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India@75: A Tryst with Technology

Episode Description

India is home to 105 unicorns with a total valuation of $ 338.50 B; 19 of these were added to date in 2022. In contrast, France created one unicorn in the last 2 years. Despite this euphoria, we do not fully understand or appreciate the far-reaching impact of the tech industry on India's development march. Apart from being a $200B industry ($178B exports), tech changed the fabric of the nation: Diversity and inclusion - 5M direct employees, 1.8M of whom are women Transparency - first to adopt GAAP reporting; setting corporate governance standards Inclusive Growth - beyond 11 metros to tier 2, 3 and 4 towns Public Digital Infrastructure - Aadhaar, UPI, Co-Win, ONDC, Passport Seva, GST Harish Mehta, one of the band of mavericks who built this industry, joins us in this episode to give us some fantastic insights. Do record or write in with your feedback.

Transcript

Hi, I am Samiran! Hi, I am Nilesh Hi, I am Sheetal and you are listening to 3TB Banter. 3 Techies Banter.

Hi, I am Sheetal Choksi. Welcome to 3TB, a podcast where 3 techies banter. It's a podcast where you can explore tech, the non-tech way. It's about how tech and economics behind tech impacts us today and in the future. It's full of information, fun facts, and common sense actually spoken in a language that everyone understands. Our guest today on the section of 3 techies banter chat is Mr.Harish Mehta. While Mr.Mehta needs no introduction to the people in the world of technology, for those who are uninitiated in the world of technology, I am going to give you a quick introduction. Harish Mehta is the author of a national bestseller book, the Maverick effect. He was the driving force behind galvanizing the Indian IT industry. He is the founder member and the convener of the chairman’s counsel at Nasscom. He has led grown and mentored onward technologies. His book, The Maverick effect is really the story of an extraordinary band of dreamers and I really think it's an extraordinary league of gentlemen who joined hands to transform our nation with technology. Whatever I say today honestly, whatever I say today will never do justice to what he has really contributed to the Indian tech industry so I really recommend that you go and check him out if you haven't already done that. Check out his profile, check out his book, it's a wonderful read and it is absolutely our pleasure and honor that you have agreed to come as a guest on today’s episode of 3 techies banter. Welcome to 3 banter Harish bhai and I hope you are not audacious at calling you Harish bhai. I know Mr.Mehta is the perfect way to address you but I am going to take that liberty and call you Harish bhai. So welcome to 3 techies banter. Samiran I know like me you have read the book end to end and so has Nilesh, do you want to jump in?

Absolutely and I think Harish bhai. I wanted to ask you about why you wrote the book but I wanted to ask you about the title itself. What made you choose the title maverick as a title in this book and how did that come to you suddenly?

See, I am putting a stake on the ground claiming that it is the IT industry that changed the fortunes of billions of people and Nasscom was the facilitator behind the IT industry to have that change happen. Now it's a massive change, changing the downward spiral of India or arresting it and then creating a virtuous cycle of growth, it's not a small thing. So many things happened, that is when the word Maverick came in people who contributed but again Maverick is an unusual thinking in some ways. So how this band of mavericks came together with a very unusual thinking of let us say collaborate and compete with no personal agenda keeping industry or India first and that is what made a significant difference or is created I call it a compounded growth because of that one particular contribution. So mavericks together created it, it's a maverick you fact. So even on the cover of the book the RT says come up with the bands, and the band represents one maverick, one entrepreneur who has worked together to bring in the change.

So that's so interesting and I think basically Nasscom, you and this whole industry have probably been pioneers in the way you have brought people who compete in the real world together and put country first or put the industry first and kind of moved. I think you were the first people to operationalize the word co-petition while it has been written in management books much before. So Harish bhai, obviously the Nasscom has been there for a while and people know the stories selectively so what led you to kind of, this is the story that needs to be told, this is something that needs to be kept at least as a legacy for the next generation that they should know how we reached here. Everybody takes it for granted including bandwidth but there are lots of stories on that.

