🧑‍🍳Howard Gardening Story #45 Steven: Garlic, Grit, and Greatness

 

It’s a Sunday morning.

We, the older ones, are visiting our company guesthouse — home to our young engineers.

Steven puts down a mountain of garlic in front of us.

Our job is to peel every clove, hand it over, and then wait — patiently — for his legendary chilli pork (sorry my vegetarian friends. No offence meant)

Even after 27 years, the taste still lingers.

By day, Steven handled the Foreign Exchange module of our product — a pucca techie.

By night, he was our resident foodie guide.

We were a small company, living those Narayana Murthy hours — but we didn’t mind.

Not when Steven led our midnight food trails —

• Fish curry rice at 1 AM in St. John’s canteen
• Sheekh kebabs at Fanoos, after 11 PM
• Andhra meals (if we made it before 11 PM)
• Bheja fry at Empire on Residency Road (not after 1 AM)

One day, Steven followed his calling — he left to start his own restaurant, Mangalore Pearl. 

Today, Mangalore Pearl is one of Bangalore’s top-rated restaurants.

Back then, it was the only place in Bangalore that served Bombay Duck. The Sole Curry he makes is the best in the world. (Okay, maybe I’m biased.)

Steven still works long hours — buying fish at 4:30 AM from Russell Market, closing his shutters at 11 PM.

When he first told us he was quitting to start a restaurant, I thought: “He’ll make it — he cooks brilliantly.”

Only later did I realise — making Prawn Ghee Roast is probably the last skill you need to run a restaurant business.

Running a restaurant, like running a company, takes everything — finance, people, marketing, resilience, grit…..

**

Maybe every organisation should host a mock Shark Tank — To grill employees who dream of entrepreneurship, and give them a taste of reality.

What do you think?

💃Howard Gardening Story #44 Kaushik: Shaking a leg to Bollywood Beats

 

One day, I spotted an ad for Shiamak Davar’s Bollywood dance school — right near our office.

Without much thought, I asked Kaushik to bring his bike. We went together, and I enrolled him.

Kaushik could easily afford the fees, but he said, “I won’t pay you. I want to remain indebted.” Such magical words. It was an emotional moment for me.

Soon after completing the course, Kaushik joined Shiamak’s core team — and even performed in the Middle East.

**

Let me share how this all started.

Every month, our company hosted Last Friday Blasts. That’s where I first noticed Kaushik, a young software engineer who turned every step into poetry. I knew I had to do something for this kid…. And I did.

**

Later, Kaushik was selected for an engineering project in France.

Before he left, I made him promise one thing: “Teach Bollywood dance to the seniors in nearby old-age homes.”

The night before his flight, we both sat together googling all the old-age homes around his new city. I don’t know how many he eventually visited — but I knew he would do something nice.

I could almost imagine the response after his first session in France —

Seniors hugging Kaushik, feeding him fruit, laughing together, asking for another session…And their voices ringing with joy:

“Wow, I can still move!”

“So what if I danced sitting in my wheelchair — dance I did!”

“Oh, why didn’t we take our video? We would have sent it to our children!”

“Darling, you must train us for La France a un incroyable talent!” 

**

Years later, Kaushik moved on and returned once to conduct a dance workshop for our team.

It felt like a reunion of joy and rhythm.

Today, he’s Director of Engineering in Singapore — still dancing through life, I’m sure.

Dear Leaders,

Do you know who your dancers are?

Ask them how they can help your company find its rhythm of happiness. 💫

☮️ Howard Gardening Story #43 Girish: The backpack that carried his calling

 

In my younger days, most parents in India expected their children to graduate quickly and start earning.

But Girish wanted a different path. He convinced his parents to let him see the world before settling into work.

To the horror of the relatives, the parents agreed. With a backpack on his shoulders, Girish set off for Europe. He eventually landed in France and began teaching English.

Somewhere along the way, computers caught his imagination. He immersed himself in coding, multimedia, and computer graphics — even creating an interactive guide to spread awareness about Indian music.

