Dr. Govindappa Venkataswamy, now 82, was born in a farmer's family in 1918 - in a village where there was no school. Each morning, he would take take the buffalo out to graze before walking nearly three miles to school. Years later, when a school finally did open in his village, there were no pencils, paper, or even a slate. The children would collect sand from the riverbed, spread it smoothly over the mud floor of their thatch-roofed schoolhouse, and write in it with their fingers.
His father, a follower of Gandhi, believed in perfection. "We were not thinking of amassing money as our goal, we always aspired to some perfection in our lives." Perfection, as he defined it, is a means of following God, or of pursuing a form of higher consciousness.
Dr. V. was first trained as an obstetrician, but then he contracted rheumatoid arthritis and was hospitalized for nearly two years. Since then, virtually all his life, severe pain has never left him. As a result of this arthritis, his fingers slowly became twisted and fused; they became useless for delivering babies, so he started studying ophthalmology. Designing his own instruments to suit his hands, Dr. V. performed as many as 100 surgeries a day. He had to train himself to hold a knife and to perform cataract surgery despite his physical pain.
Now Dr. V. runs 5 hospitals performing more than 180,000 operations each year. During the last 25 years, one of the hospitals (Aravind, in Maduai)) has given sight to more than 1 million people in India. During a recent year (1998), these hospitals saw 1.2 million outpatients, treating 2,500 children each month.
Here are a few comments by Dr. V. which provide a little insight into his philosophy of work and leadership:
"The reward for work is not what you get out of it, but what you become from it."
"Leadership is a personal quest you undertake, one based on a mission that troubles your heart."
"The toughest customers are always the people who don't need you. Many patients can't afford surgery - most don't remember what good vision is - and they don't understand why it would offer any benefit. India's poor never expected to regain their sight. A visit to the hospital is largely out of their physical, geographic and economic reach. It's also totally beyond their imagination, outside the boundary of hope. How can you hope for what you can't even imagine? How can you imagine what is so far beyond your daily experience?"
"'The poor' is a vulgar term. Would you call Christ a poor man? To think of certain people as 'the poor' puts you in a superior position, blinds you to the ways in which you are poor."
"To achieve perfection, it helps to respect money - but not to be motivated by it."
"Leadership begins with the pursuit of self knowledge and a vision bigger than that can fit in the prospectus of a single corporation." Dr. V. asks himself, "How can my work make me a better human being and make a better world?"
"Two qualities for leadership are to be a visionary and to know execution."
What is Dr. V.'s vision? With sight people can be freed from hunger, fear, and poverty. In the third world, a blind person is referred to as 'a mouth without hands' - he is considered to be detrimental to his family and to the whole village.
When asked, "What are your gifts?" Dr. V. answered, "People thank me for giving them sight." Dr. V. considers his gifts to be the things that he has given to others, not what he possesses.
A sign in one of the hospital's classrooms: "If You Are Looking for a Big Opportunity, Find a Big Problem."
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