BRAND INDIA IIT.

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Brand India

AMAN CHAUDHURY
IIT MUMBAI: These paths have led to far-off places

Tales of a
Distant Diaspora
Alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology have made a
name for themselves in the US and in India. They still have some
way to go in other countries. But there are several who have taken
the road less travelled to establish Brand IIT and Brand India.
Parthasarathi Swami reports.

I
F YOU FIND yourself in any hi-tech con-
ference in Silicon Valley, you can be
pardoned if you feel that somebody
has turned back the clock. Alumni of the
Indian Institutes of Technology — IITians
— are everywhere. Yechoor squabbles
with Shiva in one corner over a bridge hand
that the latter misplayed 25 years ago.
(“You should have discarded the seven
of diamonds.”)
Murari is telling Yusufi that the choice
of play for the 1984 Spring festival was all
wrong. (“If we had put up Sleuth, we
would have walked away with the Best
Play. Rhinoceros was a disaster.”)
Arundhati is giggling with Shobha over
what happened during the finals of the
table tennis mixed doubles in 1977. (“I am
telling you, it was an accident.” The term
‘wardrobe malfunction’ had not been
coined in those days.)
In San Jose or Sunnyvale, or away from
the Valley in Boston or Buffalo, such meet-
ings give a sense of déjà vu. You are trans-
ported back in time to Hostel No 7 or Lallu
Hall. (That’s shorthand for the imposing
Lala Lajpat Rai Hall of Residence.) “For
IITians, many parts of the US — particular-
ly in academic institutions — are a home
away from home,” says Shivanand Kanavi,

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the author of Sand to Silicon: The Amazing
Story of Digital Technology, which traces
many IIT successes in the US.
“There is a social infrastructure in
place,” adds Kanavi, who trained as a the-
oretical physicist at IIT Mumbai, IIT Kanpur
and Northeastern University, Boston. At
the Dallas labs of Texas Instruments (TI),
there are hundreds of Indians. More than
half of them are from IIT. “I don’t know the
exact number, but there are a lot,” says
Biswadip (Bobby) Mitra, managing director
of TI India. Mitra is himself a PhD in
Computer Science from IIT Kharagpur.
“IITs and IITians are now recognised,”
says Rajat Gupta, former MD of McKinsey
& Co, and a mechanical engineer from IIT
Delhi. “It is our objective to make IIT as
strong a brand as Harvard or Stanford.”
That’s possible now not just as a result
of the success of the IITians, but also
because the India Story is today widely
accepted. The institutions in a country can
never acquire universal respect unless the
country itself is held in high esteem. If
IITians are India’s foremost brand ambas-
sadors today, they too are gaining from the
fact that India has emerged as one of the
major engines of the world economy.
The US, with its concentration of
IITians, is tried-and-tested territory. The
same is not true of many other countries
where the IITs are unknown and India itself
not very high on the radar screen.
“There are no other IITians in Brazil, at
least none that I know of,” says Amit
Bhaya (Electrical Engineering, Kharagpur,
1981). “And there are only about five
Indian families in Rio, mostly attached to
the University. Bhaya, who did his PhD
from the University of California, Berkeley,
is working at the Federal University of Rio
de Janeiro.
“Most senior business leaders I have
met and worked with in Japan and
w / Switzerlan
Magimai Mathe
China have not heard
of the IITs,” says
Milind Yedkar
(Chemical, Mumbai,
1982). Yedkar has
been living in Shanghai
for the past three
years and is handling
the direct marketing
for enterprise products
of Dell in China and
Hong Kong.
It can be very diffi-
cult. For a stranger in a
strange land, the problems range from the
trivial to the almost impossible. “I remem-
ber when I had just moved to Japan, one
of my friends came to visit me at home,”
says Sanjeev Sinha (Physics, Kanpur,
1995). “He looked around and the first
thing he asked me was whether I had a pet
dog. ‘How can I keep one,’ I retorted. ‘I am
barely able to feed myself decently.’ He
pointed to a packet of biscuits. I had found
them delicious - and expensive. The pack-
et was covered with Chinese characters
and had no telltale signs. ‘They are dog bis-
cuits,’ said he.” Well, Japan has the largest
number of branded fashion stores for dogs.
Sinha hadn’t shopped there. But he gave
them a wide berth after that.
