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

summer day must feel like a lifetime ago. Mr Tewari insists this isn’t the case. His workforce is charged. They have something to prove. They are young. They have drive, passion, energy. They believe in his industry, in the potential of Internet-enabled mobile-phone advertising. ‘You can do a lot if you get the right energy in place.’ I take a second look out of the window. Perhaps he’s right? Maybe the drab decor and uniform workbenches are camouflaging a hidden ambush of tigers, gnashing at the bit and thrusting at their prey? My senses, I have to concede, are still awry.
    The discussion about his employees gives me an opportunity toget 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