Hard work and all is all fine but you need luch too.

Santosh Sivaraman passed out of Vivekananda College in Chennai. His parents and family were all professionals in some field or the other but he didn't do any of that because he wasn't quite ready for it. Those days most people hankered for a job in a bank or to become a civil servant or a doctor or an engineer but Santhosh confessed that since he was not particularly bright though he never did well in academic fields. He always did better outside the classroom.

In spite of being a backbencher in college he had some of the finest brains sitting on sides of him in class. In his defense he says it is almost always that backbenchers turn out to be the leaders of the future. He was one of the lucky few whose father’s allowed them to take a room and stay outside of college hostels and even his home. He admits that he never ever wanted to work; which is strange coming from a man whose father was in the army.

But now in a strange reversal he continues to work while his more famous classmates and associates have all retired. What happened was fortuitous. One day he read about glass at the US Consulate library and right after that he came across a man who knew how to bend glass tubes for making neon signs. He got him to make a little glass Ganesha and he gave it to a friend who ran a small souvenir store. A doctor bought it for the princely sum of Rs 100/-. That was the start of his present business, which is making and exporting hundreds and hundreds of glass Ganeshas. He hit upon a clever idea of involving unemployed women to canvass for orders. So these ladies went out and sold them to customers in all sorts of places. Places that he could never have accessed. Santhosh had no idea of what he was getting into on that fateful day when he came across that man bending glass. Listen to his fascinating story of luck.