LEGACIES ARE EARNED

In 1992 a young Indian engineer landed in Melbourne with an Australian visa granted on the strength of his qualifications, and no work. He mowed lawns, fitted blinds, packed groceries, power-washed driveways and washed cars. On New Year's Eve he began driving a taxi in a city he had learned from a map.Thirty years later he was running a region of the world's leading classification society, serving as Honorary Consul of Norway in Texas and chairing the World Affairs Council of Greater Houston.Legacies Are Earned is the life of Antony Marian DSouza, written by Ruth Elizabeth Roshan. It begins in a household in Tiruchirappalli where the bus fare to school was half a rupee each way, and where that fare decided which college he could go to. It follows him through the shipyards of Singapore, a refinery town on the Texas coast, Shanghai and Dubai, to the leadership of a global business.The title is not about him. This is a book about the people who backed him before he had done anything to deserve it. A senior engineer in Tiruchirappalli who made him learn his trade properly and had nothing to gain from it. A man in Melbourne who took in a friend of a friend, a complete stranger to him, fed him for two weeks and took nothing. Two refugees with no papers of their own who sat him down and told him to wait until he could become a citizen. A chief executive who took a call at two in the morning and did not give way.It is also an account of the work itself: deepwater drilling rigs, a shipyard that went bankrupt with two unfinished projects inside it, the year the industry stopped, and what it means to be the person who decides whether something is fit to go to sea.And it is a record of what he has done with all of it since. Many students helped through their studies since 1992, almost all of them the first in their families to reach a college or a university. Work to open an industry to women who were not in it. Service to a city that took him in, and to a country that was not his by birth.The book ends with the people he worked alongside for two decades in offshore classification, a network nobody managed, which worked because the people in it argued hard, took no credit and stayed close.