Be proud you’re wife of a soldier, highest honour for anyone in India: Sudha Murty to Army wives

PTI, Mar 15, 2024, 10:10 AM IST

Philanthropist and author Sudha Murty during her oath ceremony as Rajya Sabha MP, at Parliament House in New Delhi, Thursday, March 14, 2024. (Credit: PTI Photo/Vijay Verma)

New Delhi: “Be proud that you are the wife of a soldier, the highest honour anybody can get in this country,” Rajya Sabha MP Sudha Murty on Thursday told members of Army Wives Welfare Association here.

The engineer-turned-philanthropist in an interaction with the women at Manekshaw Centre in Delhi Cantonment also said the honour that their husbands get through their contribution to protecting the nation is ‘divided by two’, saying one half belongs to him (husband) and the other to you (wife).

Murty, 73, the former chairperson of Infosys Foundation and the author of several books, mostly for children, on Thursday took oath as Rajya Sabha MP in the presence of her husband N R Narayana Murthy.

“Be proud about your husband, they are protecting the nation. And all that honour is divided by two, half to them and half to you. Be proud that you are the wife of a soldier, the highest honour anybody can get in this country,” she told the gathering.

During the interaction, she said she gets thousands of invitations to attend events but her work schedule doesn’t allow her to attend most of them, ‘but I tell my secretary that if it is (an invitation) from the Army, the Navy or the Air Force, then, never say no. Because, I have a duty towards them’.

Murty also gave some parenting lessons to the women in the audience and asked them to use ‘HR skills’ they use in their lives to raise their children.

‘…Like unique stripes of a zebra, every child is unique. You have two children, they are different. So, you have to use your HR skills on children. And, women have best HR skills,’ she said.

In her address, she told the gathering of AWWA members that women in different stages of their lives, from a daughter to a mother, and sister to a mother-in-law ‘have handled many HR relations but you are aware they are not HR relations. And, that technique you should use to bring up your children’.

‘You should not give them (children) money, as much as possible; children are not experienced. You should not pamper them too much, because life is hard…,’ she added.

Murty, who was the first woman engineer to have worked with TELCO, is famously known to have provided the seed capital of Rs 10,000 from her emergency funds to her husband to start Infosys, which now has a market cap of over $80 billion.

She is also renowned for her contribution to Kannada and English literature and is a recipient of the Sahitya Akademi Bal Sahitya Puraskar, the Padma Shri (2006) and the Padma Bhushan (2023).

On a question on which issues she would raise in Parliament, Murty said, “Let me understand… the very first day I am going to school, how will I answer other questions. Let me understand, let me study, when the times comes, you will get to know.” Asked how she felt about this achievement, the engineer-turned-philanthropist quipped, “I am always neutral, I am happy. Let it come, let it (session) start. I don’t speculate so much. As it comes, I will take it.”