Interview: Dr. Naushad Forbes (Part 1)

Mandar- What keeps you so motivated?

Dr. Naushad Forbes– Many years ago, I used to split my year between teaching a course in US and I would teach this course for about three months. I would spend rest of the year working here in the company and people used to ask me then what do you enjoy most? My answer was always, well, if you talk in the terms of the actual content of what I did, the actual minute- to- minute what you do, I really enjoyed the teaching.

I had this great group of students who had taken this course as an elective and who were really smart, bright, the young group with whom I spent all my time interacting with; it was a lot of fun.

But, I also felt, if I never went back to Stanford, it would be no worse a university. It will be just as great a university and as a result I felt I did more of a difference here. So in terms of what actually motivates me, it’s a long answer (laughs). It’s this combination; of this actual content of the job, what you do on a day-to-day basis may be not everything that you do but the great bulk of it, the majority of it should be the stuff that you enjoy and you take pleasure in. At the end of the day motivation is intrinsic to the job. No one from outside can motivate you. You have to feel motivated from within. You have to be self motivated. The only sustainable source of this motivation is the content of the job and the sense of making a difference. If you feel that what you are doing is helping to make something better, the something can be the world around you, the something can be an organization, results, something can be anything. The lives of people, because you are teaching them about classical music and I think that’s where motivation comes from. That desire to make a difference to people. And I am not trying to make any comment about making a difference. You can make a difference in an Akanksha sense where you are helping people who come from a disadvantaged background, ensuring that they will get a platform from which they can move ahead much more rapidly. One doesn’t need to make difference only by doing good social projects.

Part 2- Dr. Naushad Forbes commenting on the future scenario of India after ten years. Coming soon.