Girish then transitioned from teaching to running the technology department of French Chamber of Commerce training organisation.

His curiosity drove him to take a sabbatical for a Master’s in Communication in Boston, and research with the Visual Computing Group at MIT.

When he returned to France, he proposed setting up a multimedia department to prepare students and businesses for emerging technologies. The Chamber of Commerce trusted his vision.

Girish then discovered pictograms as autonomy tools for intellectually challenged persons. He also created a method to teach illiterate adults to read by associating color-coded sounds with pictograms — two powerful ways to promote social inclusion. 

Today, as an associate researcher in a design lab, Girish’s focus is on a care and support model for the social inclusion of persons with intellectual disabilities and developing the use of pictograms as a visual language, with the aim of serving communities in need.

🌱 Dear HR Leaders: Don’t you think we need an “HR stethoscope” — a way to listen to the heartbeats of our people? When we truly hear their aspirations, we can support those who dream of changing the world, just as the French Chamber of Commerce did for Girish.

🖼️ Howard Gardening Story #42 Ashok Soota and the Coders recreating canvases

 

🎨 Time for a corporate fairy tale

This story comes from a personalized book I created to honour Ashok Soota, then the founding CEO of Mindtree, who contributed handsomely to the IT boom of India.

This is the story of how a software campus became home to an Impressionist art gallery.

Here it goes,

In 2006, during a conference at MIT Sloan, Ashok wandered into an M. F. Husain exhibition. 

Ashok didn’t know much about art — but by the time he left, he’d made a friend -  M. F. Husain, the legend himself.

Weeks later, Husain visited Mindtree’s campus — a buzzing hub of young, hopeful India. Moved by what he saw, Husain said:

“I want to paint something for you — something that captures this emergent India.”

🌟 That canvas became a masterpiece.

And a revolution began.

🎨 Weekend art classes.

📚 Booklets on great painters.

🖼️ A mission to recreate the world’s greatest works — by hand.

Teams researched Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas, Sisley, …

They painted. They wrote. They shared.

And walls across the company turned into a walking museum of Impressionism.

But it didn’t stop there. - “Why not build our own gallery?” someone said.

📍 They crowdfunded it

🏛️ They called the gallery - Reproduction Material — cheeky, defiant, unforgettable

🧑‍🎨 Over 500 masterwork reproductions adorned its walls

📖 Each one came with a story — researched and written by the employees.

And on September 17, 2012 — Husain’s 97th birthday — Husain inaugurated the gallery himself.

The media called it Bangalore’s hidden Louvre.

Tourists lined up. Students learned. Families came to marvel.

🌟 What if your workplace became the place where your other self comes alive?

--

Like a good trailer, this is just a teaser. The whole film? Housed in Ashok’s book. Try asking him — nicely.” 🎬🙂

🔭Howard Gardening Story #41 Shan: The star who invented wonder

 

“It’s expensive, dear. I’ll get you something special,” Shan told his ten-year-old daughter. She wanted a Barbie doll badly, but she trusted her father.

A few days later, a big brown box arrived. Inside was a telescope kit. Father and daughter spent the weekend assembling it. When the lens finally faced the night sky, a new universe opened, not just above them, but between them.

That was Shan — our inventor, our star. Even while parenting, he was teaching by creating. Without ever quoting a theory, he let his daughter live the IKEA effect — the joy of valuing what you build with your own hands.

He once invited me home to see Venus through their telescope. I reached late.

His daughter looked a little disappointed. She said softly, “Okay, next time. I’ll show you the moon instead.”

We climbed the narrow ladder to the terrace. The city lights faded behind us. 

Through the telescope, I saw not just the moon’s craters — I saw the reflection of a child’s joy, a father’s legacy of curiosity.

Shan had installed a star-gazing app, I think it was Stellarium, on his laptop. His daughter guided me across constellations as if she was introducing me to her friends in the sky.

Shan, you are among those stars now — perhaps near Orion, maybe beside Venus.