“What is he complaining about?” asks
Pankaj Mithel (Metallurgy, Kharagpur,
1981). “He ate dog biscuits; I ate the dog.”
Mithel has just returned from China.
Supreme self-confidence and an English-
Chinese dictionary can leave you with
problems on the menu.
It could be more serious. Amitabha
Chatterjee (Electrical, Delhi, 1993) talks
about working in 55ºC sandstorms in
Fahud (Oman). He was a field engineer
with Schlumberger. “It was the highest
paying job on campus.” Understandably
so. Fahud was just the
beginning.
“In 1998, I got married
and was transferred to a
married location so I could
take my wife with me,”
says Chatterjee. “I found
myself in Deir Ez Zor,
which is a small Syrian vil-
lage close to Iraq. My
new bride got the shock
of her life. But luck
smiled and suddenly,
d
after spending only two
Sanjeev Sinha / Antarctica
months there, I was asked to move to Port
Said in Egypt.
“I worked in Egypt for about three years
before getting transferred to Maturin in
East Venezuela. This was a truly unforget-
table location. The complete contrast of
cultures (compared to West Asia), the cap-
tivating beauty of Venezuelan women, the
fantastic greenery that engulfed every-
thing, and the nine months of rain every
year were new to my wife and me.
“The one thing Venezuela didn’t have
was law and order. It was quite normal for
armed robbers to enter a restaurant (the
most expensive one in the town at that),
make all the diners lie on the floor face
down, take everything from wallets to car
keys, and drive away.
“Finally in 2002, the revolution against
Hugo Chavez began and things went from
bad to worse. It started with food disap-
pearing from the shelves in supermarkets,
and finally to firing and fighting on the
streets. When the airlines threatened to
shut down their flights to Caracas, we
escaped leaving everything behind.”
Jimmy Ghaswala (Civil, Kharagpur,
1981) is living a reasonably sedentary life
in Perth, Western Australia, right now. But
his first job was as project engineer with
the Engineering Construction Corporation
in Mumbai. “We were deputed to
Baghdad,” says Ghaswala. “Our company
was constructing the headquarters for
Saddam Hussain’s Iraqi police. (This was in
the days before Saddam was anointed
card-carrying member of the Axis of Evil.)
The Iran-Iraq war was at its height.
Baghdad was being shelled regularly. The
site was full of young graduate engineers
(as the married guys were happy to stay at
home). We worked long and hard during
the week and partied hard on Fridays (the
only day off).” Life was a bomb. You only
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BRAND INDIA

hoped that it didn’t have your name writ-
ten on it.
Subodh Raje (Agriculture, Kharagpur,
1979) was also in the thick of things in
Freetown, Sierra Leone. “Rebellion was
rife,” he says. “In the later stages, boy sol-
diers would strut around with guns.” There
came a point when it got too dangerous.
Raje came back to India. But, like General
MacArthur, he will return.
War seems the adventurous IITian’s lot.
Raje, however, points to a problem peculiar
to Sierra Leone. “We had to iron all clothes
before wearing them,” he remembers.
“There is a fly that can leave its eggs on
the damp clothes. These eggs penetrate
the skin and mature inside
the body. Once grown the
fly drills a hole in the body
to come out. This is
extremely painful. It’s
called the Timbu fly.”
Not everyone finds him-
self in a warzone, or the
victim of cutaneous infesta- Jimmy Ghaswala with son Tyrone,
daughter Shalayne and wife Armin
tion with furuncular lesions. / Australia
Rupal Majumdar (Electrical,
Mumbai, 1989; MTech in
Communications, 1991) is working for UBS They are very conscious of time out
in Zurich, Switzerland. This is a civilised here. “All appointments are kept on the
country, a land of watchmakers and dot,” says Majumdar. “My appointments
gnomes. There are no flies on the Swiss. with my doctor have got cancelled more

THE INDIA STORY

J.K. Chandra, Delhi- credentials at every opportunity. True, many of them, being
based consultant to real older generation, were not part of the technology wave. Until
estate developer DLF, has the mid-seventies, there were no calculators on campus.
an unusual qualification. Budding engineers had to make do with slide-rules where their
He is the first IITian. "I counterparts now use palmtops.
wasn't Roll No 1, or any- These IITians - more than 200,000 of them - make up the man-
thing like that," he says. ufacturing backbone of Indian industry. Some have forayed into
"I was in Civil Engineering other sectors, where too they have made a mark. They are not
and there were others in necessarily in the limelight. Unlike in the West, Indians do not
departments alphabetical- believe in self-promotion.
