CK was my teacher at IIM Ahmedabad,and remained my teacher ever after. I used to joke with him that I was like Eklavya,getting wisdom from his writings and speeches,shamelessly sponging off every nugget and dollop of wisdom that came my way. He used to remind me that the Eklavya analogy in this case stopped before the bit where the teacher asked for the students thumb. But I can say with my hand on my heart that I would have willingly cut off my thumb had he asked for it,because he made such an enormous impression on my mind,and such an enormous impact on my work. My book eventually got written because he said,over tea at the Sea Lounge one day,that he would write the foreword if only I would actually write the book. He said write it for yourself. Your mind will get clearer about these things; thats why you have to write. I wrote the book,and he kept his word and wrote the foreword. When I sent him the manuscript,I gave it a week,and then I sent him a mail asking if he wanted me to send him a summary of the book,so that he didnt have to read the whole thing. My teacher rapped me on the knuckles in his inimitable style and said No,I always read everything carefully. I have read the whole manuscript,and while you havent asked me to do your editors job,I want to tell you that there are typos to be cleaned up; and by the way Chapters 5 and 6 have large tracts of duplicated text. On another occasion,some years ago,when I was well into my career,he called and asked if I could help him with some research on the dabbawala system,because he wanted to talk about it in his acceptance speech for the prestigious Lal Bahadur Shastri award that he was going to receive shortly. I said to him that the dabbawalas never reveal their coding system to anyone and are a very closed community,and so it would be hard to find anything meaningful. There was my reproving teacher at the other end of the phone line,from America,saying I thought you would have more intellectual curiosity. That did it! I drafted a friend Ashok Jain into Project Dabbawala Understanding,and on a Sunday afternoon,at the Taj,we explained to him all that we had learnt. He heard us out on how the coding system on the dabbas worked,and how only the relevant address information and not the whole information was given to each part of the chain. He said Oh thats like the way TCP/IP works in the Internet. And I remember saying to him I guess thats what makes you the great CK Prahalad,and me,just a consultant hack. I really treasured the half-sentence footnote at the bottom of the page of his speech. I thank so and so for the research. It was,somehow,like having got a PhD! I never ceased to marvel at how a single person,could seek so deep into the reserves of his mind,and repeatedly create blockbuster new paradigms. Whether it was the idea of thinking of an organisation in terms of core competence,or the idea of the bottom of the pyramid and how to design businesses for it,or the idea of next practice that goes beyond best practice,or the idea of foresight (future insight) about consumers not merely insight about them. there are so many more extraordinary thoughts that came out of his extraordinary mind. I marvelled even more and how amazingly he packaged his ideas it was an inspirational short sentence or phrase that then seeped into boardrooms of big and small companies around the world,and percolated all the way down to laymen too. But the dazzle of his mind was never so blinding that I couldnt mail him or call him or have a cup of coffee with him and tell him what I was thinking about. And it was through every such conversation that I grew just a bit more. Unlike many other world famous NRIs,CK never preached in a one down manner. Sure he evangelized with enormous zeal and amazing energy,was frustrated at how things never got done the way he knew we could do them,but he was always the insider. He was the rock star of the business speaking circuit. At IIMA when he came back after almost three decades to speak,he had people hanging out of every balcony and the Louis Kahn Plaza was full. At CII when he evangelized his India@75 vision,there were four rooms full and TV screens and people who still crowded outside! Lucky those of us who actually got to hear him,luckier those who got to meet him,and even luckier,those like me who got to know him and learn from him. He was a doting father and a devoted husband,and certainly one of the sons that India should be really proud of. God rest his soul; may he leave behind for all of us,his intellectual energy,his passion and his sense of purpose and optimism about how things could be done better and differently,no matter how complex the problem.
