The billionaire’s daughter who endured a harsh lesson in austerity and went on to become a chancellor’s wife
AS THE wife of the new Chancellor of the Exchequer, Akshata Murthy’s wealthy family background may at first suggest she is anything but accustomed to frugality and austerity.
However, those pondering any subtle influence she may wield over Rishi Sunak’s budgets may find tantalising clues in a moving letter her billionaire Indian father wrote to her on the birth of his first grandchild.
Narayana Murthy, who founded the multinational information technology business Infosys, wrote how he instilled within her values that would help her thrive in the modern world.
Mr Murthy – listed in 2012 by Fortune magazine as one of the world’s 12 most successful entrepreneurs – explains how her surprisingly humble upbringing gave her valuable lessons that means she now knows “the importance of austerity”, a quality perhaps better known to a former chancellor, George Osborne.
Born in April 1980 in Hubli, a small town 250 miles north of Bangalore, she was raised by her paternal grandparents while her father and mother, Sudha, worked around the clock to launch their fledgling technology company.
When she was two months old, her Hindu Brahmin parents took her to Mumbai, but not for long because, as her father wrote, he “discovered quickly enough that it was difficult to nurture a child and manage careers side-by-side”.
Over several years, the businessman would fly every weekend from Bangalore to the nearest town to Hubli, Belgaum, and then travel 60 miles by taxi to his daughter. It was a journey he conceded he could barely afford.
In his letter, published in 2013 013 in a book entitled Legacy: Letters from rom eminent parents to their daughters, hters, the billionaire recalled how Akshata was chosen to take part art in a play and needed a special dress.
It was the mid-Eighties he stated, and Infosys – today India’s second largest IT company with a market capitalisation of £35.67billion – had just been launched and he “did not have any money to spend on non-basic goods”.
He adds: “Your mother explained to you that we would not be able to buy the dress and that you would have to drop out of the performance.”
Years later, Akshata, now 40, told her father that she had been unable to “understand or appreciate that incident”.
He continues: “We realised that it must have been a bit drastic for a child to forgo an important event in school, but we now know you learnt something important from that: the importance of austerity.”
His daughter was educated at the private Claremont McKenna College in California, then the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising, and ultimately gained an MBA from Stanford University. In August 2009, she married Sunak in a simple Hindu ceremony in Bangalore attended by well-known Indian cricketers and businessmen. The letter records her father’s th thoughts on her choice of h husband.
After initial “mixed feelings”, he wrote: “When I met Rishi I found him to be all that you had described him to be – brilliant, handsome, and, most importantly, honest – I understand why you let your heart be stolen.”