ly ahead. But I was the There are many IITians you will have heard of. But you may not
first person to get the have heard that they are IITians. The roll call includes Union
degree from former Prime Minister of State for Commerce Jairam Ramesh, former Chief
Deveshwar doesn't wear his academic
credentials on his sleeve Minister, the late Minister of Goa Manohar Parrikar, ITC chairman and former CII
Jawaharlal Nehru." president Y.C. Deveshwar, N.R. Narayana Murthy and Nandan
Chandra is from IIT Kharagpur, the country's oldest IIT, which Nilekani of Infosys, R. Gopalakrishnan and Ravi Kant of the
was flagged off in 1950. He was at the head of the queue to Tata Group…
receive his degree because of his academic performance; he There are some who say that there should be many more CEOs
topped the batch. It was perhaps easier in those days; the first from the IITs. They contend that if you look at the Wharton
batch, when the session commenced in August 1951 had only alumni at the helm of Indian companies, you get just as many
224 freshers. IIT Kharagpur started with 42 teachers and 10 luminaries. Ajit Ranade, chairman of the IIT Bombay Alumni
department. Association and part of the organising committee of PanIIT
Chandra's story highlights two things. First, the IITs are young 2006, says that the perception is a bit distorted because Indian
institutes. While Chandra and his batchmates are still around to educational institutions have never kept track of their alumni.
tell us of the early days at IIT, at Harvard, for example, the orig- "In the West, you are part of the alumni drive from the very day
inal nine students who made up the first batch of the institute you join as a freshman," he says. "They have to do it. It's the
(there was only one teacher) are long dead and buried. Harvard way they organise their funding."
is now celebrating its 370th anniversary. The fact that IITians Besides, the scions of Indian business families, who end up as
have achieved so much in so little time is a tribute to their CEOs, find it easier to go to Wharton, Harvard or Stanford. You
excellence. need a basic minimum intelligence, of course. And you have to
As the first product of an institution that has achieved recogni- pass a token test or two. But if you are a full-fee-paying stu-
tion all over the world, Chandra would have been lionised as an dent, you can be 100 per cent sure you will be accommodat-
icon in any other country. Here, he thrives in relative anonymi- ed. It there's a hitch, make an endowment. Says Ranade: "The
ty. He will not be attending the PanIIT jamboree in Mumbai in IITs are probably the only educational institutions in the world
December. The organising committee was surprised to hear where you can't buy your way in." That's another reason for
about him. the strength of the brand.
There are many such IITians who don't flash their academic

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than once because I reached three minutes
late and the doctor had moved on to the
next patient.”
Rupal’s wife Jyoti Majumdar (Electrical,
Mumbai, 1990) has more such experiences
to narrate of a country that lives by the
rules of civilised society. “Washing is an
issue,” she says. “People mostly live in
apartments, as we do. The laundry is typi-
cally in the cellar, and there can be exten-
sive rules on how these washing and dry-
ing machines should be used. You cannot
wash after 10 pm or on Sundays. And,
most importantly, you have to follow the
timetable of who is allowed to wash on
which days of the week between which
hours.” Adds she: “The Swiss are cleanli-
ness freaks.”
Does antiseptic environment promote
creativity and entrepreneurship, key
weapons in the IITian’s armoury? Harry
Lime (Orson Welles) in Graham Greene
thriller The Third Man sees it one way: “In
Switzerland they had brotherly love; they
had 500 years of democracy and peace.
And what did they produce? The
cuckoo clock.”
Mathew Magimai Doss (Computer
Science, Chennai, 1999) sees it very differ-
ently. “Switzerland is one of the best
places to do research,” he says. Doss com-
pleted his PhD in speech research at IDIAP
Research Institute, Martigny, in 2005 and
continued with the institute subsequently.
Doss got to Switzerland through a very
conscious decision. “During my research
(at Chennai), I found the speech research
done at IDIAP interesting,” he says. “I con-
tacted the director of the institute about
the possibility of pursuing my PhD there.”
It worked out fine.
