Eagles

I interviewed Edmund some time last year ...this was the interview I was one and a half hours late for, lost in the vastness of Cheras. Although I had intruded into the times of his other meetings...he sat there, and talked to me for one and half hours. I did two stories...this one, which I wrote for Options, was hands down, my favourite.

Datuk Sri Edmund Santhara remembers the day it all went to hell. The Masterskill Group Education Bhd executive director and group chief executive officer was at a Deepavali dinner with the Chief Minister of Johor, Datuk Abdul Ghani bin Othman and had just received an award for being an outstanding Johorean entrepreneur. There was rice and chicken curry among other things but Santhara wasn’t eating much. His head felt like it was going to burst. He excused himself and went to the bathroom to throw up. He came out again and tried to join in the conversations all around him; to no avail.

“I knew it was abnormal. But because I was feeling nauseous, I thought it must be food poisoning.” As it was the weekend and his driver was off and Santhara knew that there was no way he could make the three-hour drive back the other way to Kuala Lumpur by himself. So he went looking for his brother, Datuk Jeevanthiram and asked if he would drive him back. It was important that he get back that night itself. His eldest daughter was going to receive her first Holy Communion the next day and he didn’t want to miss that.

But something was very wrong. He threw up all the way back. And when safely deposited at his front door, he crawled into bed and woke his wife Carline up , telling her that she would have to take him to the hospital a couple of hours from then.

She did. And after being admitted for food poisoning and put through a battery of tests, including a brain scan because of the persistent headache, he heard the three words he was to hear over and over again over the next few days: ruptured brain aneurysm. Even though he ran a university college that was medical in nature, he hardly knew what that meant. A ruptured brain aneurysm? For someone who was hardly 40?

But as he was to discover through compulsive Google and Wikipedia research over the next few weeks of enforced inactivity, it could happen to anybody. It wasn’t really dependent on age or lifestyle. Except that Santhara had been really pushing himself to the limit over the past few months.

Not content with listing his company and all the attendant headaches that came with that, including a government volte face on the subject of Perbadanan Tabung Pendidikan Tinggi Nasional (PTPTN) loans which triggered an exodus of foreign investors causing the share price to tank, he was negotiating a highly challenging PhD, and had already completed 80% of the written work for his doctorate.

“I was working 15 to 16 hours a day and after the IPO I thought I’d take my first two-week break in five years. I gave all my key executives holidays but by the time they got back there was all this turbulence in the share price which required me to fly to Singapore and Hong Kong personally to explain things to them. When I was through with that, it was time to execute the strategies and tactics outlined in our prospectus and develop business in new areas, countering the effects of the unfavourable announcements over the past few months,” he points out.

So maybe it’s no wonder that he collapsed. When the results of the brain scan came through he was transferred with all due haste to Gleneagles. But here he met with the first reverse in the smooth medical machinery, as it were. No local surgeon wanted the responsibility of possibly killing off Edmund Santhara during the very delicate surgery required. Although nearly all were more than willing to assist another surgeon.

Professor Dr Michael Morgan, a world-renowned neurosurgeon happened to be in Malaysia. Carline went to see him and managed to convince him to perform the surgery on her husband. Dr Jagdeep (known to everyone as Dr Jack), a well-known Malaysian neurosurgeon agreed to assist him.

In Gleneagles, for the first time, Santhara, who had always been blessed with rude health, got a firsthand experience of being looked after by the nurses he had trained. “Most of them were from the first batch of nurses who had graduated from Masterskill. One of them, Amrita, spoke to me and told me I have to be strong. It was a completely different experience to have people that you trained saving your life. “

Dr Morgan agreed to do the surgery. Except that it would have to be performed at about five in the morning because he had a paper to present at a conference at 11am, which is why he was in Malaysia in the first place.

Thoughts of mortality circled in his brain and Santhara called the executor of his will. “I said to him, if anything happens, you know what to do. And he said, don’t think like that. Nothing is going to happen. You’re going to be fine.”

The surgery itself went off well. Dr Morgan did not do the conventional thing. Instead of “coiling”, which is a minimally invasive procedure where a platinum coil is introduced into the treatment area to block blood flow and prevent aneurysm, he did a “clipping” which involves removing a section of the skull, spreading the brain tissue apart and placing a tiny metal clip across the neck to stop blood flow into the aneurysm. After clipping the aneurysm, the bone would be secured in its original place and the wound, closed.

