‘Sudha and Narayan Murthy always had each other’s back’: author Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Sudha and Narayana Murthy got married 46 years ago, on February 10, 1978. (Image: Moneycontrol Startup Conclave)

In her latest book, titled An Uncommon Love:  An Uncommon Love: The Early Life of Sudha and Narayana Murthy, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni has laid bare the circumstances in which Sudha Murty (nee Kulkarni) and Narayana Murthy fell in love, and many years later, the latter founded Infosys. The author’s first non-fiction book also underlines how Sudha and Murthy are so different from each other – Sudha being the eternal optimist and Narayana Murthy being the more serious of the two.

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In a chat at the Jaipur Literature Festival, from February 1-5, where she was one of the speakers, the author explained why she thinks the relationship between Sudha and Murthy is such a special one. “It’s not that they didn’t have disagreements or fights, but they always had each other’s back. They respected each other’s dreams. She even gave him all her savings to start his company,” said Divakaruni, adding that Sudha told her that she would listen to Narayana Murthy and even when she didn’t agree with him, she would tell him that will support him no matter what.

Indeed, Divakaruni recounts in the book that in the 1970s, when Murthy first took the plunge to become a startup founder, Sudha paid for their dinner dates in Pune. By the time they married, she had loaned him more than Rs 4,000 - a princely sum then.

“It was the same the other way around. Sudhaji could not go to MIT because she got a job at TELCO and had to put aside her dreams. When she cried after a visit to MIT, Narayana told her that she could go if she wants and he will support her, but it would mean that he could not start a company. He was also willing to give up his dreams for her sake,” Divakaruni shared.

Indeed, Sudha Murty had missed the chance to study at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for a peculiar reason. While in engineering college, she saw a job posting on the college notice board. The posting discouraged women from applying. Already the only woman engineering student there, Sudha bristled at this. She wrote to the company's chairman, J.R.D. Tata. Surprisingly, she got an interview call from the company, TELCO. She met Tata. And got the job in Pune. When she told her father that she had no intention of going, he rebuked her for wasting J.R.D. Tata and everyone else's time. She understood she owed it to everyone - including the women engineers who would come after her - to take up the job. This incident, too, is recounted in great detail in the book.

The other thing that Divakaruni found special about the Murthys was their relationship with God. “Murthyji once told me, I didn’t have any friends other than Sudha once I started on this dream, but God was my friend. That really saw them through some tough times,” she said, adding that the title of the book is imbued with many meanings. “Yes, the Murthys are icons, but in this book, they are humans first,” she said.