Verghese Kurien — I Too Had A Dream

Before you read a single line of this chapter, look at the shape of it. There is no plot, there are no stanzas, and nobody speaks in turn the way characters do in a play. What you have in front of you is a letter — a piece of non-fiction written in the first person by Dr Verghese Kurien and addressed to his grandson, Siddharth. The people in it are real people. The decisions in it are decisions the writer actually took. The award ceremony he remembers actually happened.

That single fact changes how you should read. In a short story, a writer invents a character to carry his ideas for him, and part of your job is to work out the gap between the character and the author. Here there is no gap and no invented narrator. When the text says I, it is Kurien himself, an older man looking back over a whole working life. When it says you, he means one particular boy — and, because the letter has been printed for others to read, he also means everyone who picks it up afterwards. He is quite open about this. He hopes his grandson will take these pages out again a couple of decades later, and he dedicates them to Siddharth and to millions of other children of that generation, which is exactly why he chose paper instead of a quick phone call.

The letter carries a year at its head — it was written in 2005 — and it is signed off simply as V Kurien. The man who signs it is one of the best-known figures in India's dairy story; because milk production in the country rose so sharply through the farmer-owned cooperatives he built up, he is widely called the Milkman of India. Yet notice how little of the letter is spent on any of that. He calls what he is writing his jottings, his musings, and a man with a very long list of achievements has used them to talk about values rather than victories. That choice is not an accident; it is part of what the chapter is saying.

Because it is a letter, it also moves like one. It does not march through a plan. It follows a train of thought, drifting from a small idea to a large one and back again: why writing matters, then the biggest decision of his life, then the wife who made that decision liveable, then the family and the mentor whose values he took as his own, then what he believes about honesty and about failure, then one short family memory, then a closing wish. Do not hunt for a climax. Hunt instead for the links in the chain — the way each thought grows out of the one before it, the way a grandfather's conversation would.

Read this way, the chapter stops being a list of facts about a famous man and becomes what it really is: one person quietly explaining to another how he decided to spend his life. That is also why almost everything worth discussing here is a matter of reasoning rather than of events. There is very little that happens here. There is a great deal that is thought.

The letter opens with something surprisingly small. Kurien begins not with his career or his honours but with the act of writing itself. He compares putting words on paper with picking up the telephone, and he comes down firmly on the side of paper. A phone call, he says, gives a "fleeting joy" — it is warm while it lasts and then it is gone. A letter is different: it becomes something you can hold, keep and read again years later, with what he calls "abiding pleasure". Straight away he has set up the contrast that runs underneath the whole piece, the difference between what feels good now and what lasts.

From there he explains why he is writing at all. He wants his grandson — and, through him, others of that generation and younger ones too — to understand the choices he made and the reasons behind them. This is not the boasting of a successful man. It is closer to handing over a set of tools to somebody who will need them later.

Next comes the decision that shaped everything else. Kurien started his working life soon after India became independent, and he describes what the noblest task felt like in those days: contributing in whatever way one could towards building the India of their dreams — a country whose people would hold their heads high in freedom, be free of hunger and poverty, live with equal respect and love for one another, and in time be counted among the leading nations of the world. He then admits, with real honesty, that serving the country's farmers was not the career he had pictured for himself. Other doors were open. He could have followed metallurgy and ended up as the chief executive of a large company. He could have taken a commission in the Indian Army and perhaps retired as a general. He could have left for the United States and become a highly successful NRI. Instead, about fifty years before he wrote this letter, he agreed to work for a small cooperative of dairy farmers who were trying to gain control over their own lives. He does not present this as a heroic sacrifice. He presents it as a choice, made once and then honoured every day afterwards.

He then turns, gently, to the person who made that choice possible: his wife, who is Siddharth's grandmother. She made an important choice of her own. She knew that the life ahead of them could not offer even the simple comforts a family takes for granted today, and she still supported his decision ardently rather than merely putting up with it. Her standing by him, he writes, gave him an everlasting strength, so that he could shoulder his responsibilities with poise. He is careful to say that the choice was never his alone; she lived it with him, day after ordinary day.