Bhaya in Brazil has also stuck to aca-
demics. With an 18-year lead time over
Doss, he has obviously crossed much
wider terrain. His choice of Brazil was real-
ly a result of narrowing options. Hear it in
Meherally Ma
hmud / Pakis
his own words: “During
the years that I was doing
my PhD from the
University of California
(UC) at Berkeley, I devel-
oped a big circle of Latin
American friends. The
eighties were also a period
of much student political
activity. A couple of close
friends went as activists
and volunteers to work in
Nicaragua and El
Salvador. So there was
quite a lot of momentum towards going
and spending time somewhere in Latin
America… The Federal University in Rio
offered me a fellowship. I thought that if I
didn’t go then, as a young man, I would
probably end up never going. So I did, and
I have been there ever since.”
For some - like Ghaswala and
Chatterjee - it was where their jobs took
them. And there are those who spun the
wheel of chance. Raje found an appoint-
ment ad for the National Confectionary
Company (Natco), Sierra Leone, in a news-
paper. “I had no one to recommend me,”
he says.
Sujit Sarkar (Electrical, Kharagpur,
1989) saw an advertisement in leading
morning newspaper The Times of India. He
has been adventurous; it was for a job in
Kingston, Jamaica - a place not really on
the map for most Indians but for its rum
and runs. (Former West Indies cricket cap-
tain Garry Sobers made his 365 not out at
Sabina Park here.)
“An application was good enough for
an offer,” says Sarkar. “There were no
interviews, no problems. For a decade, I
have overseen design and development of
major public sector IT projects for the
Government of Jamaica.”
Sinha in Japan also credits his peregri-
nations to the Times. “While working in
Mumbai in 1995, flipping through the
paper, an interesting job posting
from Japan stood out.
They were looking for PhDs
for a job in Artificial
Intelligence. I applied. I land-
ed the job. It was great fun.”
Some IITians, who began
their careers in India, went
abroad to both replenish the
family warchest and to
ensure that they had a family
tan
BRAND INDIA
Subodh Raje / Sierra Leone
left at the end of the day. Santosh Kothare
(Chemical, Kharagpur, 1981) joined Bharat
Petroleum Corporation Ltd (BPCL) a few
months after graduation. “However, after
10 years of BPCL, I realised that my work
was encroaching on my family responsibil-
ities and goals,” he says. “The almost rou-
tine 12-hours-per-day and seven-days-per-
week schedule made it difficult to meet my
son. I was afraid he would start calling me
uncle.
“Fortunately, a colleague of mine who
was working in Saudi Arabia contacted me
about a job offer with an attractive salary
and proper work timings. So I left BPCL to
join the Saudi Arabian Marketing &
Refining Company in June 1993, planning
to return in four years.”
Not that it was all smooth sailing.
“When I landed in Saudi, I was informed at
immigration that the company did not exist
anymore,” remembers Kothare. “It had
been handed over to Saudi Aramco that
morning. There was still a berth for me.
But, because of the uncertain future fol-
lowing the management change, I was
expecting to return within a month to my
secure BPCL job. The feel of my first half-
month’s pay, however, was adequate
motivation to stick it out. It was more than
I had seen in my entire 11-year career.”
Subodh Raje had started his own busi-
ness initially. That didn’t work. “So I decid-
ed to take up a job overseas to tide over
the financial crisis,” says he. This took him
to Freetown, where he joined Natco. “I
was responsible for developing new
processes for the manufacture of products
such as bubblegum and two-colour lol-
lipops,” he says. Before that starts sound-
ing absurd, he explains that even getting a
screw of a particular threading size was
very difficult in this country of boy soldiers
and rebel wars.
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BRAND INDIA

HOT STUFF
What does America really think of the IITian? To answer that
question, you can either turn to the talking heads - the wise
men always ready with sound-bites on any subject under the
sun. Or you can check out what is possibly a better measure -
the popular cartoonist.
Scott Adams' Dilbert appears in 2,500 newspapers worldwide
in 65 countries and 19 languages. Amid the many characters is
Asok, an intern from IIT. "I had a friend with that name,"
Adams told India Now in an exclusive interview in Phoenix,
Arizona. "He neglected to tell me that the usual spelling is
Ashok, not Asok. I've heard from approximately 200 million
Indians telling me I spelled it wrong."
Adams says that Asok's character is faithfully modelled on an
Indian colleague of his at Pacific Bell. But that was several
years ago. Asok is brilliant. But he is also very naïve. He gets
taken for a ride by most of his colleagues.
