When people get rich, they cut themselves off from the context that has earned them these riches - the context of the common men. They forget they are part of society.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the disconnect between the wealthy and the common people.
N. R. Narayana Murthy highlights a social phenomenon where individuals who attain wealth may lose touch with their roots and the societal context that helped them succeed. This disconnection can lead to a lack of understanding and empathy towards the struggles faced by the common man, reminding us of the importance of remaining grounded and acknowledging our shared human experience.
In practice
During a talk on social responsibility, one could use this quote to illustrate the importance of staying connected to the community.
When you are in business for a long time, you go through good times and bad times. When you go through bad times, you learn to control costs, satisfy customers better, satisfy employees better and become more transparent. Therefore, you build character in the company.
India is known for much development that has happened since our independence, but at the same time, we have also failed on many levels. It is the responsibility of the future generation to ensure that all these failures are corrected and help create a civilised society with equal opportunities for one and all.
The unique instrument to eradicate poverty and usher in prosperity is our youth.
The biggest impediment to growth is in our minds and not in the world outside, and only constant in the world is change.
The future of any corporation is as good as the value system of the leaders and followers in the organization.
If longevity is the best index to measure a company, a basic requirement is the ability of the corporation to generate new and new leaders.
Your qualifications, your CV, are not your life, though you will meet many people of my age and older who confuse the two. Life is difficult, and complicated, and beyond anyone's control, and the humility to know that will enable you to survive its vicissitudes.
And after death something new begins, over which all the powers of the world of death can have no more control.
One hurries through, even though there's time; the past, the continent, is behind; the future is the glowing mouth in the side of the ship; the dim, turbulent alley is too confusedly the present.
We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse, and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it, and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.
An aphorism ought to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world like a little work of art and complete in itself like a hedgehog.
They are lonely. I'm not talking about lonely for a lover or a friend. I mean lonely in the universal sense, lonely inside the understanding that we are tiny people on a tiny little earth suspended in an endless void that echoes past stars and stars of stars.
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