My childhood taught me it's all about meritocracy and not about aristocracy: Rajiv Bajaj

Bajaj Auto MD & CEO Rajiv Bajaj credits his father for giving him 'purpose and direction' in life.

Talking about his childhood and upbringing, Bajaj Auto's MD and CEO Rajiv Bajaj in an interview for Moneycontrol's series "Latha & the Leaders", reminisced how his father, Rahul Bajaj, wanted him to go to Harvard Business School, but he didn't, ending up being the only person in his family to have never gone to a business school.

Crediting his father for giving him 'purpose and direction' in life, he recalled how in 1993, after having spent three years at Bajaj Auto, he asked his father what he actually wanted him to do at the company. To which his father replied, "I will say to you what my father once said to me, which is -- 'Do what you think best, but be the best in what you do'."

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And the young Rajiv Bajaj interpreted it as his father's way of saying, "Be a global player. Be the best in the world. In whatever it is that you choose to do'."

When asked about his mantra in life, Rajiv replied that it has a lot to do with his upbringing. He then shared how as kids, his younger brother Sanjiv, and his sister, all lived together in Akurdi, then on the outskirts of Pune, in the township at the Bajaj plant. He recalled, "He (his father) felt that the right thing was to be on site. He would always say, 'I don't believe in absentee landlordism'. So my parents moved there, and as was the case in those times, everybody that worked at Bajaj lived in the colony. So, we grew up with 200-300 kids over there."

It's not that they could not have gone to school elsewhere. His father tried, every year, to send them to school elsewhere, but that never happened. He recalls, "When I joined the company, my father's secretary showed me a file of letters that my father had written to the principal of Cathedral School in Mumbai, where he had studied. He (father) wrote every year saying, 'I request you to give admission to my children A, B and C in standards X, Y and Z'. And the permission would come, and we never went. And then the next year he would write the same thing again. And this went on till we graduated out of 10 standard at that time SSC as it was." And added that it was actually his mother's wish that the children grow up in Akurdi.

Talking fondly about his formative years, he shared, "We used to walk to school in those days. This Bombay-Poona (Mumbai-Pune) road was a little strip of tar and we would walk to school or go in the same school bus along with these 200-300 kids. And we played on the same uneven soccer field every day. We swam in the same public colony pool with everyone. We climbed the same bougainvillea trees. We stole the same mangoes from people's trees. We crushed the same tube light and made manjha (kite string) out of it to fly the kite. So that was life growing up you know for the first 15-18 years."

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Talking about the lesson that those years taught him, he averred, "The value that instilled in us was that it's all about meritocracy and not about aristocracy. That is the value our parents instilled in us."

He used a quote by fashion designer Coco Chanel that 'the best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive' to drive home his point. "We grew up in an environment where the best things were free and I think that we have carried through," he summed up saying.