Translator: Rajendran Dandapani Reviewer: Rhonda Jacobs
Good afternoon.
So all morning and afternoon, we've been hearing inspiring tales
of how people have conquered and overcome Murphy's Law.
Here is my own humble submission to the jury.
So, I have titled it 'The Son, The Holy Spirit, and The Father!'
And there are three interesting stories where I encountered Murphy's Law,
not once, not twice, but thrice in my life
and how I kind of overcame it or sidestepped it --
you can't overcome Murphy's Law.
The Son.
It's actually the story of my un-graduation at IIT.
So, I was a smart and hardworking young boy,
like many of you here, I am sure.
First rank boy, I was called.
Class topper.
Every month, every annual exam, I was the topper.
I was the school topper.
I was a hobby musician on the side,
a prize-winning essayist,
and popular orator.
And, in fact, I even learned Hindi and Sanskrit at a time when,
down South, people were frowning upon these Devnagari languages.
And I was placed in the top 2% of the +2 Board,
and the feeling was 'top of the world', and 129th AIR was my JEE Rank in '89.
(Applause)
And I took electronics and communication,
like many of our friends -- earlier speakers here.
And nothing can go wrong, right?
So 1989 was the year,
and I had no idea of the slump I was going to face very soon.
Murphy's Law says, 'If something can go wrong, it will.'
But there's an atrocious extension to Murphy's Law
many of you don't know.
It goes,
'When something just can't go wrong, that's when it most certainly will!'
(Laughter)
So, I started bunking classes, I failed courses,
I don't know how many of you know this lingo, it's called cups at IIT;
a cup is when you get a U grade.
I started collecting cups like nobody's business.
I was rusticated from the Institute.
The Institute wanted to teach me a lesson.
They said, 'Stay away from the Institute for a semester',
as if that'll help.
My girlfriend wanted to teach me a lesson.
She dumped me.
My father suffered a stroke, and he never recovered from it.
He passed away two years ago on this very day.
I was kicked out of IIT -- I was unceremoniously asked to leave,
with no degree or paper certificate to show for the years I had spent there.
I even contemplated suicide.
It became a family secret -- till today.
I have never gone public talking about this.
Sorry, all friends and relatives with us,
to whom they don't really know what exactly happened in those years at IIT.
But Murphy's Law of Exponential Gravity actually helped.
The higher you rise, the harder the fall, right?
That's exactly what happened.
But you know what, the year was 1995, and I had actually hit rock bottom.
And two other laws helped me there.
One is Thompson's Bounceback Law.
It says, 'When you hit rock bottom, the only way to go is UP!'
Anything you do, can only make you better.
(Applause)
And not just that,
there was another law by a friend called Oswald.
Oswald says, 'Whenever you fall' --
That's what is happening here --
he's picking something up.
'Whenever you fall, pick something up.'
When you learn that little lesson,
that's going to stay with you for a very long time.
That's what happened.
I learned all sorts of hacking -- computer hacking.
I learned about how to overcome failures,
how to come back --
the art of comebacks.
And I learned to work with people,
because when you don't know something, you should at least know about people.
Working with people is still helping me, even today, managing a team --
working with people, it still helps.
And I learnt the very important lesson of not relying on paper credentials.
I had none.
I couldn't rely on paper credentials.
In fact, when I applied for a job at Zoho, I didn't go there with my printed resume,
I went there and said, 'Here is a website I designed for you.
Do you like it?
I programmed it, designed it, created a logo; do you like it?'
That's how I went to them.
I showed them a demonstration of a game,
a PC game I had built -- a vocabulary game;
that's how I got into this famous company.
So this is the lesson I learnt
in the first one-third of my three Murphy's Law encounters.
People are much, much more
than just the paper qualifications that they hold.
This lesson helped me in the second chapter of my life,
which is The Holy Spirit.
It's the founding of Zoho University.
I had become an employee at Zoho, I had started managing people,
I had started recruiting,
looking for talent across the length and breadth of the country,
and the year was 2004.
There was this gap that kept hitting me.
Students who came out of college saying they had done engineering
or electronics or computer science and so on,
when we started giving them the interview, the test, there seemed to be a huge gap --
they seemed to have no idea what we were looking for;
and what they said they knew, they actually didn't.
And what they were actually good at,
wasn't really relevant or necessary at all.
There was this gap that was coming.
