Dubai: “The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.”
Australian Army Chief Lieutenant-General David Morrison may have said these words in 2013, but in the 1980s, Dr Bhaskar Dasgupta witnessed someone who refused to just walk past, eyes averted, without doing the right thing: his father, Roby Dasgupta.
Dasgupta was 10, following his father around a busy open-air market in Bhopal, India. He said: “Baba loved going there, especially for fish. There was colour, noise, coriander, vegetables, bargaining, sweat, dust, and ordinary Indian life in full orchestra.”
Then they saw something that made them stop: a large man berating a poor woman vendor. He wasn’t behaving like a typical dissatisfied customer. He was crossing a line: “He was swearing at her, humiliating her, making her shrink in public.”
Although the market was full of people, with many gawking at the scene, nobody moved. Nobody intervened… except his father, whom Dasgupta describes as “never imposing. Small. Slight. Quiet. Professorial.” His father walked up to the man and calmly said: “This is not right. You should not speak to her like that.”
It was an act of quiet courage that still moves him today, over 40 years later.
Dasgupta told Emirates 24/7 why: “As a child, you assume adults behave in similar ways. Then you witness someone doing something that everyone else is unwilling to do. What struck me was not that my father was physically brave. It was that he seemed incapable of ignoring wrongdoing. While others looked away, he stepped forward. That was probably the first time I realised that courage is often a matter of character rather than strength. Courage is not the absence of fear. It is acting despite fear.”
A childhood shaped by resilience
For Dasgupta, good character is a choice that you make every day. It’s a lesson he learned growing up in India.
He said: “My father arrived in India [from Dhaka, Bangladesh] as a refugee after Partition, with literally the clothes on his back. He had experienced the loss of home, security and certainty at a very young age. That experience gave him an unusual perspective… Partition taught my father that houses, jobs and savings can disappear. Education and character are the only assets you truly own.”
Dasgupta was born in 1968 and raised in India in a middle-class Bengali family, with younger sister Shilpi, and “a huge number of cousins. We grew up in Bhopal and, like many Indian families of that era, we were rich in books and education rather than money”.
Life was difficult, but scarcity has a way of clarifying priorities, according to Dasgupta.
He remembers his father in tears one day, when he could not afford to buy the mangoes Shilpi wanted, and his mother sorrowfully saying they didn’t have money for eggs, so she couldn’t make them an omelette for breakfast. He has never forgotten these memories of hard times.
Still, the family’s priorities didn’t change: “There was never any debate in our house about the importance of education, honesty or responsibility.”
The pursuit of knowledge
Education, especially, was the cornerstone of the Dasgupta household. His father treated learning “almost as a spiritual exercise”.
Roby Dasgupta was a professor and earned 18 degrees and professional qualifications in engineering and sciences. He had arrived in India as a refugee with almost nothing, and education became his way of rebuilding, and creating something concrete in a world where nothing was certain.
Dasgupta’s mother, Dr Papia Dasgupta, matched him in intellectual curiosity, but in a different field: arts. Dasgupta said: “She was a professor who moved effortlessly between geography, tribal studies and tourism. She won prizes in drama and cookery, acted in film, radio and theatre, wrote books, travelled to more than 80 countries, spoke seven languages, rode horses, shot competitively, and somehow still found time to raise a family. To this day, I am not entirely convinced she was human.”
As children, there was nothing unusual about the way their home functioned – it was just normal life for Dasgupta and Shilpi. He said: “Only later did I realise how unusual it was to grow up in a household where both parents were still fulfilling their dreams, studying, researching and writing long after midnight. Their example taught me that intellectual curiosity is not a luxury. It is a way of engaging with the world.”
From Bhopal to global boardrooms
Although his own path in life has taken him to international shores, Dasgupta has never forgotten the lessons his parents taught him.
Dasgupta started his career in financial services, and climbed the corporate ladder, working with international banking institutions in places like Delhi, India, Singapore, and London, UK. His family relocated to the UK in 1992, and lived there until moving to the UAE in 2018. He said: “I moved into public service in the UK as a senior civil servant, serving under three Prime Ministers’ administrations, before joining the Abu Dhabi Global Market [in 2019].” Ever since, Abu Dhabi has been home for Dasgupta, his wife Sangeeta, his son and daughter.
Now, as a semi-retired executive who serves as chairman, board director and advisor to a number of regulated businesses around the world, Dasgupta takes the lessons his father taught him to every boardroom and meeting he enters.
He said: “What I learned growing up was that work was not something you did for status. It was something you did because people depended on you. Education was not about qualifications. It was about independence. Duty came before comfort. Looking back, I realise those lessons have influenced almost every major decision I have made.”
The principle of never walking past unacceptable situations has stayed with him.
He said: “Financial services, governance and regulation often involve uncomfortable conversations. Sometimes you have to challenge decisions, question assumptions or raise concerns that others would prefer not to discuss. There have been occasions when it would have been easier to stay silent. Yet I often find myself thinking about my father and that marketplace. Leadership is not about popularity. It is about responsibility. If something is wrong, somebody has to say so.”
Building the world you want to see
One way Dasgupta is working to right wrongs is by helping improve female representation in leadership. He has made it a priority to actively support, mentor, and invest in women founders and fund managers. Dasgupta is chairman of the boards of fund management company FundRock and the Middle East Stablecoin Association (MESA), and has actively ensured women are well represented on the boards of these organisations.
It's his way of setting new standards: “If you believe something is important, you cannot simply talk about it. You have to build it.”
Just as he tries to do so every day, Dasgupta hopes his 30-year-old son Karn, and 23-year-old daughter Diya, will take their grandfather’s lessons forward. “I hope they learn that integrity matters. My father demonstrated that success and decency are not competing ideas. You can be ambitious without losing your values.”
Roby Dasgupta’s display of integrity that day, in a market in Bhopal, didn’t change the world, but it made a world of a difference to a woman who was being treated unfairly. Dasgupta shared how the incident ended: “The man went away, muttering. The woman didn’t say anything but she just folded her hands and bowed her head. The entire incident dissolved like mist... but left an indelible impression on me.”
Perhaps in a world that often watches injustice happen and waits for heroes to arrive, his father’s actions are a reminder that you could be one, too.
Dasgupta said: “The older I get, the more I realise that societies are held together not by famous people, but by ordinary people who refuse to compromise their values. My father was one of those people.”