India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation (4 page)

The discussion about his employees gives me an opportunity to
get a brief measure of the man sitting across from me. In appearance, Tewari is unexceptional. He is tall, but fleshy, with jowly cheeks framing a face that looks younger than the rest of him. His comfy, kick-about jeans and brown-striped office shirt point to a relaxed but work-focused ethos. It occurs to me that the uniform also suits teleconferencing – the old newscaster’s trick of smartening only what’s visible to the camera.

I enquire about his background. The start-up owner plays with his phone as he talks, turning it on its end then spinning it around between his fingers, repeatedly. I picture him as one of the kids who would doodle through class, yet still come out top in all the tests.

As techies go, Tewari was born with a silver spool valve in his mouth. He has pedigree. His grandmother was the first-ever female professor at Kanpur’s prestigious Indian Institute of Technology. His father became dean of the same elite institution. Under his watchful eye, the young Tewari passed out with honours in mechanical engineering. After graduation, he joined management-consultancy firm McKinsey, part of its first intake of Indian trainees. For four years, he dedicated himself to writing the type of report that Gopi refuses to read. Then, after an MBA at Harvard, he struck out on his own.

Today, sitting in his own boardroom, treating his employees to off-site awaydays on the golf course, it looks like a logical decision. The hard numbers give substance to the impression. InMobi is now the world’s second largest ad operator for mobile Internet. Tewari’s fledgling company already has international offices in London, Singapore, San Francisco, Tokyo and Johannesburg. The Kanpur graduate is riding high. His seventeen billion ads reach one hundred and eighty million consumers in one hundred and nine countries every month. The figures are growing by the week. He can count Ram Shriram, the original investor in Google, among his early-round financiers. It all reads very scripted, very
Forbes
magazine, for the Poster Boy Entrepreneur.

So it surprises me to hear that the Tewari tale is not without its abrupt commas or paragraph breaks. As the conversation unfolds,
several factors emerge that could easily have derailed him from what looks like a predestined path. Not least was his family. Tewari’s parents saw his success in the entrance exams for the Indian Institute of Technology – a feat that hundreds of thousands fail annually – as confirmation of the glittering academic career that awaited him. They were, he says with marked understatement, ‘disappointed’ at his decision to go into commerce, a world still considered a trifle grubby by India’s traditional educator class.

Then his father died. Tewari had just left Harvard. Being the eldest son, social convention prescribed that now was not the time to set off on a hare-brained new venture. Yet he did it anyway. For middle-class Indian families like his, he explains, job security is ‘placed on a pedestal’. The mindset comes with other ingrained truths: earn a little and make do; follow, don’t lead; welcome change, don’t provoke it. He chose to ignore these too.

To complicate matters further, he had recently married. In Old India, it is the man of the house who earns the keep. Not vice versa. The idea of the wife leaving every morning for a desk job and making sure the monthly bills get paid is anathema to traditional thinking. Yet for the first years of their marriage, that’s exactly what happened. Mrs Tewari kept him afloat.

The weight of expectations did not stop at the family hearth. The fresh-faced entrepreneur had his own inner demons to confront. Money talks. Finishing his MBA aged twenty-six, the Harvard graduate had every prospect of making stacks of it. He spent a week in California attending job interviews, which resulted in employment offers from a variety of select private-equity firms. All his peers told him to put off going it alone. ‘“Wait a couple of years,” they told me. “Get some more work experience.”’ The idea, he admits, sorely tempted him. It would mean more cash in the bank, a more comfortable lifestyle, a fancier car, a juicier bonus. But the prospect unnerved him too. The longer he waited, he realised, the harder it would be to jump ship. So he picked up the phone to his would-be employers, thanked each of them in turn for their generous offers, and said, regretfully, that he had to decline.

That takes guts. Throwing everything after a dream. Putting heart before head. If
Simply Fly
has any guiding themes, it’s qualities like these. My thoughts turn back to the aviation entrepreneur by the pool. The two men come from different stock and different generations. Gopi, at least to begin with, had less to lose than the McKinsey man. As Tewari talks, however, I hear unmistakable echoes of the older man’s voice. It’s there in both men’s inner compulsion, in their embrace of the seemingly irrational. ‘I’d always kick myself if I didn’t give it a go,’ the InMobi founder says at one point. It’s the Graduate stealing the Captain’s lines.

I probe further into the InMobi story in search of other similarities. Two practical factors hampered the company’s creation. First, Tewari had no working capital. Second, he had no InMobi. As with Gopi, the colt entrepreneur began with the second problem. The money, he figured, would come later. What he needed was his ‘big idea’. To find it, he headed for San Francisco. His plan was to work with ‘very, very small companies’, help build them up and then flog them on. A year later, nothing. The ventures had either bombed or stalled.