'What did they learn? What were they taught?'
were the questions that started coming in our minds
when we started looking at these new applicants at our company.
In fact, we even ran a poll in our company.
We asked them how useful was college education,
all that you learned at college?
To the employees we ran this poll.
We asked them how useful was it
when you actually start working in this company.
And the red indicates it was not really good.
Only the green says, 'Yeah, it was useful.'
So we said, let's run a small experiment.
We realised it was because people were learning without context.
There was no context, only con text, perhaps,
and all these gaps.
So, we said let's run an experiment.
And we actually learned from Aristotle's Law,
which says, 'What we have to learn to do, we learn by doing.'
So you can't learn computer science mugging through books.
You can't learn to do software, you have to learn by actually doing.
Bernard Shaw also had a message.
It says, 'He who can, does. He who cannot, teaches.'
(Laughter)
But ... serious, respect to all teachers here --
(Applause)
Serious respect to all teachers here, but the point is,
if you are a software guy or a woman,
and you are looking for making good money,
you don't actually sit down at a college and teach students.
You go to that big MNC that's giving you a seven-figure salary.
That was the problem we were trying to solve.
So we said let's run an experiment.
We went to a nearby school; we recruited six kids.
They were probably not going to anyway get into engineering or medicine
because of the exorbitant costs involved.
We put them in a room, we gave them two faculty
and started what we call Zoho University.
We just chose three subjects: English, software, and mathematics --
basic mathematics,
not the higher meta-mathematics, basic mathematics.
And when I said we chose faculty,
it's not, we went to a college and recruited people,
we actually looked at people within the company,
good software engineers who were very good at what they did,
and also had the passion to share, to care, and to pass on what they knew --
passion for learning,
but actually very good at what they did inside the company.
The classroom was a very good place to learn,
but also was Wikipedia,
also was the flipped classroom, the videos of Khan Academy.
Coursera -- they were asked to sign up for online courses.
They were asked to contribute to open source tools like GitHub,
and they were asked to take up challenges of programming puzzles
and challenges in sites like HackerRank.
And most importantly, this is where the learning actually happened.
This is a learning that's very hard to reproduce
inside a sterile atmosphere of a college environment.
The office corridors, right?
The CEO walking by;
the other managers walking by;
the things that you osmotically absorb.
The alumni network -- imagine every college,
the alumni pass away and probably never come back,
they pass out.
But not so [here].
Inside Zoho, Zoho University's 450 alumni still move around the place.
It's a continuously growing, expanding, alumni network.
And the intranet.
Everything that the CEO posts in the intranet,
the student is already an employee and hence can have access
to the day-to-day challenges the company faces, to the roadmap,
to the market-watching that happens.
That's the best way to actually learn.
So, 12 years later, it's no wonder, then, that Zoho is actually --
we have launched 41 different batches in the past 12 years.
That amounts to 450+ graduates of Zoho University,
who are working inside Zoho.
That's actually 10% of Zoho, right?
Imagine, one in ten people who are employees of Zoho
haven't seen the inside of a college.
So the lesson learnt in this encounter with Murphy's Law is:
The best you can do, actually the only thing you can do to students
is to immerse them in a learning environment
and just watch the magic unfold.
That's the lesson I learnt.
Moving on to 'The Father' -- my son's freeschooling adventure.
2013 was the year.
I had already learnt a lot at college --
lessons, hard lessons at college.
I had seen the importance, or rather the lack of it, of paper credentials.
I had seen Zoho University grow from a very small, six-student experiment
to a 450-strong alumni network.
And I thought, probably there's something that I can do with my own son
who was then 14 years old.
And I was growing impatient -- he was in Class VIII at that time.
I was growing impatient with what was happening to him at school.
They were not teaching him the things that I wanted him to know.
They were teaching him stuff he could anyway pick up all by himself,
and there was no time for me to actually work with him.
There was some continuous assessment test
and an annual assessment test coming all the time.
And there was this unnecessary rat race that he was being enforced to go through.
So I took him off school after Class VIII.
I taught him English by watching news and movies with him together.
I taught him biology from very famous TV programs and books written by people.
I taught him physics from amazing people
who knew the art of conveying very complex concepts
in a very simple, very lovable, pleasurable manner,
in terms of making it easy to understand.
I taught him maths by giving him exposure to problem-solving,
the art of problem-solving,
simple and basic maths where the complexity is in the knottiness,
the twistedness of the problem.
