Shame on us, Mr NRN.

One of the holy trinity of Indian LinkedIn ‘Bharatiyas’ (the others being Ratan Tata and Anand Mahindra) is Mr N R Narayana Murthy, the founder of Infosys. Recently, he has been in the news for some pearls of wisdom, which some people who like to spread negativity have been pouncing on for their alleged tone-deafness and plain-old stupidity. This is another such example. Here’s one uninformed, misled young man who is writing about this icon of Indian industry:

I think we are misunderstanding this excellent NRN sound byte.

Maybe he means that he will hire some world-class accountants to do a public re-valuation of all the free and subsidised things he has benefitted from and peg them to market value, calculate the gap as per today’s money terms, and pay the government and the people of India back with interest that’s say, 1% more than some benchmark that’s easy to calculate…like maybe the CAGR of Infosys over those years.

And here we are, just sitting here, keyboard warriors, taking the completely wrong meaning from it and trying to discredit this great man who deserves first to get the Bharat Ratna and then be appointed President, following which his decidedly simple and notably renowned author & feminist of a partner, his wife, who gave ₹10,000 to Infosys and never ever breathed a word of it (I only know it from hearsay since none of them would be so immodest as to boast about that) should get both (the award and the Presidentship), making them a couple like no one else bar the Curies with their multiple Nobels.

Maybe it is us who don’t get his altruism and generosity. Maybe it is our constant negativity about this great, ancient nation and its rightful place in the Universe that is causing us to see everything from a myopic lens. Maybe the problem isn’t people like (future) Bharat Ratna President N R Narayana Murthy. Maybe the problem is us. And in our quest for this silly, juvenile equality-shequality and justice-shustice thing, we are missing out on the true essence of Bharatiyata. We need to look inward, my friends. And stop criticising those who are clearly above us. As the obviously upright Col Jessep memorably says to the nitpicking Lt Kafee rather sternly in that film, ‘A Few Good Men’, he (NRN, in this case) would rather that we just said “thank you” and went on our way. I agree.

Ask not what Infosys can do for the country, but what the country can do for NRN and Simple Sudha. (Now, I am crying!)

There, I said it. Sue me.