The letter then widens to take in other people. Whenever he was given any recognition for his contribution to the country's progress, Kurien says, he stressed that it was really a recognition of what many people he had the privilege of working with had achieved. His own contribution was possible, he adds, only because he stuck consistently to certain values — values inherited from his parents and other family elders, and values he saw in his mentor and supporter, Tribhuvandas Patel. Of these he singles out one as the most important: integrity, and personal integrity at that, which he explains as being honest to yourself. He states his belief about life itself in a single short sentence. "Life is a privilege", he writes, and to waste it would be wrong. Living that privilege means accepting responsibility for yourself, using your talents to the best of your ability and contributing somehow to the common good — a common good that turns up in small everyday forms: a friend who needs help, a teacher looking for a volunteer, a community that needs something done. Real failure, in his definition, has nothing to do with prizes or money. You have failed if you held back your best effort, and if you gave nothing at all, however small, to that common good.

A short, unexpected turn follows. Anything can go wrong at any time and mostly does, he warns, and yet he has noticed that a person's happiness has surprisingly little to do with the conditions they are actually living in. Nearly all of us measure ourselves against somebody we assume is happier — a relative, an acquaintance, sometimes a person we barely know. Look closely, he says, and what we were comparing ourselves with turns out to be only an image of perfection. Seeing that helps us understand and value what we have instead of brooding over what we do not.

Only near the end does an award appear, and even then it appears in order to be put in its place. He reminds Siddharth of the day the boy went with him to the ceremony in which the President awarded him the Padma Vibhushan in 1999, and of how proudly the child slipped the medal around his own neck, looked at it in awe and asked very innocently whether he could keep it. The answer his grandparents gave him was not a refusal: of course the medal was his as much as it was his grandfather's, they said — but he should not be satisfied with merely keeping his grandfather's award, because the challenge in front of him was to earn his own reward for the work he would do in his own lifetime.

The letter ends not with an instruction but with a wish. If we are brave enough to love, strong enough to be glad of somebody else's happiness, and wise enough to know that there is plenty in the world for everybody, then we will have lived our lives to the fullest. He dedicates his musings to Siddharth and to millions of other children of that generation, hoping they will be inspired to go bravely out into the world and work tirelessly in whatever field they choose, for the larger good of the country and of humanity.

One of the quietest and most striking things about this letter is how crowded it is. A man is summing up his life's work, and he keeps stepping aside to point at somebody else. He says so directly: whenever he was recognised for his contribution to the country's progress, he took care to call it a recognition of what many people he had worked with had achieved. Learning to talk about these people separately is the fastest way to write a strong answer on this chapter.

Siddharth is the reason the letter exists at all. He is not described at length. We really meet him only once, as a small boy at a formal ceremony, doing something small boys do. But his presence controls the tone from beginning to end. Because Kurien is writing to a child he loves, he never lectures and never shows off; he explains. Notice too that everything you learn about Siddharth reaches you through his grandfather's memory of him. The boy has no voice of his own in the text.

The grandmother — Kurien's wife — is given a place that many life stories would have skipped in a line of thanks. He does not simply thank her; he says she made an important choice of her own. She knew that the life ahead of them could not offer even the simple comforts a family takes for granted today, and she supported his decision ardently all the same. That support, he writes, gave him an everlasting strength and let him shoulder his responsibilities with poise. His point is not that she was patient in some general womanly way. It is that his work would not have been possible without her. So when a question asks how she shared her husband's dedication to a greater cause, this is the answer: she did not merely put up with his choice, she backed it warmly and carried part of its cost herself.

Tribhuvandas Patel is named, in a single line, as Kurien's mentor and supporter. Notice what he is named for. He is not credited with handing Kurien a job or opening a door; he is credited with values — the same values Kurien says he inherited from his parents and family elders and then saw living in front of him at work, with integrity first among them. That is what a mentor means in this letter: somebody whose example shows you what a decent working life looks like. Be careful not to invent more than the text gives you here. Beyond the name and that one word, mentor, everything we know about him is carried in the values Kurien lists.

His parents and the elders of his family are credited in a single sweep for the values he carried with him into his work. He does not separate home from career; the letter treats them as one continuous training.

The farmers are the group he chose to serve, and they stand behind every other statement in the letter. He does not describe them one by one. The single thing he does tell us about them is the important thing: the small cooperative he agreed to work for was made up of dairy farmers who were trying to gain control over their own lives. They are not people waiting to be rescued. They were organising themselves, and he joined them.