I exposed him to history by taking him on museum trips,
making him meet people, read books.
I taught him --
No, I didn't teach him chemistry.
(Laughter)
After a lot of research, I realised chemistry was just not needed
unless you were going to get seriously into science.
(Laughter)
(Applause)
[CHEMISTRY (SKIPPED IT)]
I can still remember hydrogen, helium, lithium, beryllium, boron,
carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, fluorine, neon, sodium, magnesium, ...
Is it needed?
Not needed!
So I taught him programming by giving him exposure to programming.
That's the only way to learn programming.
I taught him software by watching blogs and articles
written by amazing maestros of the domain.
I taught him -- every little thing I taught him was contextual.
I kept giving him examples of where he was going to use them --
it was practical.
I tapped into my friendship network and gave him mentorship,
one-on-one connections with seniors, with people I knew,
from whom he could imbibe not only concepts
but also the lifestyle, the personality of these people.
I even tried teaching him game programming.
Because I was -- my secret passion's gaming,
building amazing educational entertainment interfaces.
I tried teaching him game programming.
That's when Murphy came knocking.
Murphy's First Law of Homeschooling says:
'Whatever you know a whole lot about, your child will refuse to learn it!'
(Laughter) (Applause)
But there's a second law to it,
which says,
'Whatever you know nothing about,
your child will desperately want to learn it.'
So these two were real challenges I faced.
But he came to me one day and said, 'Dad, do you know what WebGoat is,
I need to do penetration testing.'
Whaaat?
I had no idea.
And then I decided, okay, this is the time I have to cease to be a teacher;
I have to be a co-learner.
I sat down with him, I learned with him.
My aim was to just give him an environment,
so that he can look at me as company.
'Come, let me teach you something,'
instead of, 'Hey, I don't know this, teach me this.'
So finally, things got all settled down,
and he became an employee at Zoho Corporation, last week actually.
He's an intern now at the --
(Applause) Yeah.
He's an intern now at the Applications Security Team.
But wait, there's one more law.
Harvard Law for Attempted Experiments
says: 'Under controlled conditions of pressure, temperature,
volume, humidity ...
the organism will do as it damn well pleases.'
(Laughter)
So after all this, one fine morning, my son comes to me and says,
'Dad, I want to try organic farming.'
(Laughter)
This actually happened.
And that's when I realised, probably, all these time,
I have been probably trying to make a Mini-Me, right?
So I have been trying to achieve my own unfulfilled dreams
by looking at him, 'Do it, do it, do it.'
(Applause)
So, once again, I said --
After all, Kahlil Gibran has said, 'They come through you, but not from you,
You may give them your love, but not your thoughts,
because they have their own thoughts.
You may house their bodies but not their souls,
For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow.
You may strive to be like them, but do not seek to make them like you.'
Kahlil Gibran.
So I said, okay, let me look back:
2003 -- he's doing his own thing.
That's how he has learned everything.
2017 -- he is still doing his own thing.
Let's just provide, right?
Between 2003 and 2017 -- let's just provide that environment,
that environment where he can learn by himself,
try things out, make mistakes, bounce back, learn, and move on.
If we can do that, that's the lesson I learned here.
The only thing anybody needs to learn is how to learn.
Everything else takes care of itself.
With that, I come to the end --
The Unhappy Son, the Holy Spirit, and the Satisfied --
(Applause)
the Satisfied --
(Applause)
the Satisfied Father.
My wife, she never wants to come to the limelight.
She refused to actually be part of this presentation.
That's the one there, the one in the hat.
And she likes to be the silent performer on the back bench,
manipulating, managing, and monitoring everything.
But I want to take credit here also.
Remember, to stand a chance to be kissed by the princess,
the frog has to get out of its well first.
Right?
Just imagine, I was that guy -- I met her at IIT --
the only good thing that came out of it.
(Laughter) (Applause)
Imagine -- rusticated from the Institute, ejected from the campus,
on the road, having nothing else,
I went and said, 'Will you be my partner for life?'
I stepped out of the well; she kissed me.
So there's just a little more here.
This is basically a disclaimer, it is not for you to read.
Probably when there is a recording done, you can read it.
This is respect for Murphy's Law,
because you can't say I have defied Murphy's Law and walk.
I am going to have a fracture there, perhaps.
So thank you!
(Applause)