My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future by Indra Nooyi

Part I
Growing Up

1
The women’s living room in my childhood home had a
single piece of furniture—a huge rosewood swing
with four long chains that were anchored into the
ceiling when my grandfather built the house, on a leafy
road in Madras, India, in 1939.
That swing, with its gentle glide back and forth in the
South Indian heat, set the stage for a million stories. My
mother, her sisters, and her cousins—wearing simple saris
in fuchsia, blue, or yellow—rocked on it in the late
afternoon with cups of sweet, milky coffee, their bare feet
stretched to the floor to keep it moving. They planned
meals, compared their children’s grades, and pored over
Indian horoscopes to find suitable matches for their
daughters or the other young people in their extensive
family networks. They discussed politics, food, local gossip,
clothes, religion, music, and books. They were loud, talked
over one another, and moved the conversation along.
From my earliest days, I played on the swing with my
older sister, Chandrika, and my younger brother, Nandu.
We swayed and sang our school songs: “The Teddy Bears’
Picnic,” “The Woodpecker Song,” “My Grandfather’s
Clock,” or the Beatles, Cliff Richard, or Beach Boys tunes
we’d heard on the radio: “Eight Days a Week,” “Bachelor
Boy,” “Barbara Ann.” We snoozed; we tussled. We read

My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future by Indra Nooyi