Anurag Jain's Blog on Bangalore Events, Travel, IIM Bangalore, IIM, IIMB, Management

Friday, April 01, 2005

Posted 8:00 AM by Anurag

My Obituary

As promised in my post on Self-Obituary yesterday, here's my own obituary as written by me. I wrote it an year back or so. Lotsa things have hapened in life since. Hence, it's time to update it! Anyways, here goes:

Anurag Jain was a fairly renowned person for his skills in setting up new businesses. That he didn't want to work for someone else, first struck him while working to improve the plant capacities by debottlenecking the processes and equipments at a big chemical plant. And thats when he decided to go back to school for some business education. His boss tried to stop him by telling him that he would be a real good chemical engineer in the long run, but Anurag had his mind set on doing something in the business world.

After the b-school, and a few false starts later, Anurag could establish a distribtion logistics business that turned the conventional supply chain wisdom on its head. That success led him to invest in other businesses such as retail and real estate, and to a small extent, in civil aviation.

Anurag's life was not without its share of problems. After few unsuccessful business ventures, he joined an automobile company as in-charge of IT. Very soon, he realized that he just couldn't do it, had a fight with the management and was fired unceremoniously. Once again on his own, he had to lead a tough life with no income. He lived in cheap hotels, dharmshalas while chalking out plans for the next phase of life. Later, he ran into trouble with local authorities for some of his business practices. He also had a troublesome phase when he had to let go of a close friend with whom he had co-founded the initial business. Even now, some of his business divisions continue to make losses and they need all attention they can to turn them around. And even though, the other profit-making divisions sort of offset these losses, Anurag wouldn't let go of the loss making ones because of strong emotional attachment.

As usual with worldly success, over the years, Anurag did change a bit. But the two things that didn't change about Anurag were his non-materialistic attitude and a will to help others. He led a simple life, and donated a lot of proceeds from his businesses to his childhood school and his engineering alma mater.

Anurag led a fairly good personal life too. He had a good marriage and a caring family. His wife always supported him in his risky ventures. So did Anurag by supporting all her career moves. Anurag built a steady network of friends who kept his ambitions firmly tied to the reality by giving him constructive feedback.

In the end, his was an ordinary life, fueled by a lot of ambition and a will to succeed. A lot remained to be done to fulfil his vision. And we are sure he would have completed it had he got a few more years.

1 comments

Comments:

Hi Anurag....
forgot 2 mention 'bout ur wife in ur web-site.

# posted by

Anonymous : April 27, 2005 8:51 PM