The world missed your inventive brilliance, but we who knew you, still look up — because somewhere, a part of you still shines.

Dear Leaders, please share Shan’s story with your engineers. It will remind them that true innovation isn’t about budgets or titles — it’s about curiosity, imagination, and the love of creating something together. I am sure they will volunteer to go to the schools you sponsor and open up a new world to the students.

I feel sad when writing this for a friend who we lost at a tender age but happy that I have immortalised him through this story.

🧘Howard Gardening Story #40 Praveen: From deep work to heart work

 

Praveen joined our Telecom Product Centre as a Testing Specialist. He was only 21 days into the company when he surprised me. 

With fresh eyes and quiet confidence, he pointed out weak areas in our product design that even our experienced team had overlooked. 

It wasn’t just his sharpness that impressed me — it was his way of working. Praveen had a rare talent for what Cal Newport calls deep work — the ability to enter a state of distraction-free concentration where true insights emerge.

But what made Praveen special went far beyond his professional contributions. He was equally committed to his inner journey. 

He once described it to me with a metaphor I’ve never forgotten: Moving from ignorance to knowledge, he said, is like trekking through a dense jungle. The path is dark, full of obstacles like self-doubt and limiting beliefs. At times, you feel lost. But if you persevere, breakthroughs arrive like shafts of light breaking through the canopy. Finally, you reach a clearing — a space of awareness and wisdom, transformed by the struggle that brought you there. - it was a wow moment listening to the young Yogi.

That inner clarity soon shaped his outer actions. Praveen wanted to start a community of meditators within the company, a place where colleagues could pause, reflect, and grow together. We had a prayer room that our Muslim colleagues used on Fridays. I spoke to them, and Praveen and his group started using it for meditation on the remaining days.

Praveen has since left IT. Today he runs Heart Café, a space where people gather not to network or transact, but to have genuine heart-to-heart conversations over coffee.

🌱 Dear Leaders, has anyone ever approached you to start such a community? Say yes to them. The community may actually emerge as a team of ‘Deep Workers’.

♟️ Howard Gardening Story #39 Unni: From Hooch to Chessboards

 

“In this village, everyone was once an alcoholic… until one man came along and introduced them to chess.” - That’s how Shenaz Treasury described Unni (Thanks Shenaz). 

Filmmaker Kabeer Khurana captured Unni’s spirit (pun not intended😀) in his short film, The Pawn of Marottichal.

Marottichal, a sleepy village of 6,000 people nestled at the foothills of the Western Ghats in Thrissur, was once drowning in moonshine. Alcohol wasn’t just a drink there — it was a way of life.

And then came Unnikrishnan.

As a young man, Unni had lost his way, drawn to a Maoist movement that cost him his family’s trust. But in his 30s, he returned — this time, not with anger, but with resolve. He opened a small teahouse at the heart of the village and started something audacious: a war against alcohol.

He and his friends raided houses brewing hooch, smashing barrels and dismantling distilleries. But he knew raids alone couldn’t heal the addiction. So, after every raid, he offered something unexpected — a chessboard.

Soon, one move led to another. Curiosity turned into obsession. The people who once filled their evenings with liquor now filled them with pawns, bishops, and queens.

It took nearly 40 years, but the transformation was complete. Marottichal became famous as India’s Chess Village. Children played in schools, elders played in Unni’s tea shop, in bus stands, at roadside, even in fishing boats; and the world took note — even the Solomon Islands issued stamps to honour Unni and his village.

Dear Leaders, imagine this: if a single man in a tiny village could transform alcoholics into chess players, what change could you spark in your organisation using your powerful employee communities?

Could you not invite a:

- Dr. Rosie Meek to create sport-based rehabilitation in prisons? Or

- Kailash Satyarthi to launch gully cricket for child rights? or

- Prof. Vijay Barse to bring Slum Soccer to the forgotten corners of our cities?

All it takes is one seed, one bold move — and the board changes forever.