That's a true picture of the IITian in
Corporate America 20 years ago. For the
most part, IITians went to the US for fur-
ther studies and were quickly assimilated
in the academic community. But many of
those who went to work were body-
shopped there by IT service companies.
For most of them, that's all they did -
work. "They were really naïve. They spent
hours in their cubicles and the rest of time
in their chummeries," says Bharat Desai, chairman and CEO of
the Troy (Michigan)-based Syntel, which began life as a staffing
company way back in 1980.
Adams says that while Asok has become quite popular with his
fans, many Indians tell him that he no longer portrays the cor-
rect picture. The IITian in America has become savvy. Some are
CEOs of huge concerns. Others have set up their own business-
es, listed entities worth billions of dollars. The dotcom boom
saw many IITians - with their technology background - make it
to the big league. Among the stars are Pavan Nigam of
Healtheon, Desh Deshpande of Sycamore, Pradeep Sindhu of
Juniper Networks and Arjun Malhotra of Headstrong.
"I guess I will have to create a new character more in keeping
with the times," says Adams. This time he will check out the
spelling more carefully.

“If you wanted to make money, you
had to go abroad,” says J.K. Chandra, the
country’s first IITian (see Box: The India
Story). “You must remember that IITians
did not always enjoy the image they do
now.” Chandra has spent several years in
the Gulf and is now back in India as a con-
sultant with the DLF group.
Chandra says that salaries were pathet-
ic and choices were limited. “Even then we
knew IIT was a great place,” he says. “But
the outside world had to realise that.” In
many ways, Chandra & Co had a job very
similar to today’s Distant Diaspora.
“What were the options?” asks for-
mer CMD of Videsh Sanchar Nigam S.K.
Gupta. “It was the IAS (Indian
Administrative Service) or the US.” The
Indian Institutes of Management and MNCs
came later. Incidentally, Gupta says he is in
the happy position of being both an IITian
and not one. When he passed out of
Roorkee, it was a common-or-garden engi-
neering college. (It is a greybeard com-
pared to the IITs, however; in October
2006, it completed 160 years.) In 2001,
an Act of Parliament made it the seventh
IIT. “We have the best of both worlds,”
says Gupta enigmatically.
Meherally Mahmud Bhingraj had to cre-
ate his own world. “I got where I am due
to a great gal I met in Mumbai,” he
says. “She was from Pakistan. We
met. We talked. We met again and
talked again. We got married. We
did not perhaps care about the polit-
ical implications.”
Mahmud (that’s the name he
uses) says getting his wife Indian cit-
izenship was proving difficult. “We
both needed to have the same pass-
port eventually.” So he tried doing it
the other way around. “I made a trip to
Pakistan and found that they were willing
to grant me legal citizenship,” he says. “So
I made the move.”
“There is another way to look at it,” he
adds. “I got to where I am due to destiny.”
Mashallah. Bhaya in Brazil would probably
say Que Sera, Sera. (He is fluent in Spanish
too, though Portuguese is the official lan-
guage of his adopted country.)
But depending on destiny is not stan-
dard IITian practice. And it is certainly not
so for those who venture abroad. “The IIT
is a sort of sieve,” says
Veerendra K. Jaitly, a Delhi-based con-
sultant with Cisco, who did Electronics
from Kharagpur and joined the Indian Navy.
Jaitly spent 18 months in the UK. That
gave him a totally different perspective, he
says. So after the first screening process -
the Joint Entrance Examination - eliminates
much of the chaff, the stay abroad acts as
a second order permeable membrane. And
further fractionation gives you those who
venture into uncharted waters — a differ-
ent breed of IITian altogether.
But are these people at the cutting edge

Sujit Sarkar
/ Jamaica
BRAND INDIA IIT.qxp 23/1106 2:38 PM
of Brand IIT really achieving something?
Says Sinha in Tokyo: “Ten years back
when I got into a taxi, if the driver recog-
nised me as an Indian, the first question
would be: Are you a cook in a curry shop?
A diplomatic driver would talk about his
love for chicken curry and naan but won-
der how we could eat curry all the time. A
few years from now, the same driver will
ask me if I work in IT and comment on how
good Indians are in mathematics.”
Many echo the same line. “Brand IIT
does not raise Jamaican eyebrows,” says
Sarkar. “There is practically no awareness
of the IIT Brand in Perth,” says Ghaswala.
