Backdrop: After achieving a “gold standard” school track record, I dreamed of joining the armed forces (being inspired by the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri’s slogan ‘Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan’). For various reasons this did not fructify and I ended up joining the IIT Madras only to discontinue the course after a year.
Cutting a long story short, against a backdrop of strong family opposition, armed with a National Merit Scholarship , I ended up signing up for a B.Sc. Hons. Course in Physics and Maths in Hyderabad. Logically, I should have gone on to fulfill my father’s dream of seeing me blossom into a research scientist, but this was not to be. With a freshly minted degree, I entered a two year stint dabbling in arm chair student activism, amateur editorial work, and an exposure to rural India through travel to the interiors. Though many thought this to be a waste of time, I consider this to be a very important phase in my life, shaping the formation of my core sensibilities.
Subsequently I took up a job as a management trainee with Aeronautical giant HAL and worked there for a couple of years. They had an excellent executive training program and it is here that I got interested in computers, management, finance and allied matters.
Inevitably, this led to my resigning the job (I had to borrow a princely sum of Rs 10,000 to pay my employer’s bond) and joining the PGDM program at the IIM at Bangalore.
I truly enjoyed this period of my life, especially the interactions with my exuberant and driven batch-mates. Other highlights included my summer project getting the Alumni award for “the best project” and a team of three of us winning the third prize in the 1981 “National Competition for Young Managers”.