G Sadananda Prabhu, my dear father picked up a skill from Shri K P Hegde, the Manager of Kanara Chamber of Commerce and Industry. He would always have a writing pad and would note down a ‘To-Do List.’
He was very fond of Mathematics and as was the norm during those days, without calculators, the ability to retain numbers was reduced to simplicity, as one had to be very agile in the competitive field of commodities, to learn to buy and sell. It was also very important to maintain relationships. He invested in a telephone connection, as communication is the most important aspect of life in business.
The ‘To-Do List’ was always interesting and classified. Even the requirements for home or something he would like to do after a few weeks was jotted down. This is an element of memorising and compiling your activity to the list of things one must do.
Remembrance: He was always organised for the day, or the week, or the time ahead. In today’s atmosphere of doing as much as you can or as much as you should with the aid of tools has expanded the scope of one’s abilities.
The beauty of Sadananda Prabhu’s action was that he wrote as much as he wished to accomplish, he wrote as much as he could what he intended to do. The other aspect of it was, whenever a thought came to his mind, even in the middle of the night he would take out the pad and write it down before he went back to sleep.
So, this act of writing down was not a decision. It was a thought. This is what helped him to build relationships. He was welcomed by the business community and his chosen friends because of choosing the few ones he wanted to keep a relationship with. Even when encountering a stranger visiting his office, he would smile and make them feel at home, enquiring about their whereabouts. He had that uncanny knack of even getting to know all about that person. This endeared him to both suppliers and customers. His actions were always beneficial to people. He was very wary and alert that he made no mistakes or errors.
Many times, I have seen him doing compound calculations on a slip of paper, which arrived exactly to 2 decimals, something we take for granted in the calculator today. He said to me once, “who is good in math is good for life”. When I ponder over this, yes, successful people have always been good at numbers. It is valid for business or economy. But when I studied logic after many years, I found that mathematics and logic are something that go together. We should stop the nonsense in our public life and bring sense.
Common sense is there in everybody and he had it in abundance. Whenever he spoke, he had the art of making sense and that is what made him dear to all.