“Of course, there is awareness amongst
the Indian community, sometimes even
uncomfortably so. People think that
because we passed out from IIT we are
some whiz-bang intellectuals.”
But the lack of recognition is exactly
Girish Marathe / Bahrain
how it was in the US even as little as a
decade ago. Things are changing every-
where. As India takes its place on the
world stage, the Indians who are leading
the globalisation drive are earning respect
and accolades. “We are not looking for
recognition and honours,” says Chandra,
the first IITian. “But they are coming. More
will come.”
Are these kudos deserved? Many in
India see the IITian as a creature with a
super-sized ego. “IITians do not suffer
fools gladly,” says Girish Marathe
(Mechanical, Kanpur, 1982). Marathe is
now in Bahrain as head of retail banking of
Ahli United Bank. “There is much scope for
improvement in the areas of tact and diplo-
macy,” he adds. “There is low tolerance
for dealing with ambiguity. IITians have
enormous disdain for people who are not
numerate or quantitatively savvy.”
You wouldn’t expect all IITians to agree
Page 29
with that. And most of them
don’t. “Yes, we have come
across people who feel that
IITians are arrogant and look
down on others,” says Rupal
Majumdar. “From the ones I
know and myself I complete-
ly disagree. I feel that the one
thing that we immediately
learn when we join IIT is that
there are smarter people
than us out there.” The only
negative, as he sees it, is
that when IITians congre-
gate, they go on a nostalgia trip
ignoring all others around them. Ask any
IITian’s husband or wife; they’d fully agree.
So what do these humble souls who
crunch numbers for breakfast have to
offer? What has IIT taught them that
makes them so different? You will get two
sorts of answers. There
are many IITians who are
doing humdrum jobs in
India. They will talk to you
about their favourite pro-
fessors and the high stan-
dards of education. Let not
ambition mock their useful
toil, their homely joys and
destiny obscure. But if you
turn to the achievers both
in India and abroad, the
answer is uniform: the real
learning came outside the
classroom or laboratory.
“What the IITs have taught us is far
more than academic knowledge,” says
Marathe. “They have taught us how to
deal with alien social situations and off-the-
wall personalities. A lot of real world learn-
ing happened in late night “bull sessions”
where no subject was taboo.”
“Throughout my itinerant life, the traits
and competencies
dar with daug
Rupal Majum
/ Sw itz erl
Ashana
BRAND INDIA
Milind Yedkar
/ China
developed at IIT have
stood me well,” says Ghaswala. “The abil-
ity to mix with strangers and make friends
easily is priceless, especially when one has
moved as often as my family and I have.”
Ghaswala talks about other lessons
which didn’t make much sense at the time.
For instance, it was expected at IIT that
everyone would know the names of all the
people in their hostel, their department and
others they came in contact with. Over a
five-year period (the duration of the course
at that time), it totted up to well over
1,000 people. “We also learnt the impor-
tance of being nice to workers,” says
Ghaswala. “I remember that the older mess
workers took care of you if you earned
their respect.
“It has always fascinated me how
important these lessons are when it comes
to human relationships,” he continues. “As
a young engineer on sites in West Asia, I
was amazed at how much more productiv-
ity I could get out of our workers by just
following these two principles.”
“People appreciate the fact that you
can learn their names fast and remember
personal details about them,” says Bhaya.
“I think that the general
experience of hostel living,
which entails dealing with
people who come from
different language and
cultural backgrounds, as
well as having very dis-
tinct psychological make-
ups, is so rich that it pre-
pares you for almost
anything you encounter
later in life.” Adds
hte r Sarkar: “Understanding
and the heart of the
Jamaican Rastafarian
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DECEMBER'S BOUNTY
From L to R: S.K. Gupta, Desai, Rajat Gupta and Ravi Kant
Come December and Mumbai will see its hotels fill up. From all
corners of the globe, the IITians are returning home for the
PanIIT 2006 - the global IIT alumni conference. "We expect this
to be the biggest show ever," says Ashank Desai, Chairman of
PanIIT 2006 and founder-chairman of software company
Mastek Ltd.
The conference will be held from 23 to 25 December. It will be
inaugurated by the President of India A.P.J. Abdul Kalam. Prime
Minister Manmohan Singh will participate in a session on nation
building.
