When Sudha Murty was told 'Business Class Not for her'

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 "Go and stand in the economy class queue. This line is for business class travellers," a well-heeled woman told Sudha Murty at the International Heathrow airport in London. The chairman of Infosys Foundation was at the airport in a salwar kameez, which perhaps made her a misfit in the queue in question. But, what eventually got Ms Murty's goat was when she was called a "cattle-class person".

That was when the otherwise calm 66-year-old wife of industrialist Narayana Murthy decided to give her fellow traveller a piece of her mind. 

 "Class does not mean huge possession of money. Mother Teresa was a classy woman. So is Manjula Bhargava, a great mathematician of Indian origin.

 The concept that you automatically gain class by acquiring money is an outdated thought process," she writes in the book. In an interview with repoeters, she said she could have shown her boarding pass and cleared all doubts about her "class" in no time, but she waited to find out how, according to the woman, she was not befitting for business class standards. 

 "Soon I realised it was because of my dress!" Ironically, Ms Murty ran into the same woman later in the day. From her Indo-Western silk outfit paired with an expensive pair of heels, and complemented with a Gucci handbag at the airport, the latter had slipped into a plain khadi sari to suit the theme of a meeting where Ms Murty was pitching Infosys Foundation to sponsor funds for the overhaul of a government school.

 Needless to say, the woman was shocked to see Ms Murty chairing the meeting. "The clothes were a reminder of the stereotype that is still rampant today. Just like one is expected to wear the finest of silks for a wedding, social workers must present themselves in a plain and uninteresting manner," she writes. 

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