Put together, these names make an argument. Kurien could easily have written a letter in which one determined man overcomes difficulties and achieves great things. He wrote the opposite kind of letter. Achievement here is something several people build together, and the person whose name gets attached to it has a duty to say so out loud. That is why gratitude in this chapter is not a polite decoration at the end. It sits right beside integrity as a value in its own right.

Three ideas hold this letter together, and it is worth separating them carefully, because in an answer they are very easy to blur into one vague sentence about being a good person.

Integrity. Kurien calls it the core value, and he defines it in a way you can test on yourself straight away. Integrity begins with being honest to yourself; once you are, being honest with other people follows naturally. Notice the order he puts them in. He does not start with rules, punishments or the fear of being caught. He starts inside. If you can admit to yourself what you actually did and what you actually want, you will not need to pretend to anybody else. That is a far more demanding standard than simply not telling lies, because there is nobody watching to catch you out.

Service. The dream in the letter is a large one — an India whose people are free of hunger and poverty, live with equal respect and love for one another, and stand among the leading nations of the world. But the service he actually describes is far more ordinary and much harder: choosing useful work over comfortable work, and then staying with it for decades. Kurien openly admits that this was not the future he had imagined for himself. That admission is important. He is not telling his grandson that the right path will feel obvious or exciting. He is telling him that it may look like a step downwards at the time and still be the right step.

Life as a privilege. "Life is a privilege", he writes, and to waste it would be wrong. Read that slowly. A privilege is something you are given rather than something you earned, and something not everybody gets. If that is what a life is, then leaving your abilities unused is not a purely private matter. It becomes a kind of ingratitude towards everyone and everything that made your life possible. This is where his definition of failure comes from, and it is the single most useful idea in the chapter.

What failure means here. Most people measure failure by outcomes: the marks, the salary, the prize, the job title. Kurien throws that measure out. For him, you have failed if you did not give your best, and if you did not use what you have for the good of others. Two things follow from this, and both are worth writing about. First, a person can look extremely successful by the world's measure and still have failed by his. Second, and this is the encouraging half, you can lose a competition, be overlooked, or work somewhere nobody notices, and not have failed at all.

These three ideas are connected, not separate. Integrity is what makes service possible, because work that genuinely helps other people cannot be done for long by somebody who is dishonest with himself. Service is how a privileged life gets repaid. And failure is measured by whether you did those two things, not by what you collected along the way. If you can show that chain clearly in an answer, you have understood the chapter.

Near the end of the letter Kurien tells one short story, and that little story does more work than all the general advice around it.

He reminds Siddharth of the day the boy went with him to the ceremony in which the President awarded him the Padma Vibhushan in 1999. He calls it a "magnificent ceremony", and there is no false modesty in the phrase; the day clearly mattered to him. The child slipped the medal around his own neck with great pride, looked at it in awe, and asked very innocently whether he could keep it.

It is a completely natural thing for a child to do. The medal is shiny, it is right there in his hands, and a child has no way of knowing that the object stands for decades of difficult work. What his grandparents said back — and Kurien is careful to record that the answer came from both of them — is far more interesting than a plain no. Of course the medal was his, they told him, as much as it was his grandfather's. But he should not be satisfied with merely keeping his grandfather's award, because the challenge in front of him was to earn his own reward for the work he would do in his own lifetime. Read the two halves together and you can hear how the answer works: the boy is refused nothing, and is handed something much larger to do.

Think about why this small incident is placed exactly where it is. Everything before it has dealt in ideas: honesty, service, not wasting a life. The medal turns all of that into a picture you can actually see. A shining object passes from an old hand into a small one, and the answer that comes with it makes the argument of the whole letter visible at a glance: a reward you did not work for should never be enough for you.

There is a second layer here too, and noticing it will lift an answer. Kurien has spent the letter insisting that awards are not the point and that failure has nothing to do with prizes. Then he tells a story in which he is holding one of the highest honours the country can give. Those two things fit together rather than clashing. His position is not that honours are worthless. It is that they are a by-product. You aim at the work; the recognition may or may not follow; and either way somebody else's award is not the thing to settle for.