Feeling low, he headed back to India for a month-long break. Sitting on the couch at his mother’s house, bored, he sketched out a business plan. His idea centred on ‘mobile search’. The intention was to design a service enabling phone users to send an SMS requesting information – say, for the location of a restaurant or the number of a plumber – and receive an SMS back with the answer. That was the breakthrough idea. It looked good on paper, he says in retrospect. It ‘got trashed’ in practice. Yet it opened the door to what he is doing now. By early 2008, a prototype version of his InMobi product offering hit the market. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Tewari was right about the money too. It came. First in dribs and drabs, then in ever-increasing volumes. He remembers his meeting with Ram Shriram, of Shertalo Ventures and Google fame. The Technology Midas was joined by a representative of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Together, they represented two of the biggest venture-capital firms in the world. Twenty minutes
into Mr Tewari’s presentation, Shriram raised his hand for him to stop. ‘Right, we’re investing,’ he said. The InMobi owner stood there stunned. He looked down at the remains of his slide presentation. ‘What about the revenue model, the pre-money valuation?’ The details can wait, the investment guru responded. ‘For now, let’s roll up our sleeves and discuss what you’re going to do after this.’

An hour later, the boy from Kanpur found himself sitting in a cheap rental car in a Silicon Valley parking lot. When he had woken up that morning, InMobi had officially run out of money. For three months, he and his five colleagues had been pooling their private credit cards. No one was collecting a salary. Then, from one moment to the next, he was over seven million dollars richer.

‘How did you feel in that moment, sitting there in your car?’ I ask, imagining the exhilaration he must have felt.

‘I was very happy,’ the modest entrepreneur replies, allowing himself the slightest of smiles. ‘I thought, “I’ll drink to this.” So I cracked open a Coke.’

Manjunathea presses ‘Play’ on the video software that sits expectantly on his computer screen. I’m back in another bare, businesslike meeting room. Only this one is located on the edge of Mysore and measures about four times the size of InMobi’s. It also has a name: The Taj Mahal Conference Room.

As the introduction of the corporate video plays out, my toes begin to curl. The script is packed with business-speak and fulsome phrases, all of which are read out in cloying tones by an over-dramatic narrator. ‘Behind the brand is a story of excellence,’ the commentary starts. I have a foreboding of what’s to follow. The predictable ad agency behind the film does not disappoint. The company ‘explored new domains’, became a ‘mission-critical transformation partner’ and, at the end of it, still emerged with ‘the courage to dream’. It’s wince-making stuff.

Sitting across the conference table, forty-four-year-old Manjunathea is looking elated. In a sense, he has every reason to be. For the last fifteen years, the subject of the video – IT giant Infosys – has been his employer. Narrative style aside, the story is indeed extraordinarily impressive. Starting with two hundred and fifty dollars in cash and seven founding members, Infosys has grown to become one of India’s most successful firms. A genuinely global player in the IT industry, it now employs over one hundred and thirty thousand people in ninety countries.

The whole operation stands as a testament to entrepreneurial vigour and enterprise. Back in 1984, Infosys anticipated the market by switching from mini- to mainframe. It introduced the ‘Global Delivery Model’, arguably the genesis of India’s multi-billion-dollar outsourcing industry. It was the first Indian company to list on the NASDAQ exchange and the first to offer stock options to its employees. Today the best known of its founding fathers, Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, command worldwide respect for their creative genius. They deserve it. As their employee explains, the pet project that they had kicked off in Murthy’s front room now boasts annual revenues of over six billion dollars, more than that of the entire state of Goa.

‘Now it is my pleasure to spend the next forty-five minutes to an hour talking you through the learning programme for our freshers,’ Manjunathea says, before quickly correcting himself. ‘Sorry, our “fresh entrants”, I should say.’

He scrolls his keyboard mouse across to the PowerPoint icon and brings up a set of slides on the projection screen. Like Tewari, Manjunathea is a graduate of Kanpur’s Indian Institute of Technology. The two have little else in common, however. The grey-moustached Infosys manager is undoubtedly smart and articulate. Dressed in his ‘crocodile’ chinos and prescription black shoes, however, he isn’t what the corporate video would call a ‘game-changer’.

Before his current post, he spent fifteen years as a software developer. Everything about him, from the leather mobile case on his belt to the pens in his breast pocket, speaks of a steady,
dependable, meticulous employee. Manjunathea is the kind of man on whom successful corporations depend: loyal in his affections, unstinting in his work ethic and essentially content with his place on the career ladder. He is, I realise, the perfect candidate to be training Infosys’s new employees.

