Gurcharan Das

Gurcharan Das (born 3 October 1943) is an Indian author who wrote a trilogy based on the classical Indian goals of the ideal life.

India Unbound was the first volume (2002), on artha, 'material well-being', which narrated the story of India's economic rise from Independence to the global information age. Published in many languages and filmed by BBC, it was called "a quiet earthquake" by the Guardian. The second, The Difficulty of Being Good, is on dharma or 'moral well-being', and is "rich with learned musings on the epic, Mahabharata and its moral dilemmas" that speak to our day to day contemporary life. Kama: The Riddle of Desire is on the third goal of desire, and recounts a tale of "love and vulnerability, about self-doubt and betrayal, about wanting more of everything and being haunted by settling for less."

Das graduated with honours from Harvard University in Philosophy. He had later attended Harvard Business School (AMP), where he is featured in three case studies. He was CEO of Procter & Gamble India and later managing director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide (Strategic Planning). At age 50, he took early retirement to become a full-time writer.

Das is a regular columnist for The Times of India and five Indian language newspapers in Hindi, Telugu, Marathi, Tamil, and Gujarati. He also contributes periodically to Financial Times, Foreign Affairs, Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. Aside from the trilogy, his other literary works include a novel, A Fine Family, two book length essays, India Grows at Nights: A Liberal Case for a Strong State, The Elephant Paradigm, and an anthology, Three English Plays.

Early life

Gurcharan Das was born in Lyallpur, British India (now Faisalabad, Pakistan). He was named Ashok Kumar but was renamed at age three and half years old. His father was an engineer with the government of Punjab. The family lived in Lahore at the time of the partition of India in August 1947 when they had to flee for their lives. They arrived as refugees in Shimla, and this is where the young boy grew up. His father was a passionate mystic and meditated for many hours a day and the boy was raised in an atmosphere charged with Bhakti mysticism. His partially autobiographical novel, A Fine Family, sheds some light on his early life.

In 1952, the family moved to Bhakra Nangal; in 1953, to Delhi, where he went to Modern School. In 1955, his father was transferred to Washington DC, to represent India in talks with Pakistan on the sharing of the waters of the rivers of the Punjab, mediated by the World Bank. He went to high school in Washington D.C. In 1959, he won a scholarship to Harvard University. He graduated from Harvard in 1963 with honours in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He wrote his senior thesis under the political philosopher, John Rawls, who had a great influence on his life. Harvard later elected him to Phi Beta Kappa for "high attainments in liberal scholarship."

Corporate career

Instead of accepting a fellowship to do a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Oxford, Gurcharan Das returned home to India. Just before coming back, Das wrote in a letter to his mother that he "just could not imagine living the rest of my life at that stratosphere of abstract thought." While waiting to decide what he wanted to do with his life, he got a job as a trainee in a company that made Vicks Vaporub. He soon discovered that he liked the rough and tumble of the business life "and like the man who came to dinner, I stayed on."

Gurcharan Das rose to become the managing director and Chairman of Richardson Hindustan Limited. Before that he spent two summers at Harvard Business School's Advanced Management Program, where he is featured in three case studies. In 1985, his parent company, Richardson Vicks was acquired by Procter and Gamble and he became the first CEO of Procter & Gamble India and vice-president for Procter & Gamble Far East from 1985 and 1992. He then moved headquarters to become vice-president and managing director, Procter & Gamble Worldwide, responsible for global strategic planning.

At the end of 1994, after a 30-year career in six countries, he took early retirement to become a full-time writer. Before leaving he wrote, 'Local Memoirs of a Global Manager in Harvard Business Review.

He has joined a Bangalore-based edtech company, BrightCHAMPS as an advisor on their Global Curriculum Advisory Board. Das is a member of the Board of Trustees at the Centre for Civil Society, a New Delhi based liberal think-tank.

Literary career and books

Gurcharan Das began his writing career as a "weekend writer". In his twenties, he wrote three plays, which were published together as an anthology, titled Three English Plays, by Oxford University Press in 2001 and later re-published as Three Plays by Penguin India in 2011.

At age 23, he wrote his first play, Larins Sahib, which won the Sultan Padamsee Prize in 1968. It was produced by the Theatre Group in Bombay in 1969, published by Oxford University Press in the UK in 1970, and later presented at the Edinburgh Festival in 1991. A historical play about the British in India, it is set during the confused period after the death of Ranjit Singh in the Punjab with a focus on an unusual Englishman in India named Henry Lawrence.

His second play, Mira—a "rite of Krishna for five actor-dancers" – explores what it means for a human being to become a saint through the story of Mirabai, the sixteen-century Rajput princess-poet. It premiered at the La Mama Theatre in 1970 to much critical acclaim. Clive Barnes of the New York Times wrote, "Remarkable in the way it combines Indian legend with the sophistication of Western total theater…Mira has the quality of a dream ritual." It was produced in Bombay by Alaque Padmsee and was called "a major artistic achievement of immense merit and supreme significance to the re-blossoming of theatre in India"