Notice, finally, how carefully the moment is told. We never hear the boy's voice for ourselves. Everything about him comes to us through his grandfather's memory of the day, softened by affection and by the years in between. That is why the incident reads as warm rather than harsh. The grandfather is not correcting a greedy child. He is remembering a moment when a child asked an innocent question and, without meaning to, handed him the perfect chance to say the thing he most wanted to say.

Kurien was not a professional writer, and this letter is better for it. Its style is plain, warm and unhurried, with no clever tricks. Even so, there are real choices here worth noticing, and anything you say about his tone and language has to rest on them.

Direct address. The whole piece is aimed at one person. That single decision produces the tone. Because he is writing to his own grandson, there is no need to impress anybody, no need to defend a record, and no room for a public lecture. He explains instead of arguing. The reader is quietly placed in the grandson's chair, which is exactly why a private letter still works on complete strangers years later.

Contrast as a tool. The letter is built on pairs of opposites, and once you spot the pattern you find it everywhere. The telephone against the letter. The immediate against the lasting. The careers he might have had against the one he chose. Awards you are handed against rewards you earn. Success as the world counts it against failure as he defines it. Every pair pushes you towards its second half. This is why the opening about letter-writing is not merely a polite way to begin. It teaches you the shape of thinking that the rest of the letter will use.

Word choice. Look closely at the two words he uses for pleasure. A telephone call gives a "fleeting joy"; a letter gives "abiding pleasure". Fleeting means gone almost as soon as it arrives. Abiding means staying, remaining, lasting. He could easily have written short and long. The words he actually picked carry a feeling as well as a meaning, and together they announce the letter's central concern with what survives us.

Understatement. The biggest facts in this life are handled in the fewest words. Three possible careers are given up in three short sentences. An extremely high national honour is mentioned and then set aside. A writer who wanted admiration would have done precisely the opposite, stretching each one out. The plainness is itself a quiet form of the integrity he is describing: he practises on the page the modesty he recommends.

Voice. There is really only one voice in this chapter, and it belongs to the letter-writer. Even the one other person who says anything, the boy asking about the medal, reaches us through the grandfather's retelling of that day. So take care with your wording when you write about the chapter. Every judgement in it is Kurien's own, offered as his personal view, not the announcement of some neutral outside narrator.

This chapter comes with a thinking skill attached to it, and it is one of the most useful things in the whole book: learning to tell a fact from an opinion.

A fact is a statement that can be checked. Somebody else can look it up, measure it or find a record of it, and then agree or disagree with you on the evidence. That Kurien began his working life soon after the country became independent is a fact. That the President presented him with the Padma Vibhushan in 1999 is a fact. Neither of them depends on how anybody feels.

An opinion is a judgement. It may be wise, widely shared and supported by excellent reasons, but another honest person could take the opposite view without being wrong about the evidence. That a telephone call gives only a passing kind of joy is an opinion; plenty of people would disagree. That the career he took up was not the one he had pictured for himself is a judgement about his own feelings. That life is a privilege and wasting it would be wrong is an opinion too — a serious and deeply held one, but a belief rather than something you could check in a record.

Why does this distinction matter so much in a letter like this one? Because almost everything memorable in the chapter is opinion, and that is precisely where its value lies. Kurien is not reporting events; he is advising a child. Learning to see the difference stops you from swallowing advice as though it were data, and it equally stops you from dismissing good advice just because nobody can prove it.

When you write about this chapter, a few habits will serve you well. Name the form early: say that it is a letter, and you have already shown that you know what you are dealing with. Attribute ideas to Kurien by name rather than to a nameless narrator. Give reasons instead of labels — rather than writing that he was a great man, show the choice he made and what it cost him and his family. Follow the letter's own logic when you plan an answer: integrity first, then service, then his redefinition of failure. And wherever a question invites your own view, actually give one, and support it with a reason from your own life or reading, because that is exactly what this letter asks of the person reading it.

Finally, keep the chapter's smallest lesson somewhere at the back of your mind. The letter argues that written words outlast spoken ones, and that a page can be picked up again long after a conversation has faded. Every time you write something down carefully — a note, a thank-you, a considered answer — you are doing the very thing this chapter recommends.