The Perfect Vision of Dr. V.

Dr. V. admits that Indian families raise daughters and sons with a certain discipline and love. "At Aurolab," says Dr. Natchiar, "the workers are all farm girls. Most of them are in the big city for the first time in their lives. For them, this is a luxury. They are next to God, working in this environment, helping others. They come to work at Aravind because they want some human element in their work. They want to work under a different philosophy."

Many members of the hospital staff go to the Aurobindo ashram. Says Dr. V.: "We feel that the higher consciousness is trying gradually to give us a system. We are all aware of the parts of the human body as they work. We take in food; we like the taste of it. Part of it is absorbed here, part of it there. But we are not aware of it. The higher consciousness works in the same way. Slowly, your system is built around it, but not according to human nature. At the hospital, we are slowly building an organization that seems to be linked with the higher consciousness."

When Dr. V. said that he wanted to build hospitals, Dr. Natchiar was ready to do what he asked. He was her older brother. He had raised her, and he had been her teacher at ophthalmology school. Dr. Natchiar convinced her husband to study ophthalmology. His sister, in turn, convinced her husband, and on it went: Eventually, nearly the entire family got involved. Little by little, a dynasty was being built. The family is now in its fourth generation.

"We keep talking to the children so that they understand the early days," says Vara, Dr. V.'s niece. "Last Christmas, when half the family went to America, the other half, 13 children, were left home. Dr. V. suggested that they go on a trip of their own. It was then that he organized the New Age Group, as he calls it, a morning study group." Each week, Dr. V. asks them a question: Why are circuses so appealing? Why do balloons cost what they cost? The assignments are meant to be fun and to teach the children about organizations and the social order. The children and their parents meet on Sundays over breakfast, rising at 6 AM to read and discuss the answers to these questions. This is a New Age Group of prophets in the making: Their talk is the language of laughter and passion.

The Future of Perfection

Why do adventure-travel companies escort people to the heights of the world but not to its depths? Perhaps because it's easy up at the top of a mountain in Tibet or Chile to think that you're getting enlightenment. A visit to southern India, a true topological depth, takes spiritual endurance. It forces you to examine your comfortable notions about yourself and about leadership: Your soul is tested more in the depths than it is at the heights.

This is a place where eating an ice cream can threaten your life. The food and water are so corrupt that a Western traveler is almost guaranteed sickness. The Times of India reported last spring that patients were pouring into a hospital in southern India suffering from serious food-borne illnesses. The Indian government raided roadside food kiosks, destroying uneaten food, and cholera experts were brought in to investigate. The smell of centuries of burning flesh and piles of sewage burns inside you. It invades your sleep. A doctor staying at Aravind said she wished she had brought a chilled bag of her own blood, in case of an accident. The AIDS epidemic in India is second only to the horror in Africa. There are truck drivers who stop as many as six times a day to have sex with children as young as 10 years old.

When organizations and systems are weak or breaking, leadership reaches its pinnacle. You have to find another way to perfection. It's not strange that an Aravind exists in India.

"Had enough poverty for a while?" a friend asked me when I got back from this journey to perfection. While I was in India, he had gone to Canyon Ranch in Tucson, Arizona. He works hard at answering 500 emails a day. Like his peers in Silicon Valley, he is focused largely on himself, a flyboy who spends one-third of his life in the sealed-off first-class cabin of one airliner or another. His mantra: What I want, what I need. He is the center of the universe. The bad news is that his universe is no bigger than him.

We may not admit the poverty of our own lives, but we feel it. Soon we may even see it; economic shifts will thrust the reality of it in our face. We are headed for the cyclone, and if we are blind to our soul, we will be uprooted in this new world order.

"People at business schools talk about share price," says Dr. V. "I tell them that I gave sight to 180,000 people last year, and that doesn't mean much to them." But the Aravind model may come to mean a great deal as the map of power continues to shift relentlessly toward the East, and as perfection becomes less the mystery and more the essential job of leadership.