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The will to survive
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Sunil Robert’s I Will Survive was launched recently at Landmark
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FROM RAGS TO RICHES Sunil Robert
On the cover of the book is the photograph of a tall, dark, smiling man. Dressed in an elegantly cut dark-blue suit, complete with a cream silk tie.
Hardly the kind of man you would expect to find squatting merrily on a pavement outside the White House.
But Sunil Robert is the man in question, and there has decidedly been very little in his life that has gone the way one would expect.
He remembers the moment when that photograph on his book, I Will Survive – Comeback Stories of a Corporate Warrior, came to be. “It was the first time I had taken my mother to the U.S. She was horrified when I suddenly dropped to the ground, and asked her to take a photograph!” he remembers, laughing.
The story of his life, from battling poverty and struggling to support his family of six, to becoming an international award-winning communicator, forms the seven chapters of this book.
The launch of I Will Survive in Landmark, with well-known psychiatrist Vijay Nagaswami as the special guest, was informal. “These days, most people feel like they’ve hit a roadblock in their lives, by the time they’re 25 or 26. But here’s somebody who has been through trials most of us can hardly begin to imagine, and lived to tell the tale,” said Dr. Nagaswami.
“Twenty two years ago, this city,” Robert says of Chennai, “was a pivotal point in my journey. I was 18 years old. Those were the loneliest days of my life, the lowest point. I would sit on St. Thomas Mount, watching planes take-off and land, having no idea where to start setting things right, or even whether I could. But there, sitting on the hillock, is where I had my epiphany, where I decided that if I ever wanted to set things right, this was it. Some of the finest friendships and events in my life happened in this city.”
During his college days, Robert became entrenched in gangs, and was a goon-for-hire. (“That’s something I probably wouldn’t put on my CV,” he laughs.) “I’ve had to struggle every single day to rebuild my life” he says. Robert went on to complete a degree in journalism and MBA, while working shifts at several jobs. Meanwhile, he was selected from amongst thousands of applicants for an International Youth Exchange Program in Italy, and would work at several multinational companies in the years to come. For him, the recognition for all that he had to endure came in 2006, when he was awarded the Stevie International Award, which is considered the Pulitzer for corporate communications.
“Voltaire was right when he said ‘Most men live lives of quiet desperation’,” says Robert. “I’m sure my story is not uncommon. It’s just that we tend to undermine our experiences, and don’t value them enough.”
Robert’s strained relationship with his abusive father defined most of the first two decades of his life. Finally, it was a decision to confront the issues that pushed him to write everything in a letter to his father. “A blue inland letter,” he smiles.
His father’s response was to embrace the son he had mistreated for so long — a reconciliation that changed the way they lived as a family. “It’s only when you have a child of your own that you realise what decisions your parents must have had to confront,” he says. His son Aman is eight now. “Very soon, I’ll probably get a letter too,” he laughs.
CHITHIRA VIJAYKUMAR
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