I Too Had a Dream

by Verghese Kurien

If you are always honest to yourself, it does not take much effort in always being honest with others.

that failure is not about not succeeding. Rather, it is about not putting in your best effort and not contributing, however modestly, to the common good.

there is little correlation between the circumstances of people’s lives and how happy they are.

strong enough to rejoice in another’s happiness and wise enough to know that there is enough to go around for all, then we would have lived our lives to the fullest.

I began to see then that when the government enters business, the citizens of India get cheated. The greatest repercussion of the government entering into business is that instead of safeguarding people from vested interests, they themselves become the vested interest.

I was to learn yet another valuable but sad lesson: that the technical advice of ‘experts’ is all too often dictated by the economic interests of the advanced countries and not by the needs or ground realities in developing countries.

One of the earliest lessons I had learnt was that Amul existed because, barely a few hundred kilometres away, Bombay existed.

‘whether the rich and fortunate are imaginative enough, and the resentful and underprivileged poor patient enough, to begin to establish a true foundation for better sharing, fuller cooperation and joint planetary work’.

When we were planning for Operation Flood we decided to look at these problems afresh. My colleagues and I examined what our wives and mothers were doing. These were, no doubt, traditional habits. But it was these habits that had kept us healthy because 40 per cent of our cows and buffaloes have bugs and some of these filter into the milk. Boiling safeguarded the milk and also increased its life. But then why were we pasteurising it? Why were we bottling it if it was being unbottled? Why should we transport a pound of glass with every pound of milk and bring back that pound of glass, sterilise it and put an aluminium cap on it? Why could we not provide milk in bulk through machines? If we could do this, we could also abolish the messy milk rationing system in our cities. So cash and carry seemed the best option. This concept, of course, created a furore in Delhi. All the pundits in the government, particularly in the dairy division, were convinced that bulk vending would never work. They said: ‘You put a coin into our public telephones and you get neither the connection nor the coin back. If Kurien with his crazy schemes puts up machines for milk for the people of Delhi, and if these people get neither their coins back nor the milk, there will be riots in the capital; it will become a law and order situation and all kinds of calamities will befall – questions will be raised in the Parliament, the minister will lose his job

For us, excellence was particularly difficult to obtain when bureaucrats and politicians, who knew far less about the issues we were working on than we did, sat in judgement and continued interfering.