There is an almost Jesuit sense in the way N R Narayana Murthy sees the role of luck in life. The man, who has come to personify the phenomenal success story of India Inc, has repeatedly dwelt on how turning points in life are often fortuitous events though, to make the most of it, one’s response to it is anything but.

At the 30th Annual General Meeting of Infosys on Saturday, in effect his last working day before he formally retires as chairman of the board on August 20, NRN spoke of his three-decade experience leading his company with a seed capital of $250 to one that generated a revenue of $6.1 billion in 2011, as “both exhilarating and humbling”. In his valedictory speech, he went on to speak of how his story is one of what any average person anywhere is capable of doing, but behind the aspartame phrases, one could detect the grit that made him, over the years, take the life and death decisions his co-founders often shied away from.

Twenty years ago, on a blustery Saturday afternoon not very different from the one yesterday, in a small office in a leafy lane in Bangalore, NRN, by his own account, sat without saying a word for four hours. After nine years of unremitting, often despairing, work Infosys had finally begun to make some money.  The company, defying the doomsayers, had proved that it cannot be written off, and more importantly a foreign investor was willing to shell out a million US dollars to buy it. His six co-founders – including the likes of Nandan Nilekani, Kris Gopalakrishnan and Shibulal – debating the offer in the room, to a man wanted to sell.

Then NRN spoke and he provided an entirely different perspective on the Indian economy’s liberalisation that was just kicking in, of the possibilities it afforded and of which the buy-out offer itself was a small encouraging sign. He spoke passionately but to the point, and in half an hour he had won new converts and the company has since then never looked back. He was the real progenitor of Friedman’s ‘flat world’ though the credit, at least for its conceptualisation, goes to the more articulate Nilekani. On Saturday, at the AGM, NRN, untypically, allowed a little triumphalism to creep into his speech when he pronounced, “I have always been the No 1 actor in every decision this company has made.” It was sharp and unambiguous, and it was fully merited.

As a student in the district headquarters town of Mysore in the mid-1960s, NRN’s dream was to become a “junior engineer in a hydroelectric project in the new temples of Nehru’s India.”  The most he would he concede to his ambition was the “macho” one of building a generator for the power plant. But then, life began to give him chances, unlooked for, unforeseen.

Narayana Murthy’s wife Sudha with son Rohan and daughter-in-law Lakshmi Venu at the Infosys AGM

From Kanpur IIT where a fortuitous meeting with an American academic revealed to him the magic of computers and his stint in IIM-Ahmedabad, to his now mythologized hitchhike from Paris to India, rudely interrupted by 72 hours in a Bulgarian prison that rid him of his Leftist sympathies forever, NRN learnt to see both triumphs and trials as tacit lessons for continuous improvement. “Learning from experience, however, can be complicated. It can be much more difficult to learn from success than from failure. If we fail, we think carefully about the precise cause. Success can indiscriminately reinforce all our prior actions,” he said at a pre-commencement address in 2004 for students of New York University’s Stern School of Business.

It is this relentless rigour that saw him lead the Infosys turnaround in the late nineties and make it the first-ever Indian registered company on the Nasdaq. He was the main architect  when it pioneered such things as stock options for employees, internal transparency, a fun-filled workplace ethic and global delivery model that made Infosys, all of which became the industry norm for corporate governance and, far more importantly, showed the world what was capable with just brain power and sweat equity.

Of late, Infosys has slipped to second place in the IT sector behind main rival TCS in terms of net profits, and its last quarter results were not particularly favourable, a point that came in for some criticism on the part of the shareholders at the AGM. From August 20, when NRN turns 65 and will be divested of all official roles in the company he founded, a new leadership, many of them his trusted protégés, will take over. The jury, as it indeed is in such cases, is out on what they will be able to do the company in the long term, but NRN apparently has ensured that his main legacy that he bequeathed in the form of casually dressed men and women seen loitering in Infosys campuses, often the best and the brightest, who, when confronted with a problem and its even more outrageous solution, retort ‘why not’?

At the AGM towards the end, as the pathos-filled lyrics of Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna livened up a power-point presentation, NRN, seated on the dais, was a study in concentration. In the reticence, and the slightly sagging shoulders, however, one imagined a little pensiveness. But the man, as always, has his future decoded and ready. As he has said: “I believe that we have all at some time eaten the fruit from trees that we did not plant. In the fullness of time, when it is our turn to give, it behooves us in turn to plant gardens that we may never eat the fruit of, which will largely benefit generations to come. I believe this is our sacred responsibility, one that I hope you will shoulder in time.” Those words, like the man’s name, are bound to endure for a long time.