“When someone drives around in a BMW or any other luxury car, what would you think of him?” Sujith Kumar J. asked me.
Sujith is secretary of the Chennai chapter of national HRD Network and I was primarily discussing an HR subject with him. A brief digression had taken me to this question. Assuming it was some kind of a trick question, I racked my brain for a clever answer. Unable to think of any, I settled for a straight and predictable one.
“I would think the guy is just loaded,” I said.
“Now, what would you think of a guy who took a train to Meenambakkam and then walked to the BMW showroom and booked his dream car?”
Instead of answering his question, I put one to Sujith, “Is there a guy you know who did that?”
There is indeed someone who did exactly that – Srivathsa Balaji. What’s remarkable is that he subsequently made the entire payment for the BMW 3 Series 320d Prestige he now owns, again taking the train and walking up to the showroom.
The walk from the Meenambakkam station to the BMW showroom was the culmination of a 20-year-old dream for Srivathsa, a 36-year-old who is now employed with an IT major as senior project manager.
When he was 16 years old and a Class XI student, Srivathsa wrote down on a piece of paper that he would own a BMW one day. It was a decision that would influence many other decisions in various spheres of his life. Srivathsa acknowledges that the vision of owning a BMW must have internally directed the choices he made in his career and larger life. He was squirreling away a part of his salary towards this goal.
If he had put down Rolls-Royce on that piece of paper, 20 years ago, would Srivathsa have travelled a different course? Would he have made different career and life choices? In short, would his life script read different?
Our lives are largely shaped by the pictures in our head and the intensity with which we hold on to them. For some, a fancy car is a powerful picture that acts as a spur to wealth creation and shapes the mundane aspects of their lives. In Srivathsa’s case, this desire had instilled discipline in him, especially in the area of money management.
Srivathsa’s team members find his story inspirational: a regular middle-class guy with a regular job, resolutely marching towards a big dream and achieving it. When he drove the car to work for the first time, they were as excited as he was. One of them suggested the car be nicknamed Bucephalus, Alexander the Great’s famous black horse.
Says Srivathsa: “When I did a search on Bucephalus, I realised the name fit in perfectly with my story. Bucephalus was considered untameable and when Alexander the Great tamed the horse, he had achieved what many had considered impossible. When I shared my desire to own a BMW car, many of my friends considered it impossible too.”
