greatest leader and mobilizer of the masses, in our
nation’s history, had M. K. Gandhi not quit his law practice in South Africa for what he considered
was more important for him and the world around him – freedom. He triumphed because he firmly
believed in his cause.
So go and discover your passion. Find out what you love to do and believe in yourself. Live your
dreams.