The nation-building focus is expected to be much more than an
airing of opinions. "We have conducted a survey amongst
IITians across the world," says Desai. "We asked them,
amongst other things: 'What does nation building mean to
you?'" The responses were: Leveraging technology for address-
ing the country's problems (48.7 per cent); Creating profes-
sionalism and integrity in business and government (40.2 per
cent); Global branding of India 30.2 (per cent); and Breeding
entrepreneurship (31.3 per cent).
Rajat Gupta, former MD of McKinsey & Co, and part of the
PanIIT panel, says that some 15-20 per cent of the 300,000
students who have graduated from the IITs over the years are
now abroad. "They want to give back," he explains. "This is
the forum to enable them to do so."
Is this in some way a compensation for the brain drain? Not at
all. Tata Motors MD Ravi Kant, who is an alumnus of IIT
Kharagpur, says that India's IT revolution would not have taken
place without the presence of these IITians abroad. "The CEO
of a technology company in India can build up rapport with the
CTO (chief technical officer) of a Fortune 500 company
because both are IITians," explains former CMD of Videsh
Sanchar Nigam Ltd S.K. Gupta, also an IITian.
IITians have already given a lot to the IITs, For instance, the
Shailesh J. Mehta School of Management at IIT Bombay and
the Vinod Gupta School of Management in IIT Kharagpur were
largely funded by the IITians they have been named after.
"Today, our agenda is much larger," says Desai. PanIIT 2006
will unveil several far-reaching initiatives.

became easier because of exchanging
study notes and sharing eclectic cultural
feathers in C-wing, top floor of Lala Lajpat
Rai Hall. Our wing had a Telugu, a
Tamilian, a Malayalee, a
sh Ko tha re with wife Sa
Santo
sh / Saudi Ar
and son Aaka
Delhiite, a Mumbaikar and a
Bengali.” Tolerance of diversity comes nat-
urally to the IITian.
Sinha says he got his job in Japan
because of his excursions into “dramatics,
painting and a bit of creative writing”.
Adds Ghaswala: “Much of what we learnt
was non-educational, character-building
stuff. Come to think of it, most of our
group picked up hobbies like music, drama
and singing only after coming to IIT.”
In all fairness, this is to the credit of the
IIT authorities. It is part of the
system they have designed. It
may not be uncommon in the
West. “But it was novel to
India,” says Chandra in Delhi.
“Some professors took part in
these activities; some encour-
aged from the background. For
obvious reasons, they prefer to
leave the students to think they
are doing it all on their own.
Academic inputs are neces-
ngeeta
sary. But there are others just
abia
as vital.”
If the IITs allow you to
explore other facets of your talents, it
makes for a later work-life balance. “The
Swiss have moved up the ladder from earn-
ing to make a living to focussing on the
quality of life,” says Jyoti Majumdar.
“Positions out here are relatively less
stressful and people less aggressive.”
“Although Australians are hard work-
ers, life is much more balanced here than in
India,” says Ghaswala. “In India, we seem
to accept that our family life has to take a
backseat and we exist only to slave for our
employer.” Adds Sinha: “People enjoy life
in many ways, both traditional and mod-
ern. Downtown Tokyo is about an hour
from the skiing slopes or the beach.” The
quality of your work depends to a large
extent on the quality of your life.
It would be simplistic to dismiss the IITs
as a place where they only taught you to
have fun. Marathe puts it in perspective.
“IITs offer the best liberal education in
India,” he says. “Most IITs have extremely
strong and active Humanities & Social
Sciences departments. The courses these
departments offer truly broaden your per-
spective and set you thinking. Academic
knowledge pertaining to core disciplines
also helps a lot. It has taught us to be ana-
lytical and logical, operate from fundamen-
tals, question everything, and reduce com-
plex situations in terms of clear problems.”
“What we learnt that we use most
often is to be able to work hard and meet
tight deadlines without getting too worked
up about it,” says Rupal Majumdar. “Call it
efficiency, commitment or perseverance;

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we learnt that the important thing is to get
the work done well, not the time you
spend on it. Also the ability to grasp brand
new concepts quickly and to make them fit
into the scheme of things you know
already. That’s an art or science - call it
what you will — that we perfected at IIT.”
But the biggest thing IIT gives is self-
confidence. Says Sinha, “It is the confi-
dence to be able to learn and understand
any problem or domain in a matter of hours
or days at most.”
