Sid Mittra was not the boy voted most likely to succeed. He kept failing and failing as a young man, but eventually won big.
He has lived an extraordinary life. And that was before becoming one of the founders of the financial planning movement in the United States. In the U.S., he has been a financial planning practitioner, teacher and author. But before that he had to overcome overwhelming odds.
Yet even as it is seemingly impossible for a bee to fly, Mittra was able to surmount a million-to-one odds. They came from being born into a poor country, India, a nation that was struggling under an imperialist master that finally was sent packing in 1947.
Mittra succeeded in business in his country, went to a foreign country -- actually the book reads like a travelogue as he is forced to go through numerous nations in the pursuit of his dream -- where he obtains several advanced degrees, success again in business and raises a family. It may seem to some glorious and exciting now looking back on more than 80 years of Mittra’s life. Still, one rises from reading this little biography thinking that it was anything but beer and Skittles.
It has been a life in which the author must have thought many times about turning back. “Whom the Gods would destroy they would first make mad,” the ancient Greek playwright Euripides said. But Mittra never went mad.
How did he do it?
It was in part owing to the teachings of a professor. As a young man, he told Mittra that, if a bee could defy the laws of physics, humans could also overcome almost anything.
“I hope,” his professor says at the conclusion of the bee lesson, “this convinces you that the best course of action in life is to adopt a pluck-until-luck philosophy. That is, if you wish to succeed, never, ever give up, no matter how many times you’ve failed.” (Page 17)
Lesson taken.
Mittra would fail and fail, especially in academics, but would go on to attain much success in a busy life that still has some unwritten chapters. (Mittra is not going quietly. He has a plan to bring financial education to more and more people.) Mittra would get an education, which would require him to go on an astounding quest across three continents and thousands of miles from India to Northern Florida. This is a story within a story. It is a tale of a stranger in numerous strange lands. He had little money, difficulty with the way some Americans spoke English and no assurance that he would ever actually reach his destination. Yet the bee flew.
He kept pressing on as have tens millions of others who came to this country, a nation of immigrants. Mittra’s story is the story of people who came here from the subcontinent and many other places. It could be the story of people who came here from the Far East. It could be story of my immigrant parents, refugees of Hapsburg and British Empires. (Mittra’s family and mine share a prejudice -- neither liked the British Empire. My maternal grandfather, rumored to be a member of the IRA, supposedly had a price on his head and was being sought by the notorious irregular British police force, the Black and Tans. But I digress).
Mittra’s story is one of growing up poor in Banaras, a holy city in Northern India in the last decades of the British Raj. His father, an Indian banker, prematurely dies. It throws the family into a struggle to stay out of poverty. This is likely a foreign concept to many people who have only known Western affluence (See the s idebar below, Growing Up in India in the 1930s). So Mittra had to fight his way up the greasy pole. He had to struggle to get an education and find a place in banking. It was a long struggle. He often heard and sometimes actually believed that he was “a dunce.”
He was a teenager when World War II broke out -- the British Empire was crumbling and the Japanese, after overrunning Myanmar (nee Burma), threatened India. His brother, a doctor, achieved great things, but Mittra struggled through school. He eventually landed a job as a lowly clerk in banking. He struggled to find help in obtaining a graduate degree.
Mittra was getting ahead at the bank. They were letting him write research reports. Maybe he was on the fast track in his homeland. Yet he still wanted to obtain a graduate degree. After blowing a chance for a Fulbright scholarship because he misread a date, he applied to myriad American universities for a scholarship.
After endless rejections, he finally succeeded. But there were caveats -- one obvious and one not so obvious. His bank pleaded with him to stay in India. Mittra took a big chance and turned his back on a secure job in a friendly environment. He headed for the United States to try to obtain an advanced degree, which he might or might not obtain and which might or might not mean a good job in a new land.
The university was in Florida in the Deep South, at a time when Jim Crow was still strong. Mittra, a dark skinned Indian, was heading into a region racked by racial turmoil.
Making things worse, he accompanies a friend on an extended car trip from Gainesville, Fla., to Washington, D.C. There he needs to do some research in his pursuit of a graduate degree. His friend is a white woman. He is going through the heart of the South at a time when many states prohibited the mixing of races.
“Why you riding with this nigah?” a police officer, who looks like a character out of The Dukes of Hazzard, demands of his female friend (page 122). The cop puts him in jail for a night, which, at that point, is probably the best place for him. The cop, under Georgia law, had been required to stop interracial couples.
In this case, apparently, ignorance was bliss. If he had known what he was heading into, almost any person with even an iota of poltroonery (yours truly) would have been on the first plane back to the subcontinent.
Still, if one wants to believe in a divine plan, Mittra had some kismet and luck on his side. The Jim Crow cop, in a strange sort of way, was doing him a favor by separating him from his white friend at the beginning of a trip. If they had taken the trip together, there is a fair chance that Mittra wouldn’t have survived or would have been badly injured somewhere. Instead, after his night in the pokey, he is put on a bus and sent on his way.
Mittra eventually ends up back in Florida. He obtains his doctorate in economics, something he did not set out to study. He goes into teaching. Mittra succeeds, despite many roadblocks, in staying in the United States. He becomes wildly successful in financial planning. He authors more than a dozen books. One of them, Practical Financial Planning for Professionals, becomes a foundation book for generations of financial planners.
He marries his Indian sweetheart. He raises a family. He beats the ostensibly impossible odds.
The underdog is standing in the winner's circle. The rebels beat the empire. The Brooklyn Dodgers finally overcome the mighty Yankees and win the 1955 World Series. The Boston Bruins actually defeat the supposedly invincible Montreal Canadians in the playoffs.
Sometimes it is the person who is voted least likely to succeed who ends up with the brass ring. This is Sid Mittra’s story.
Yes, The Bee Can Fly, by
Sidebar: Growing Up In India In The 1930s
“Our beds consisted of mattresses on the floor, buttressed by long pillows. Our toys were pots and pans and rags. Our clothes were simple and always handed down to the next child. Because we did not have central heating and air conditioning, let alone refrigerators, we improvised by creating hand-held fans with banana leaves for cooling off during the hot season. We used a clay pot with a long, slender neck called a surahi for cooling drinking water. In the winter, we heated our rooms by burning charcoal in earthen posts. The practice fouled the air and was dangerous, but no one questioned it because it was useless to complain. It simply was the way it was done at the time.” -- “Yes, the Bee Can Fly,” pages 21-22