Stories from my father land

I attended a ceremony which is conducted when a person reaches his/her 60th birthday. My cousin reached that milestone and decided to invite friends and family to one such ritual based ceremony. If the birthday boy or girl is married at this stage, they celebrate it by having a marriage ceremony. To westerners and uninitiated Indians, this is like renewing your marriage vows. I went to cheer the couple and meet assembled family and friends.
I met quite a few of them after more than a decade.

Having described the context and the setting, I will now come to the gist of this narrative. I was pleasantly surprised that people were keen to narrate incidents about my father to illustrate how much he meant to them. Since it is 14 years since my father died, this was a surprise and a pleasant one as they showed my dad in a brilliant light. One long lost cousin's husband recognised me and it seems it was because my walk was exactly like that of my dad. If my intellect was half as sharp as my dad's, I will be thrilled. A few of them said they still followed his advice and one person has even safely kept a 20 year old letter from my dad.

Every now and then I will meet someone who will feel a kinship with me because of what my father did for them. And very few of these were material things. One person talked about his systematic nature. Another about his meticulousness and yet another person about his fairness.

There was one particular narrative which I had not heard before.
My father, Prof Y Satyamurthy was the CEO of a small sick unit which was taken over by Crompton greaves and he was on Crompton Greaves rolls. This was in Pune and those were the days when Mumbai and many pars of Maharashtra was ruled by labour union leaders. In particular people feared Datta Samant. He was one tough cookie. He walked into the office with some other people who I guess were union office bearers. my Dad was on the other side with his management team. Before a word was spoken my Dad handed over a list and said that those were the management demands. Datta Samant was surprised to say the least. He started raving and ranting that he would not tolerate this. Management could not make demands. My dad said that in those pages he just handed over were the details of what was essential to run the company. If those cannot be met, the talks were over. Datta Samant left fuming and furious.
I cannot vouch for this since this is a second hand narrative. Apparently Datta Samant came back to the table two days later and they reached a quick agreement. Then he said that this was the first management which he had met which had honestly and transparently shared all the details of the company and it's position and that he was impressed with the thoroughness with which this was documented. If this had happened in 24/7 news coverage, my dad would have been more famous. However I am what I am because he did not care to dwell on these since he generally believed in humanity and he cared two hoots about visibility.

What I have learnt from him is that I should be true to myself. I should not laze around because others do or work harder to please others. My father worked very hard and enjoyed it. He lived a hundred years in terms of what he achieved though in chronological terms he only lived till he was 66. I know he is one of my guardian angels since life is generally good to me.