He asked Santhara if he had any requests vis-à-vis the surgery. “I told him, please cut above the hairline.”

He takes out his Blackberry to show the pictures he took of his head, post-surgery. “Not bad, eh?” he asks gleefully, looking at the picture of the shaved head and the black stitches emblazoned across it like a bad tattoo. He points to the scar on his head, as it is now, barely perceptible. “That’s because he did a very good job.”

After the surgery, Santhara who had been in the thick of things was ordered not to do any work for three months. He was basically not contactable by phone or Blackberry. The company would have to function without him.

“It gave me a chance to see how the second-liners would do and to tell you the truth, I was very satisfied. Whatever weaknesses I identified, I started addressing the moment I got back to work.”

That was in March. In the meantime, he travelled to Australia and New Zealand, gazed at mountains, and thought about life. “Having a brain aneurysm is a crossroads experience. You get to think about what you really want in life and how you want to go about getting it. It gives you a different perspective altogether.”

Before, it was always about having, being and doing more: “I wanted to build something bigger and better, there was no limit. And then I was struck down and I thought, perhaps it’s not about the destination but about enjoying the journey more.”

He also came up with his own “bucket list”. “While I was in hospital I wrote down about 25 things I would do if I survived the operation, if I got back to normal. There was always a possibility that even if I survived the operation I wouldn’t be 100%. Sometimes with a ruptured aneurysm you lose the ability to walk. Sometimes, you lose your memory.”

He didn’t lose either. But he has noticed a difference. “You can never go back to being the way you were before an aneurysm. I notice that now I have an attention deficiency. Being a chess player, in those days, I could sit for five to six hours and concentrate on a single game. I could have long four-to-five hour meetings. These days, I keep my meetings short, simple and sharp. 45 minutes and that’s it! First half an hour we have the discussion and the following 15 minutes we decide on the execution. We make a decision, life moves on. Things are very different.”

So what’s on his bucket list? “For one thing, I wrote down the name of all the people that I didn’t like very much. This list includes some friends, relatives, old schoolteachers who bullied me back in the day. I had been unhappy with them for so long and I thought the least I could do was to call them and forgive them and ask them to forgive me. And I told them, no doubt we dislike each other, but is there anything we could do together?”

He also decided to participate more actively in social work and as a staunch Catholic, renew his commitment to the church. “I’m active in the Telugu Association of Malaysia and I’m also active in my own foundation, the Malaysian Intellect Development Foundation which focuses on active citizenship via leadership and also entrepreneurship among the youth. And I now want to start a motivational company.”

He said another thing that the brain aneurysm arrested was his mad pursuit of money, power and status. “Life is not measured by these things. As a young business executive, what do you do? You want to earn more money. As you move up the corporate ladder, you want more power. And after attaining money and power, what’s important is status. You get entrapped in this world. But after coming through the aneurysm I woke up and suddenly these things didn’t seem so important anymore. They do not guarantee happiness.”

He said he felt a call. “Everyone feels the call. It could be a religious call. It could be a call for social contribution. It could be for doing small things in a big way in your community. A simple thing can change people’s lives. You don’t have to change thousands of them. If you could change the lives of 10 people and they in turn affect another 10 people, it snowballs.”

He also worked on his thesis for his doctorate. “Education has always been important to me. I did my MBA part time while I was working. I enrolled in the doctorate programme and had completed 80% of my work. I went back to them and asked them for an extension to April 30; that was the last date of submission and I did submit my thesis and am waiting for my final verification.”

Santhara has probably worked harder than most highly educated people to get to where he is. While he was still living in the estate in Renggam and was put in the science stream which meant that three times of a week, he had to stay back for ninth period, a peculiarly Johorean institution, there were no more buses back to where he lived. He needed to get a bus to Renggam town and from there, a bus to the Ulu Remis estate. And from Ulu Remis, he would have to hitch a ride with one of the passing lorries to get back home.

“There were days when I reached home at nine at night. One day it was really bad and I only reached home at one o’clock. Walking through an oil palm plantation when it’s all dark is an experience. Snakes are one thing, and you have all kinds of things running over your head. But it was fun. It helped me be a better person.”

