Monday, Oct 1 2001
The Horse that Flew: How India's Silicon Gurus Spread their Wings - By Chidanand Rajghatta
India's Ride on the Silicon Highway!
- Anjana BasuAnjana Basu taught English Literature, briefly, in Calcutta University. She writes poetry, stories, features in the local newspapers and in Cosmopolitan. She has had a book of short stories published by Orient Longman, India. The BBC had broadcast one of her short stories and her poems have featured in an anthology brought out by Penguin India. In America she has been published in The Wolfhead Quarterly, Gowanus, The Blue Moon Review, and Recursive Angel, to name a few.
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Book Name:The Horse that Flew: How India's Silicon Gurus Spread their Wings
Publisher: Harper Collins India
Price: Rs. 595
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Although Internet companies have been known for giving employees lucrative
stock options and creating overnight millionaires, several dot coms have
been slipping workers pink slips lately and sending them to the unemployment
line. This is where the Silicon Valley dream has ended, with the collapse of
everything the IT world seemed to promise.
Money was not waiting to be minted on the internet and more and more
investors are insisting on concrete earnings from Internet companies in the
near term, which will lead to a wave of mergers and layoffs that will
continue throughout the summer and into the fall, a signal that we are
moving into the next phase of the digital revolution.
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However that is now. When Silicon Valley was the next best thing after the California Gold Rush, it was fabled that 40 per cent of the techies in Silicon Valley, were of Indian origin. This while India was slipping into economic decline. In fact, the Silicon Valley example gave this country a chance to hold up her head and say, "India produces the world's best geeks."
Bangalore girded its loins, Hyderabad became an IT capital, Kolkata spoke of
setting up software parks - all on the strength of the Indian achievement in
California.
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This book, written by Times of India's Washington correspondent, tells the story of India's journey down the information super highway, both in the US and in India.
The big names of IT are profiled here Sabeer Bhatia, Vinod Khosla, Vinod Dham, NR Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji. What majes the book different is the fact that it includes women IT heroines, who are normally left out of the roll call, like Radha Basu of Hewlett Packard or Vani Kola who mothered a baby and a company at the same time.
The book covers the super success of the Indus entrepreneurs, who took over from the Sabeer Bhatias and made it possible for desi upstarts to get every kind of help from their superiors through sheer networking skill. IIT, the alma mater of many of these geeks also gets covered, since in today's world, it has become synonymous with Indian geekdom, a kind of super computer brand turning out geeks byte by byte.
Of course, it isn't all highs, since the book attempts to give a comprehensive historic sweep of the life and times of the Silicon Gurus. As a result it touches on the bursting of the dot com bubble, how the horse that flew became the horse that slew. But it doesn't end on a low note -
the author goes on to talk about how India could overcome the digital divide. After all, Indians are inventive - in the Punjab washing machines have been turned into giant lassi makers - and the same people that brought you Silicon Valley are now looking hopefully at India's problem solving
skills and probably expecting too much because the problem is still a long way from being solved.
The book is informatively written, though perhaps peppered with too many desi computer puns and, as an overview of the situation, does an invaluable job.
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