Yedkar talks about his own experience:
“It was 2000 and I had been enjoying a
reasonably successful career in supply
chain management at Procter & Gamble
(P&G) in India and Japan. After a 16-year
business career I made an abrupt change to
marketing and surprised everybody by
starting afresh as a marketing associate for
an important brand in P&G Japan. Here
was I throwing away my long experience in
sales & operations and going head-to-head
with peers in their twenties. I believe my
being an IITian had a great role to play in
this decision. Five years of pitting intellects
against the very best at IIT Mumbai has
given me the confidence that I can do
almost anything I chose to.”
Mahmud (NA, Kharagpur, 1976) had
to take a similar gamble. He has set up a
textiles business in Karachi, in Pakistan.
“People who know I am an engineer think
my specialisation was in textiles,” he
says. “At this time, I am considered to be
somewhat of an authority in textiles.
When all fails, they contact me.”
Incidentally, the “NA” against Mahmud’s
name stands not for the normal ‘not avail-
able’ or ‘not applicable’ but Naval
Architecture. It’s a long way from ships to
slips and booms to looms.
Is it a waste, all the money spent on
Jyoti Majumdar / Switzerland
teaching a young
Mahmud to design
ships? (According to esti-
mates, even 25 years
ago, the government was
spending $10,000 to sub-
sidise each IIT student’s
education.) Is it also a
waste that many IITians
are now abroad and may
not come back?
The guilt feelings, even
if they were there a few
years ago, don’t exist any
longer. IITians abroad realise
- as do their erstwhile critics back home in
India - that they are doing sterling work for
the country. All over the world, they are
adding (perhaps unconsciously) to Brand
IIT and Brand India.
Even those who have left the profes-
sion - for finance, for management, and
even more unrelated areas - have imbibed
the confidence that is fast becoming part
of the Indian psyche. “Initially, after mov-
ing to the world of entertainment, I did feel
guilty about having squandered the coun-
try’s resources which gave me a top-class
engineering education,” says Sameer Kohli,
who graduated in Mechanical Engineering
from IIT Delhi in 1993. “Today I realise IIT
is not just about an engineering course, it
is about the structure and discipline of life.
If I, as an individual, can make a difference
in the way films and television commercials
are made, then I am sure the country’s
investment on me is not a write-off.” Kohli
has been involved in the scripting and
direction of Yahaan and Samay — When
Time Strikes.
When the time does strikes, will these
IITians return to India? In a globalised
world, they don’t think they need to. And
it all depends. Bhaya, for
instance, has a Brazilian wife
and three children. “The deci-
sion to return to India is hard-
er than if I had been alone,”
he says. He continues to hold
an Indian passport, though he
is entitled to a Brazilian one.
Yedkar too is an Indian citi-
zen. “What will bring us back
to India is our heart,” he says.
“I am keeping my fingers
crossed that the Indian econo-
my continues to grow. That
will create opportunities for
BRAND INDIA
/ Brazil
Amit Bhaya
globally-experienced executives to make a
meaningful contribution.”
For the people in West Asia, it is taken
for granted that they will return. “There are
too many formalities in getting citizenship
here,” says Marathe. Kothare’s current
ambition is to visit more countries. “I
intend to return to India after retirement
and shuttle between Mumbai paubhaji and
Pune bhakarwadi,” he says. (For those
who need a translation, these are popular
ethnic fastfoods of the two cities.)
“One is always looking for the next
move, the next opportunity,” says Jyoti
Majumdar. “What will bring us back is the
realisation that our kids should not miss
out on what we enjoyed and learnt. India is
definitely the right training ground. And
then there’s IIT. It would be fabulous if our
kids were able to qualify for IIT.”
Chatterjee is more phlegmatic: “Let’s see
where life takes me next.”
For Mahmud in Pakistan, returning
could mean just walking across the bor-
der. He is the closest of them all physical-
ly. But, thanks to the historical baggage
in the relationships between the two
countries, he may well be the most dis-
tant. He has no intention of returning to
India; he is not too sure his wife will be
welcome. But, in his book, coming back
is not necessary. He sees his wife and
himself as builders of bridges, as the first
swallows in the coming summer of eco-
nomic and social cooperation between
the two countries.
“In third countries, Indians and
Pakistanis work very well together,” says
Jaitly in Delhi. “Not everybody can use the
language of love to promote unity and
progress. But we IITians have languages of
our own that can do as good a job. We talk
Java and C++.”
31