What I’ve Learnt: Gurcharan Das

Author, intellectual, former CEO; 83; Delhi

MAKING A LIVING VERSUS MAKING A LIFE. At age four, I brought home my first report card. My mother asked, “Did you stand first?” My father said, “It’s the wrong question! Ask him: what does he like doing in school? Drawing? Listening to stories?” That day I was introduced to the difference between my parents—my middle-class Punjabi mother who wanted to ensure that I would ‘make a living’ one day, and my more relaxed father, an engineer and a mystic, who was more concerned that I should also ‘make a life’.

INNER FREEDOM SHOULD BE EVERYONE’S PURSUIT. Human beings have far more mental freedom than they realise, but we are creatures of society’s expectations. Invariably, sometime in our 40s, we ask, “Is this what life is all about?” I faced this dilemma thrice in life. The first was at age 17 when I won a scholarship to Harvard University. My teary-eyed mother bid me farewell at Delhi’s Palam Airport, while urging me to study something useful. At Harvard, I dutifully chose engineering as my major. My roommate, however, chose Russian literature, and he was reading Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina. One day at lunch, he suggested that if I were to have an affair with a married woman, it should be with someone like Anna Karenina. While he enumerated the Russian heroine’s virtues, I realised something was wrong. Here I was stuck calculating pipe friction and mugging up Bernoulli’s equation while he was dreaming of sleeping with Anna Karenina. I marched off to the Dean’s office and switched from engineering to the liberal arts. This was an expression of ‘inner freedom’ and the first milestone in my journey to ‘make a life’

CHOOSE THE LIFE YOU WANT. Over the next two years, I studied whatever I liked—history, literature, philosophy—I even took a course in Sanskrit love poetry. Hearing this, my mother practically fell off her chair. But my father reassured her, saying, “He is making a life through books!” Eventually, I majored in philosophy and got a scholarship to do a PhD at Oxford. The summer before I left, in Chandigarh, I asked myself: “Do I really want to spend the rest of my life at that stratosphere of abstract thought? No, I want a life of action.” Quietly, I declined the scholarship. My mother’s worst nightmare had come true: she had an idle grown-up son at home. To save her embarrassment, I answered the first ad in the paper and landed a job at the company that made Vicks VapoRub. Giving up a promising academic career for a life in business is a second milestone in my journey to ‘make a life’.

WEAR TWO HATS IF YOU GET BORED WITH ONE. While I enjoyed the rough and tumble of business life, I soon got bored and thought of quitting. My father came to my rescue again. “You have the weekend,” he said. “You can do something you like then.” So, one Sunday morning at age 23, I sat down to write a play and said to myself: “It must have been a morning like this when Shakespeare too sat down to write Hamlet!” The play was a success, winning an award and being performed at the Edinburgh Festival. I then wrote another, which was performed Off-Broadway in New York. For the next 25 years, I wore two hats—a Monday-to-Friday hat at my job and a Saturday-Sunday hat as a weekend writer.

KNOW WHEN IT’S TIME TO MOVE ON. I rose to become CEO of Procter & Gamble India and then Managing Director of Global Strategic Planning at P&G Worldwide. One day during a global meeting, I looked out the window and asked myself, “There must be more to life than selling Pampers”. My work had clearly stopped giving me a sense of purpose. At 50, I took early retirement and became a full-time writer. By then, I had fulfilled my mother’s wish that I ‘make a living’. We had savings, which made it easier. It was the third milestone in my struggle to ‘make a life’. My confidence in becoming a full-time writer came from having taken my weekend hobby seriously. I spent 25 years perfecting my art. Writing has given me a sense of purpose.

KEEP YOUR EGO IN CHECK. My mother initially named me Ashok Kumar. My grandmother suspected that her daughter-in-law had given me that name because she was secretly in love with the actor of the same name. She took me to her Guru, placed me at his feet, and asked him to give me a name. He called me Gurcharan Das; overnight, I was transformed from the ‘prince of happiness’ to the ‘humble servant at the feet of the guru’.

After I grew up, I asked the Guru why he chose this name. He said, “It’s good to be reminded about humility. Take your work seriously, but not yourself.” He meant that I should learn to shrink my ego, so I don’t need to be a ‘somebody’ or need premium treatment all the time. This would allow me to live lightly, without the burden of my ego’s expectations. This has been the mantra of my life, but it’s still a work in progress.

As told to Noor Anand Chawla.

To read more stories from Esquire India's October 2026 issue, pick up a copy of the magazine from your nearest newspaper stand or bookstore. Or click here to subscribe to the magazine.