The first slide shows a graph with the total number of graduates in India. Once more, I steel myself for what’s to come. ‘So there were eighty thousand graduates in 2000, around two hundred and fifty thousand in 2006 and, if I had to estimate the current rate, I’d say it would be around three hundred thousand.’ The figures have a purpose. He wants me to understand the dilemma facing contemporary India: ‘quantity versus quality’. If you were to handpick ten tomatoes, he explains, you can choose carefully. If you pick ten thousand, you cannot. It’s meant as a generic truth, which he then applies to his employer. Infosys finds itself in the second bucket. The IT giant recruits between fifteen and eighteen thousand graduates every year. ‘Ensuring the best level of quality is what we try and achieve on this campus.’

He flicks to the next slide, which outlines the core components of the three-month training course: technical competency, soft skills, process orientation, English-language fluency. ‘The ultimate goal’, he says with a flurry of his hands, ‘is to make a person production-ready.’

He makes the new stock of trainees sound like computer microchips, readying themselves to be commoditised, marshalled into line and then shunted out of the factory gates. As he continues through his slides, the impression grows. Twenty-four days of basic IT training. Twenty-two days’ tech-specific instruction on JAVA, .Net and a variety of Open Software Frameworks. Ten days’ POST: Project Organisational Standards Training. All the while, the new recruits are expected to be busying themselves with technical assignments, case studies and group projects. Libraries and computer labs open twenty-four hours a day. There are no discos, alcohol is forbidden and curfew falls at eleven o’clock. It’s Tech Boot Camp in all but name.

Slide Six deals with ‘Building a Conducive Learning
Environment’. Again, Infosys’s desire to manufacture the country’s smartest programmers covers every angle. All the classrooms have ‘smart’ whiteboards linked to the trainer’s computer and on-desk terminals for each student. The company’s combined intelligence – essays, think pieces, programming advice, reviews, et cetera – is all accessible through KSHOP, Infosys’s online knowledge portal. Furthermore, the teachers are ‘A1 professionals’, as good as any university faculty.

‘Conducive Learning’, Manjunathea clarifies, includes close attention to the new recruits’ private lives as well. Students are housed in plush chalet rooms with maid service and the latest mod cons. For meals, they have the choice of seven food courts. As for leisure, Manjunathea reels off a selection of the facilities: a fully equipped gym, a swimming pool, four squash courts, a bowling alley, a full-size cricket stadium, a soccer pitch, tennis courts, an athletics track, a huge sports hall, a snooker hall, a health club, even salsa classes.

Occupying more than three hundred acres of once barren land on the edge of Mysore city, the campus has the feel of an upmarket seaside resort. The list of other amenities makes life more or less self-contained: a launderette, a hairdresser, a Domino Pizza restaurant, a supermarket called Loyal World, a health centre, Vodafone and Airtel stores, an outlet of fashion retailer Indigo Nation, several banks and a one-thousand-four-hundred-seat cinema. Partially submerged, the latter looks akin to a gigantic metal golf ball plugged in a bunker. As with Mahindra World City, there is no temple or mosque, no whiff of religion whatsoever. At Infosys, the gods are quiet and every miracle made by human hand.

At the end of the extensive briefing, Manjunathea offers to take me for a quick tour. To facilitate transportation around the sprawling campus, Infosys puts five thousand bicycles at the disposal of its fresh-faced trainees. We take a golf cart. He shows me the library first. The shelves hold sixty thousand books. Prominent on the ‘Advised Reading’ display is Narayana Murthy’s collection of speeches, the optimistically entitled
A Better India: A
Better World
. I wander over to the magazine rack. For downtime, students can pick between
Dataquest
,
Developer IQ
,
PC Quest
and a host of other technology titles. I thumb through a copy of
Visual Studio
. ‘Code # Contracts in .NET 4’, the headline article reads. I scan the first few paragraphs and put the magazine back. The contents might as well have been in Klingon.

From the library, we make our way to the Global Education Centre, known on campus as GEC 1. Groups of young graduates are making their way to class. Boys and girls walk separately, segregated by cultural instinct rather than corporate edict. We briefly sit in on the last of the morning sessions. There are roughly a hundred ‘fresh entrants’ in the theatre-style classroom, all sitting behind an Acer Computer watching the lecturer on the stage. She speaks quickly. ‘. . . structure members are accessing the dot operator . . . a structure can be embedded in another structure; a pointer can point to a structure . . .’ She loses me immediately.

We head to an open-air cafe, where Manjunathea introduces me to two students on a free period. He asks if they have five minutes to talk with me, a request to which they politely assent.

Pushing aside their open textbooks, they wait for me to start. I’m slightly reticent. From Manjunathea’s presentation, I half expect them to be brainwashed programmers capable of responding only in code. Neither does, of course. Indeed, both turn out to be extremely personable and highly fluent. Twenty-one-year-old Amrutha describes herself as an electronics undergraduate from Bengaluru. It’s her first time living away from home. I ask her about her experience on campus and she says she felt a ‘little bewildered at first, you know’, but is more settled now. Her parents, she points out, are ‘more than happy’ to see her here.

