Rich Mintz  

I’m currently wrapping up Eliza Fay’s Original Letters from India, the NYRB edition of a collection (first published in 1925) of letters written in the 1770s. Fay traveled from Dover to India (with her husband, a lawyer) at a time when the British imperial outposts were genuine outposts, beset by dangers of all kinds. When you set out for India in those days, safe arrival at which was not guaranteed, and Fay and her husband were detained and held hostage twice during their twelve-month (!) journey.

It’s hard to empathize nowadays, when anyone with $1000 can book an advance plane ticket and be safely in India next week, more or less guaranteed. Exoticism will never entirely disappear as long as people are tribalist and closed-minded (i.e., forever); but a world in which even modestly paid manual laborers have access to cheap mobile phones is very different from Fay’s world. When she dispatched her letters, she had no guarantee they would even arrive.

I found Ariel Levy’s profile of Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw, Indian biotech CEO, refreshing on multiple levels.

In her free time, around the edges of running a gigantic biotech company, Mazumdar-Shaw devotes her surplus entrepreneurial energy to changing the Indian health delivery system, and the approach to health prevention and health insurance, at the level of the Indian village.

For one thing, it’s always interesting to hear about an energetic, thoughtful, successful businessperson, who’s not afraid to think capitalistically but who applies her surplus entrepreneurial creativity to social challenges. I never heard of Mazumdar-Shaw, the billionaire founder of Biocon, and in fact I’m not sure I’ve ever taken notice of Biocon, which gives you a sense of just how insular we Americans are, even the thinking stratum of us.

For another, I enjoy reading a story about a strong professional woman who was underappreciated in her early career — indeed, who worked in a country where women are systematically underappreciated — who maintained her good humor and indefatigability, and kept pushing forward in the direction indicated by her own personal compass, and ended up being successful. Her Scottish husband John Shaw is a successful businessman in his own right, but it’s clear from this story that in their household her career is privileged over his, and he’s comfortable with that.

It’s a classic entrepreneurial story (nobody believed in me, but I believed, and kept going until I succeeded), but not all entrepreneurs do keep their good humor. Some end up embittered and paranoid, resentful of those who didn’t believe in them, unable to share credit or mentor others, and unwilling to credit the large share of luck that played a role in their successes.

Mazumdar-Shaw doesn’t seem that way, at least in this telling. She hasn’t lost her good nature or her optimism, doesn’t seem to have an outsized opinion of her own talents, and is clearly generous both financially and emotionally to her professional staff, who speak highly of her. What’s more, she’s held onto her sense of social vision, which is what separates a great entrepreneur from a good one. She wants nothing less than to transform the healthcare experience of the Indian villager.

Historically entrepreneurialism has been seen as a men’s game, but I’m glad that’s changing. Human society needs all the social creativity it can muster, and that’s doubly true in places like India where a quarter of the population lives in stark deprivation. Just imagine a world where everyone was encouraged to contribute according to his or her full talents and interests, to reach his or her full flowering, in an environment that fully respected differences of approach and inclination — how much richer would life be!