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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

An Entrepreneurial Journey

Asvini Kumar
Tuesday, November 29, 2011
Asvini Kumar
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”.


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