Prianka is one year older and the more outgoing of the two. Originally from Bhopal, she talks of the ‘wow factor’ that she and all the students feel on arriving at the campus. She’s the first in her family to get a job ‘in corporate’, as she puts it. As with Amrutha, she too feels it necessary to stress the contentedness of her family with her choice of employer. ‘They are happy for us to be independent,’ she says of her expectant parents, ‘but they want us
to settle and save our salary too.’ Both girls expect to marry in ‘four or five years’. I ask if they’ll carry on working afterwards. ‘It depends,’ Prianka says. Depends on what? She doesn’t respond, just smiles and hunches her shoulders. ‘Just depends.’ Both would certainly like to build careers at Infosys, they add. ‘The last thing we want to do after studying so hard is to sit at home.’ Prianka giggles and Amrutha joins in. They agree that the money is good too. The girls are cagey about telling me exactly what their starting salary is, but Prianka provides an illuminating comparison. ‘Put it this way, it took years and years for my father to start earning what I earned in my first week.’ I ask what he does. He works for Western Coal Fields Limited, she tells me, ‘a quasi-government group’.

Gopi had talked about India’s gradual economic liberalisation, about how the state was loosening its grip, freeing the private sector up to grow. Prianka and Amrutha were born at the outset of that process. Not all Indians have seen their prospects improve, but these young women certainly have. Their career hopes and earning power both speak of a remarkable generational transition, a shift that now offers them opportunities inconceivable to their parents.

Sat on a nearby bench, Manjunathea taps his watch face. I thank the graduate pair and leave them to their break time. Looking back from across the quad, I turn to wave. Both are already looking down, however, their noses buried back in their textbooks.

We walk along one of GEC 1’s many corridors. Manjunathea has arranged for me to ask a few questions at the end of an IT basics class. We pass by room after room, each overflowing with future Infosys programmers diligently studying their craft. The sheer scale of the operation begins to hit me. Later, my tour would take me to the newly built Global Education Centre 2, a colossal, crescent-shaped structure with Greek colonnades, Indo-Islamic flourishes and, at its centre, a more than passing resemblance to Washington DC’s Capitol Hill. Covering one million square feet,
the floor plan of the four-storey building reveals one hundred and thirteen rooms on Level 1 alone.

Even here, though, in the modest enormity of GEC 1, I’m struck by the hundreds of people that pass through these corridors every day, all of them bright, industrious young adults like Amrutha and Prianka. Where are they heading? What lies in store for them? What kind of India are they set to inherit? What kind of India do they hope to create?

My eye is drawn to plaques on the classroom doors. As with the conference room, all carry illustrious names. Most derive from the world of business and scientific enterprise: automotive pioneer Henry Ford, General Electric’s charismatic former leader Jack Welch, early computer scientist Alan Turing, inspired inventor and polymath Benjamin Franklin. I don’t see any rooms dedicated to Narayana Murthy or Nandan Nilekani. Should they exist, their names would not be out of place. After all, it is on their entrepreneurial acumen that the gargantuan Global Education Centres have been built.

Striding some ten yards ahead, Manjunathea ushers me into the last classroom along the corridor. How many of the young graduates inside aspire to be the next Ford, the next Franklin, the next Nadkani? The thought follows me through the door and towards the lectern at the direction of the class coordinator.

‘What does Infosys mean to you? What thoughts does it conjure up?’ I ask by way of a warm-up question.

Answers are proffered from among the full rows of terraced seating. ‘A good career in the IT field,’ comes one. ‘Excellent training,’ comes another. ‘Career growth and international exposure,’ a third. My follow-up questions receive a similar response. Why Infosys, not Whipro, Tata Consultancy Services or another of India’s leading IT companies? ‘It’s an honour to be here.’ ‘It has the world’s best training.’

Only one deviates from the script, a thin, mop-haired young man on the back row. ‘Personal growth,’ he says. Then, to the laughter of the class: ‘In financial terms, and all.’ Reminded of Prianka, I ask for a show of hands. How many of you are earning
more relative to your parents when they started work? Not a hand stays down. The hope to be working for Infosys in five years’ time is almost universal too.

I had come to the campus of one of India’s most famous examples of entrepreneurship in the expectation of meeting a new breed of business visionaries. It was, I realise now, a naive assumption. India’s entrepreneurs have created companies in which the brightest crop of young graduates can prosper and thrive. Not all want to go it alone. Very few do, in fact. A mere three hands go up when I ask who in the class envisions themself setting up their own businesses in the future. In the US, it would be the majority. Outside, on the steps of GEC 1, a batch is having a graduation photo taken. They are ‘production-ready’ and throw their hats in their air to prove it.