The Postcard to Telco

The notice was pinned to a board in a corridor of the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore. It was 1974, and a young woman named Sudha Kulkarni stopped to read it.

It was a job advertisement from Telco, the Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company, one of the largest engineering firms in India. The company wanted young, bright, hard-working engineers with excellent academic records.

At the bottom was one more line: "Lady candidates need not apply."

A student in Bangalore

Sudha was a postgraduate student in computer science. She had grown up in north Karnataka, in a family of teachers and doctors, and she had studied engineering in Hubli at a time when very few women did. She came top of her university, and now she was one of very few women at the institute.

She was not even planning to take a job. She had a scholarship to study for a doctorate in the United States, and she meant to go.

But the line at the bottom of the notice made her furious. It seemed to say that all her hard work and all her results counted for nothing, simply because she was a woman.

A postcard

She decided to complain to the head of the company. She did not know exactly who ran Telco, but she knew that the whole Tata group was led by J. R. D. Tata, the industrialist and pioneer of Indian aviation. So she bought a postcard and wrote to him.

Her message was short and direct. She reminded him that the Tatas had always been pioneers. They had built some of India's first great industries, steel and power and chemicals, and they had cared about education. In fact, the very institute where she was studying had been founded through the vision and generosity of Jamsetji Tata. She wrote that she was surprised that such a company could turn people away because of their sex.

She posted it and almost forgot about it.

The interview

About ten days later, a telegram arrived. Telco invited her to come to its plant in Pune for an interview, and offered to pay her travel.

Her friends in the hostel teased her. They told her to go anyway: it was a free trip, and she could buy some good saris in Pune. So she went.

When she entered the interview room, there were six people on the panel. She realised that this was serious. She heard someone whisper that this was the girl who had written to JRD.

They asked her hard technical questions, and she answered them well. Then an older member of the panel explained, kindly enough, why the company had never hired women for the factory floor. It was rough, demanding work, he said, and they did not know how a woman would manage.

She replied, in substance, that every change has to begin somewhere. If no company ever gave a woman the chance, no woman would ever work in a factory.

She got the job. She became the first woman engineer hired at Telco's plant in Pune.

Meeting JRD

Years later, by then working at Telco's office in Bombay, Sudha met J. R. D. Tata in person. She has written that she felt nervous, remembering the angry postcard, but he was courteous and warm, and he said he was glad to see girls becoming engineers.

She told another small story about him. One evening she was waiting outside the office for her husband, Narayana Murthy, who was late to collect her. It was getting dark, and the office was emptying. J. R. D. Tata saw her standing alone, asked why she was there, and waited with her until her husband came. Then he told Murthy, gently but firmly, never to keep his wife waiting like that again.

What changed

Sudha Murty, as she became, left Telco after some years, when her husband and his friends started a small software company called Infosys. She went on to lead the Infosys Foundation, to support thousands of schools, libraries and hospitals, and to write many books for children and adults, in English and in Kannada.

Telco, which later became Tata Motors, went on to employ many women engineers.

It began with a young woman who would not let one unfair line go unanswered, and with a busy man at the top of India's biggest business who read a student's postcard, and acted on it.

Want to read more?

Sudha Murty has told this story herself in her essay "Appro JRD", which has been widely reprinted, including by the Tata group. Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's An Uncommon Love describes these years of Sudha and Narayana Murthy's lives in more detail.