Sudha Murty: “I don’t go to restaurants. Why drive, park and waste time in traffic when you can eat at home?”
There is no pump when Sudha Murty enters the room. In fact, no one really notices. The videographers are busy starting their cameras, its staff swirls around the key line and I admire a painting representing the Mahabharata – made by a collective based in Kolkata of the Bengal School, she said to me later. “What magazine?” She asks, smiling, while I have turned around, takes note and whisper an answer. “Ah yes, please sit.” So I do it. In videos and photos, Mounty seems greater, a power of a person, but here, in the atrium upstairs of his office in Jayanagar de Bengaluru, she seems lighter, smaller, even simpler. She is modestly dressed, in a green cotton Salwar Kameez, and it is her face which fills the details absent when I show her a video of my daughter thanking her for writing one of her favorite children’s books, GOPI intimate newspapers, Featuring his real Golden Retriever, who are now sleeping lazily by his feet.
As a staff member arrives by wearing a tray full of spicy coriander, the conversation turns to the house. “It is”, she nods – as well as most of the other things she eats. “I don’t go to restaurants. Why drive, park and waste time in traffic when you can eat at home? It’s easier and faster. ” When the cameras rush, supervising her face, we are on the subject of kitchens and cooking, and how she and her husband, NR Narayana Murthy, co-founder of infosys, managed to build both healthy business and healthy eating habits at the time. “When he built Infosys, he never had time to cook,” she said, adding that there had never been a day when he finished a meal without washing the plate. “It was very useful even at that time,” added Mounty, whose own plate, at that time, was overflowing. “I have always worked, so I have never become an expert in cooking. I know the bases – Rice, Sambar, Roti, Sabzi – But not dishes like Holige [a sweet flatbread from Karnataka]. Our meals are always simple. This explains why she asked her mother’s help in the kitchen. It was only when she became old that we looked out outside the help. »»
As a winner of Padma Shri, member of Rajya Sabha, founder of the Infosys Foundation and prolific author, PhilanthropE and educator, Mounty is not stranger to the rupture of stereotypes. She obtained her baccalaureate in engineering from the BVB College of Engineering and Technology as the only girl in her class. “There was no toilet, so I did not drink water from 7 am to noon. Then, I would go home, I used the toilets, I would have lunch and I am back in the laboratory at 2 pm, “recalls the multihyphenate, who continued to finish his mastery in computer science from the Indian Institute of Sciences. His grandmother discouraged him from studying engineering, insisting that this was intended for boys and warning that it would harm his prospects on the wedding market. She persevered, repeating history by becoming the first woman engineer of the Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (now Tata Motors) in 1974. When she married Narayana Milde in 1978, she did it with a condition – she would spend her family name like Mounty, not Mounty, because she aligned herself with the Sanskrit alphabet.
