DLF chairman emeritus K P Singh recollects that his mother had once advised him that ‘whenever you fall you must look up’ and this has had a profound impact on his life.
He recollects an incident several years back when he was travelling back by bus with his mother Rampyari Devi to Bulandshahr, his native place, after visiting her village near Modinagar.
“I may have been around four or five years old and we were returning home by bus from her village near Modi Nagar. We had to change to a bus in Ghaziabad to go to Bulandshahr. That’s when I slipped and fell down on the step. Children normally get a helping hand but my mother said ‘beta you will fall and fall you will a thousand and million times in your life but remember one thing – when you fall you naturally look down but you must try and look up.”
“These words are etched in my memory even today,” Singh told HT.com
He said that when you fall, your natural reaction is to look down but she had asked me to look up. “I spoke to a few psychologists later in life and asked them what it means and they said it means that she built in you a positivity of life. I can’t think of anything negative,” he said.
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Singh recollects in his new book ‘Why the Heck Not’ that his mother was a spiritual person and would often ‘pull Kushal (KP Singh) into the puja room and make (he and his sister) them sit with her while she prayed and recited the Gayatri Mantra…”
Singh says that his mother taught him “one thing – when you grow in life remember people will reach out to you for help, try and help them.”
The book ‘Why the Heck Not’ has an entire chapter devoted to his wife Indira ’The battle for Indira’ that talks about finding the best specialists, carrying out research on every aspect of her health and making tough life-saving decisions on her behalf.
On women taking up careers in the real estate sector
Asked about his views on women entering the real estate sector, he said that with the kind of stakeholders one has to deal with, it is perhaps easier for men to consolidate and get approvals for land.
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“But that is one side of the story. There is a second side of the story of this business which is important where women can do well if not better than men,” he said, adding where developing the land at hand into a building or a project is concerned.
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