A Matter of Consequence

While the corruption movement rages on, a personal note of sadness intruded yesterday.

At breakfast, my mother casually mentioned to me an accident where a coconut tree had fallen on someone, killing him; we dwelled briefly on the freak, tragic nature of it – trees don't usually fall on people in Mumbai, coconut trees even less so – but I didn't think very much of it then. The next morning, a large obituary notice abruptly made the matter more personal.

The person in question was Ved Prakash Arya.

I have known Ved, on and off, from my early IBM days; he was a customer then. We met again a decade later; him as COO of Pantaloon Retail (Future Group was still in the future) and me as a newly minted CEO of subsidiary company Futurebazaar. I can safely say that I would not have made it through my first year without help, and a key person providing the steadying hand was Ved. He was effectively my boss, but more than formal interaction Ved's off-the-cuff feedback and pointers were critical in keeping my head above water and avoiding some imminent rookie mistakes. When he left Pantaloon to start his own fund, it was a big and disorienting loss. He continued to give me occasional advice, but our contacts grew less frequent – from nearly daily to once in a while.

I always wanted to emulate Ved. He was marginally older than me, came from a background of no particular priviledge, and went through a similar academic journey. However, he had something that people start dreaming of in their teens and usually give up only in their deathbed. Ved was just forty two, but he had already achieved  some measure of what I'm still hoping I will achieve.

Ved, you see, was a person of consequence.

Consequence is harder than success, than money, than power. Consequence is the difference between Steve Jobs and the average CEO, between Anna's lakhs of followers and the average politician's lakhs of votes, between a person who merely achieves a milestone and a person who influences in some way the events that follow him. Many make money or gain power, few gain consequence.

Ved materially impacted people; many emulated him, his methods, tried to copy his achievements. We have been tragically reminded how fragile life is, how temperamental the nature of the universe. Ved died young, but he became a person of some consequence well before he died. I hope I achieve some measure of what Ved did before, inevitably, some form of coconut tree strikes me down.

Goodbye, Ved.