Sethuraman senior had no fattened calf ready to welcome his son, Sriram Sethuraman back to India. The latest returnee evoked no surprised remarks from anyone in the family. “When you have the opportunity in India, why work elsewhere?” asks Dr. Sriram Sethuraman, a technologist at the Bangalore-based Ittiam, a DSP Software and Systems Company. Back in 1986, his father, a mathematics professor, wanted him to pursue medicine, but he went on to become an engineer, and then did a Ph.D., graduating from Carnegie Mellon. A decade or so later, the company he worked for, Sarnoff, offered him an option to explore setting up an Indian operation, but he had by then made up his mind on becoming a part of Ittiam. Today, Sethuraman has returned to India to work for a startup, but as a technology head—the ideal deal.

And the reason for his jump from Sarnoff to Ittiam? “Similar work and role as in Sarnoff; Ittiam’s product focus, vision, and the rate of progress over the initial year in the video team when I first visited Ittiam,” says he. And why from America to India? “Family. I wanted to return to India after my studies, but soon realized that my video technology knowledge could fetch me no job in India. So I decided to work—for a while at least—in the States,” says Sethuraman. At his previous stint in Sarnoff, his research work paid off a score patents for his innovations. Now in Ittiam his technology involves innovation in developing low-complexity MPEG-2 to cutting-edge H.264 transcoding algorithms and its implementation.

“Shifting base was more of a welcome sign because my family always beckoned me and my wife had no problems in moving,” says Sethuraman. Professionally, “it was wholesome satisfaction, Ittiam was exactly that product oriented company I was looking for, its ideologies and the nature of work was something like I had always thought of,” says he. Life after his return from the U.S was not very discernibly different for him. “Nothing was surprising. I grew up here and I know how it works. But things are so convenient as my family is close by and I don’t have to miss it.” On the work front, an area that required a bit of adjustment from him was in the personal bandwidth needed to lead and mentor a relatively young team, unlike the bunch of PhDs he worked with in Sarnoff. Sethuraman enjoys the kind of growth one has in a startup—growth, he says is much faster than in the big firms. After two years in India, Sethuraman has no regret about his choice, “If I have lost something in quitting Sarnoff, it could possibly be the rich exposure in research and the state-of-the-art technology,” he remarks.