India’s startups stand on the shoulders of these giants, and now there’s an app to reach them

Infosys co-founders Kris Gopalakrishnan and Narayana Murthy (right) with Prof HN Mahabala (center). Photo credit: Itihaasa.

It was a special evening of nostalgia in Bangalore yesterday for Indian IT.

Infosys co-founder Narayana Murthy helped the elderly Prof H.N. Mahabala, who taught him computer science at the premier Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) decades ago, to the front of a hall filled with IT stalwarts. Murthy recounted a tale about teaching the Fortran programming language to freshers of the Indian civil service.

A young officer was stuck as the computer wouldn’t print out the solution of a quadratic equation. Murthy went through the code and pointed out that the print command was missing. “Professor Mahabala told us computers can even arrange marriages,” retorted the officer. “So won’t the computer know it has to print the answer after finding the solution of the quadratic equation?”

The professor, sharp as ever, rounded off the tale: “Well, the computer did get Murthy married.” (Murthy’s wife Sudha was also a computer engineer who met him through a common friend who used to lend Murthy’s books to her.)

Murthy had not seen a computer until he went to IIT. Later, he founded Infosys, helped turn India into an IT services powerhouse, and became a multi-billionaire. His co-founders Nandan Nilekani and Kris Gopalakrishnan, serial entrepreneur Ashok Soota – who was president of another Indian IT giant Wipro for 15 years – and several other honchos were gathered in the hall. Their gurus were there too, including Professor V Rajaraman, who pioneered a supercomputer center at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) back in the early eighties.

Rivals and friends

Indian IT stalwarts. Photo credit: Itihaasa.

The occasion was the launch of an app called Itihaasa. The word is Sanskrit for ‘history’ and fittingly begins with ‘IT’ because the app chronicles the history of Indian IT. Available on both Android and iOS devices, the free app currently has 600 videos, including interviews with 44 stalwarts of Indian IT, as well as cross-linked articles and photos of artefacts. It’s an ongoing project conceived and financed by Kris Gopalakrishnan, co-founder and former CEO of Infosys.

“You can see we’re competitors but very good friends also,” Kris tells me, waving his hand across the room at doyens of Indian IT companies who once competed fiercely with one another for global projects. What they share is a heritage, from the first computers coming into India in the fifties to economic reforms in the nineties that propelled Indian IT services to the world stage. Last year, the IT industry had nearly US$150 billion in revenues and contributed nearly one-tenth of India’s GDP.

It’s been a wonderful journey from the first computer that came to the Indian Statistical Institute in 1955, says Kris, who is now an investor and mentor for startups. He hopes the Itihaasa app will connect the new generation of tech entrepreneurs in India with their heritage, and new companies will gain from the ideas and experience of the past. “We’ve demonstrated world class companies can be created in India.”

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Catalysts of change

The new gen entrepreneur will, for sure, appreciate that heritage is presented in an app. “I wanted to do it differently, not write a book… Basically, I’m a geek and this is what I enjoy doing,” explains Kris, whose current passions span tech, entrepreneurship, and education. He recently contributed nearly US$35 million of his personal wealth for setting up a Center for Brain Research at the IISc.

His co-founder at Infosys, Nandan Nilekani, has been a catalyst of change in his own way. He left Infosys to lead the Indian government’s massive project Aadhar to give a 12-digit unique identification number to every single person in a population of 1.3 billion.