From Renggam, he moved to Johor Bahru. “That was when I moved to Sekolah Dato’ Jaafar, which was a turning point in my life. SDJ was something different. There, I learned about ownership. Our principal Harbajan Singh said if you want to see how a school is managed, you look at their toilets and their field. In SDJ, every student had their own plot and every day you had to go into school early and tend your plot and clean the grounds you were assigned to in the duty roster.

“A lot of things I learned there are actually implemented in Masterskills. For an educational institution, it’s remarkably clean. And we were the first one to put all our students in uniform. I did it because I believe in standardization. I was also in Pelapis which is the reserve officers training unit and that’s where I implemented coloured stripes for our students. If you are a first-year, you wear one stripe, if you are a second-year, you wear two stripes. If you are a nursing student you wear a blue stripe and if you are a pharmaceutical student you wear an orange stripe. The idea is to identify them and also to create competition among them. If you all your friends are wearing two stripes and you fail your first year and are only wearing one stripe, you would probably find that unacceptable.

“The idea is to identify them and create competition among them. A lot of things we do here eventually became the industry standard and people copy us without knowing why we do what we do,” he chuckles.

University was a challenge. “I got offered a business course with UKM. When I told my great grandmother I was going to university, she said, what course will you be doing? And I said business studies. And she wanted to know why on earth I needed to go to university to learn about business. You can’t blame her. This is how they thought in the old days.

“And then I went to university and completed my four-year programme in three and a half years. I didn’t do that well in my first year. But I improved subsequently in my second and third years.”

However, the results of his unspectacular first year dragged him down and he only managed to scrape a cumulative grade of 2.99, which would mean a second-class (lower) honours. This was unacceptable. “I wanted to sit for two more papers to bring up my cumulative grade and the university pointed out that I had already completed what I needed to. So I wrote them a letter saying that as I have four years to complete my degree, I was technically entitled to one more semester. So they allowed me to do it and I brought up my average which allowed me to get a second-class upper.”

During the final semester he had a part-time job in Johor Bahru and taking the classes for the paper meant he had to ride his little used mosquito bike, a 1988 Kawasaki Ninja which didn’t have a radiator, about 340km to University Kebangsaan Malaysia, to attend classes once a week.

“I would stop halfway at Pagoh and have a Coke or a 100 Plus. And then I would pour the rest of my drink on the engine to see how hot it was. If there was a lot of smoke I would know it was very hot and wait a little longer for the engine to cool before I resumed my journey. These days, when I pass the Pagoh rest-stop, it takes me back and I always stop and smile at what it used to be like. I notice that after the aneurysm, I value memories like these a lot more.”

And after all that, he was unable to find a job. “I sent out more than 200 resumes in the course of a year without getting even one job offer. And then I finally landed a position in a company that used to be known as Hitechniaga. It was under the MBf group. And it was there that I built my career.”

He is indebted to Hitechniaga’s CEO George Gan for giving him a chance and teaching him about business. “It was he who introduced me to terms like paradigm shifter and paradigm pioneer, two concepts that I applied to Masterskill. I moved within MBf from technology to finance to education.” And it was here, that he finally settled eventually going on to take the ailing Masterskill group to its present heights.

Having finally secured a real job, one that was commensurate with his education, you would have thought that Santhara would start living it up. He didn’t. “A lot of guys I knew bought nice sexy cars like Alfa Romeos, after graduation, and hung out in Bangsar. I hung out in Bangsar too, except perhaps, not in the same places. I was going to the Strategic Business School there, pursuing my MBA. I had taken a bank loan of RM45,000 from Bank Rakyat to pay for my course at an interest rate of 11% to 12% which was normal in those days. So while the other guys partied, a huge chunk of my disposable income went towards my studies.”

So stretching himself from paycheck to paycheck he continued to climb. And he did not climb alone. “I met my wife Carline at university. She was a straight A student. She was my good friend in 1992, my girlfriend in 1993 and we got married in 1998. We have two daughters, one 10 and the other 5. A while ago, I gave 12.8% of my shares in the company to my wife. So she is effectively the largest shareholder in Masterskill, a fact which she reminded me of recently, when I called myself the largest shareholder,“ he says with a laugh.

Santhara said his father had once told him that no matter how high it flies, a house bird can never be an eagle. “I had been comparing myself to my university batch mates who happened to be the children of managers while my own father was a labourer. He was trying to tell me that I could never be one of them. I pointed out to him recently that he was wrong. It is possible for a house bird to transform itself into an eagle. We can all be eagles in our own way.”