Managing the World the Nancy way !

Managing the World
the Nancy way !

It is a story – true story to be precise – of a little girl.


Nancy is her name. She has seen eight autumns so far. But hardly any spring !

She was born in a small, sleepy hamlet in Madhya Pradesh—Rashidpur—but lives, now, in a millennium city near the national capital of India – Gurgaon. Life in the two habitats is as different as chalk and cheese. To Nancy, however, the two seem the same. She is not difference-blind, but her poverty is.
Her father, Vikram, is a poor rickshaw-puller. He is, like many others of his tribe, an alcoholic. Lazy and lousy, he earns less and spends more – mostly on his drinks and so forth. Her mother, Sita, is a domestic servant. Hard working and sensible, she works in two middle class households and earns Rs. 2,000 per month. Both Vikram and Sita are illiterate.

For a house, they have a small hut – about 7 feet x 7 feet – by the side of a road. They have no address. There is no furniture, power or water. They squat and sleep on the floor. An earthen lamp lightens their hut. An erratically functioning municipal water tap at a distance is the source of water. A toilet ? They have never known anything like that – they go their forefathers’ way in some remote, open space when the sky is sunless.

A wonder of wonders, the poor, illiterate parents send Nancy to a school. The reason? Not education, but a ‘sumptuous’ mid-day meal, which school provides absolutely free. The old, kind lady whose domestic work Nancy’s mother does, provides uniform and books. Thus everything is free, which makes Nancy’s father very happy: not for the reason that his daughter goes to school, but for her being brought up according, to the Book of Traditional Wisdom, which counsels that spending money on a girl was like watering a tree in your neighbour’s compound.

Nancy, too, is happy – but for different reasons. She has friends to play with in the school – something that she badly missed at home. Intelligent and inquisitive, she finds her studies interesting. Swift, sensible and sweet – everywhere – she is loved by her peers and liked by her teachers.

Nancy excels in studies as much as in co-curricular activities. For her good performance, she receives prizes and wins trophies. She is, in short, a wonderment: how could, people around often ask, a little girl from a hut, and hurting environs manage a totally strange world of a school, which none of her present or past generations had the privilege of even casually visiting, so successfully, so skillfully?

On presenting a good budget, the UK premier Margret Thatcher was once queried by a scribe as to where did she learn the art of budgeting from? From my ‘Kitchen School’, she replied. I learnt the tough job there and applied its principles here. Nancy’s experience is also something like Thatcher’s. She has learnt the principles of managing things from her ‘Hut School’. Her mother, poor, illiterate Sita, was her teacher.
Nancy saw many alcoholic working men like her father beating their wives and helling their home-life in the neighbourhood. She saw many cash-crunched poor people living wretched and low life there. She saw feuds and fights going every now and then among her neighbours, disturbing peace and tranquility of the place. But thanks to her mother, such things never happened in their world—their hut—home.

How did Nancy’s poor illiterate mother, Sita manage to live that way, with peace, honour and dignity in such poverty and painfully violent environs? “Very simple”, Sita tells everyone asking such questions, “with respect, love and compassion. I try to give these to others in so abundance that these flood back to me. My husband’s intoxication and violence, the damage of our deprivation and dearth, the bad feeling of our bad neighbours and others get drowned there. Happiness floats everywhere in our life.”

Nancy watched her teacher—her mother—from close quarters with rapt attention and emotional involvement, performing her lesson in her real life, internalized it and put it at play, successfully, in her own wee world.
Nancy’s way is, whatever the modern management gurus might say, is the sure way to success in managing any world, small or big, simple or complex, peaceful or violent.

August 31, 2010