The INS Vikrant, in its lifetime, generated enough power to light up the whole of Mumbai. The very fact that there are a couple of thousand kilometers of cables on board is an indication as to the enormity of giving it a “mid-life refitting”. Sharad Junghare, who did his bit to help with the refitting, can tell you that it is no simple task.

Hardly easier was the mid-life refitting that Junghare himself underwent. The shift from a successful career in the defense forces to the management of a business process outsourcing company is, to say the least, radical.

To serve in the armed forces was a long-standing ambition for him. Junghare entered the civil engineering course in Vishweshwarayya Regional Engineering College in Nagpur merely because his father was a civil engineer, and the trend then—and, for the matter, now—was to become an engineer or a doctor.

The important thing, he realized sometime around then, was that, if someone is unsure whether what he is doing is what he wants to do, the best he can do is to do it as well as he can. His ambition crystallized when he figured out that the Navy had as much a need for engineers as it did for sailors. He applied for, and got, a job at the Naval Dockyard in Bombay. His performance at the familiarization course was appreciated, and Junghare was sent for a postgraduate course in Naval Architecture at the Indian Institute of Technology in Delhi. He returned to work at the Naval Dockyard for several years.

It was to be the most exciting time he spent in his entire naval career. The comfortable pad he was provided with in Navy Nagar in south Bombay had a panoramic view of the golf course and the Arabian Sea. Besides his work on the Vikrant, Junghare was also involved in maintenance of the navy’s Russian submarines. The Russia connection was just starting.

Sweepers and scientists
St Petersburg can be bitingly cold in winter. On an average temperatures range in the minus twenties, but can go as low as –40 degrees Centigrade. Winter lasts for seven months and more; and the two months of summer, with continuous daylight, is an occasion to be celebrated. (The ladies, in particular, look forward to showing off their new dresses.) Junghare recalls the time when he saw dead bodies uncovered by the melting snows—people who had passed out on vodka, and never quite woke up. For the young man from Nagpur who went to the “most beautiful city in the world” to do a postgraduation in the Military Academy, it was a sight that could hardly be forgotten.

Junghare studied for the design and construction of warships and submarines. Of the three years he spent in the then Soviet Union (Gorbachev had just entered the arena, with talks of perestroika and glasnost), two were as a bachelor, and one as a married man. He made friends from street sweepers to scientists, in part to become a fluent speaker of Russian, and in part out of that desire to have an identity that is natural for someone in a different country.

He subsequently returned to spend four years at the Naval Headquarters in New Delhi. It was the second time the question of what it was he wanted to do arose, and he applied the same conclusion. And for the second time, it worked.

Junghare was handpicked by no less a personality than the then Head of the Defence Research and Development Laboratories (and now President of India) APJ Abdul Kalam, to work on the Integrated Guided Missile Development Programme.

A Different Calling
So how did this man end up as Senior Vice President, Operations, at a fairly large ITES company called TransWorks? Well, after his twenty years with the defense forces, when he became eligible to receive pension, a question began to nag Junghare. He had spent a long time at it, but did he want to spend the rest of his life designing Weapons of Mass Destruction?

No, he decided, and set to finding out what it was that he wanted to do next.

Call centers were the “hottest” that was happening, Junghare learned, and the ground was relatively unbroken. He could either set up an offshore concern, working for a big U.S. company seeking to cut costs, or be his own boss. Having had more than enough of working under someone, Junghare quickly dismissed the first idea. He got together with his friends Prakash Gurbaxani and KP Nair and, after securing the faith of a venture capitalist, set up 24/7, one of the first in the field. He was Employee No. 1 there.

The union was short-lived, though. Differences in opinion between the three of them on one side and the VC on the other crept up, and they left 24/7 to join TransWorks—a company that had been started around the same time. This fact was ideal, says Junghare, for they could “pick up where they had left off”.

Many of his former employees at 24/7 have joined TransWorks, a fact that he points out with some pride. The feeling is understandable, for, as he says, one of the major changes his newly refit life was an interaction with college students on a hitherto unprecedented scale. The other was the concept of selling, of which there was hardly any in his time with the Navy.

Then there was the whole paradigm shift as far as the concept of finances went. When working under the government, a specific amounted of money was allotted, while in private enterprise, the money had to be made first.

Regulating rules
However, there are several useful lessons Junghare learnt in the former phase, which have stood him in good stead in his venture into the world of big business.

Predictably, the discipline those twenty years of Navy life hardwires into its men have done him more than a bit of good. It is important, Junghare asserts, to understand and appreciate established procedures that are so much a part of life in the forces. And it is equally important to know their limits, and when to let common sense take over. He cites an amusing example relating to the application for leave.

The instance he mentions is the “960-kilometer rule”. There used to be a rule that when a person went on leave, he was entitled to compensation for the cost of travel incurred—up to a distance of 960 km. Beyond that, he would have to foot the balance himself. Although Junghare himself had little to lose from this rather curious clause (Nagpur, his hometown, comes well within the distance from most places he might be stationed in), he wondered about the 960 km rule.

A little bit of digging provided an astounding answer. The distance is the farthest possible between any two points on the British Isles. The rule, lifted unquestioningly from the British original, was a relic of the colonial past. “A classic example of following a rule blindly,” laughs the ex-serviceman.