India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation Read Online Free PDF Page A

design apps for iPhones, Twitter and the like. ‘The idea’, he’d explained, ‘was to predict when the customer would call and why.’ It’s a frightening, ground-breaking thought.
    Both Nags and Dr Shetty had struck me as inspiring and ambitious. Visionaries in their fields, they had – like Gopi – succeededin creating something from nothing. Together, the entrepreneurial trio shared the same drive, the same audacity to go against the tide and, most importantly, the same unassailable conviction that India’s time was now . The combination had seen them achieve much in their respective careers. It had also helped them land a ton of cash.
    As individuals, they abounded with optimism. And why not? As a triumvirate, they could claim impressive track records. Although none showed signs of slowing, they had each, in their own way, arrived. Students pore over their business models. Management commentators treat their opinions as ‘insights’. Everywhere they go they are ‘somebody’.
    What about the nobodies? What about the fledgling entrepreneurs who are starting out at the bottom? Do they show the same qualities, the same ambition, the same optimism?
    It is with this question in mind that I am making my way out to the Golf Links Business Park to meet Naveen Tewari.
    Founder of InMobi, a technology start-up selling ads for Internet-enabled phones, Tewari belongs to a new, upcoming breed of Indian entrepreneur. In a sense, Gopi, Dr Shetty and Nags tee up the story of New India. They laid its foundations. They wrote the introduction. Now, it falls to the next generation to continue the tale and make it their own.
    I arrive forty-five minutes late. Mr Tewari is waiting, his secretary informs me. Accustomed to latecomers perhaps, her voice carries no reproach. I go through to the company boardroom. A sparse, square room, it is decorated with a bachelor’s eye for functional furniture and foreign-made electronics. Pride of place is given to a Polycom teleconference machine. The space-age contraption has a protruding plastic arm, fixed to the end of which is a spherical socket containing a roving eyeball. A wilting fern occupies the corner.
    My test case is tapping his fingers.
    The gridlock traffic and my subsequent delay have ruffled me. So too has the business park. Arriving via the architectural bedlam of unplanned Indian suburbia – improvised housing, crumblingstorefronts, pavement-less streets, chaotic wiring, endless concrete, overworked sewerage, real life – the business park comes as a shock.
    Sectioned away from the cluttered arterial road and shielded from outsiders by uniformed security, the world of Golf Links is neatly boxed. Here, corporations reign. Microsoft, Yahoo!, Dell. Blunt yet powerful acronyms dominate the skyline, writ large in designer script. KPMG, ANZ, LG, IBM. Glass and chrome abound. The buildings are big. The lines straight. The grass cut. The bushes sculpted. The roads empty. The people near-absent. Order, of a very Germanic kind, has been restored. Or, more accurately, imposed. The world shrank and righted itself when we drove in. It could have been the miniature demonstration model back at Mahindra World City that we were driving through.
    Thrown off kilter, I kick off by asking the thirty-three-year-old entrepreneur about the photograph by the door. It’s the boardroom’s lone wall-hanging. The scene is a happy one: fifty or so employees in matching polo shirts, standing with their spouses on a golf fairway. A handful of children run amok. Stick-on smiles spread across every face. Palm trees provide the backdrop to an idyllic day out. These are his ‘superstars’, Tewari tells me.
    I look out of the window. All the superstars are now busy at their laptops, plugging away at keyboards in narrow cubicles. Each booth is equipped with a small whiteboard splattered with rushed arithmetic, sales targets and holiday dates. Bathed in the pale luminosity of artificial lighting, that happy