So coming back to when I wrote the book. So I have been in this industry for the last 45 years. We started Nasscom in 1988 and I have seen at that time, India was known as a snake charmers country or fakir’s country or a third world country. You may not have been born probably but in 91 we were bankrupt on foreign exchange. So we had to airlift gold from India to the Bank of England to import some oil, to generate essential for us. From there today India has become a global tech powerhouse and is now ready to take on and provide leadership globally especially in the technology area in the next 10 years. How did that change happen? So I believe very strongly that it is the industry that contributed. So 3-4 years back, I did buy books and read from bureaucrats or RBI governors, from politicians. The first thing I would do is look at the index page and sees whether the word Nasscom is there or not. You will be shocked, not a single one talked about Nasscom. You look at the books published in that, then you look at, I called a few economists and I said why you think India changed. Somebody said smartphones but smartphones came only 10 years back, how did snake charmers change? No answer. Even somebody said 91 reforms, reforms is a paper work. Some say policies have changed. So all that led me to believe that people don't know the story of, neither in the IT industry the story anyone has written, I don't find any. So if nobody has written it then people will jump to the wrong conclusions about what happened so that's when I said while I am not an author, I am not a historian and i am not an economist but I will still jump in and write that story. So that's the motivation for me to write the story of the IT industry. As we say we need a process of people to make a success out of anything so for the bright quality, top skills in terms of researchers, economists, writers and whatever necessary skills to get the process going. Even at the end when the book was ready, I had the book reviewed by not only my colleagues, they would verify all the facts in the book but also the critics of Nasscom. For a good reason they are critics, in the sense that Nasscom brand is so strong, they wanted Nasscom to do maybe 10 times more than what Nasscom is doing which Nasscom was not able to do. There are many savior critics for Nasscom, for that perspective I gave them the book also to review and comment on it. I dint want any historical fact to be misrepresented. I had met one Gujarati author who told me, when you write an autobiography like in my personal case when you write a biography, the first thing is you have to be truthful. If you are not truthful then your friends or colleagues will read, your family will read and that's where the books will stop, it will not go beyond and you have to assume in a personal case as if you are walking naked on the street when you write your autobiography. Do you have the courage to write it that way? So that was my way, we will jump in and write it in an autobiography way, partly because it is too much of a claim I am making in the book and I don't want that claim to be associated with someone else. The blame comes to me, whatever is written. Don't want other colleagues to feel I am putting something beyond, they can say it is his version and be out of it. So that's the reason i had to be in it in a personal way so that others can react the way they want to reach, they are free to criticize, free to challenge my assumptions and what not. And then as i said, wanted to be truthful so went through a number of iterations internally with the right people to contribute.

So I think that thing you said probably reminds you, this whole concept of co-petition, how were you able to bring these people together and hold them together for a cause greater than themselves. You can make people believe in something for one time. You see strikes, people go on but then they lose momentum, it takes 6 months, 1 year, 2 years, it goes on but you have been able to maintain this momentum of the corporation over such a sustained period of time, how has that been possible?

First of all, this is 35 years back so whatever I have written, I have reconstructed so that may not be the whole truth at that point in time but I was just trying to put different pieces together to question yourself, what happened, how it happened, so and so forth. One fundamental thing was, I don't know when, maybe after 2 years or after started Nasscom 3 years probably, I realized that people are not communicating with each other in the group, they were scared to talk about their problems in front of others because its a very small market, small number of players so everybody would go after each other. The minute they come to know I have this problem; they may go and talk to my customer. So this is real fear inside. Similarly by mistake if the customer’s name comes out then we all jump in and go after that customer. So there was a genuine fear amongst the people. So when I was representing novel of USA at that point of time, second largest software personal company and they had a co-petition as a business model very successful. So there is this product called NetWare which was being sold IBM in a white box as they used to call it. Netware was a red box and IBM called it a blue box. Noble was a very small company and with the IBMs brand the product took off in the enterprise segment, they started trusting that product. So the market which didn't exist for the product, completely opened up and they were competing with IBM in the corporate segment. So where IBM is selling the blue box, Nobel is selling the red box through the resellers to the customers in a red box, same product and it was working beautifully well. Then Nobel jumped 10 times or whatever. So the co-petition model was ingrained in the noble's way of thinking. That's what triggered in my mind, we are all competing, and how do we create that co-petition model. That time I came across a John Money story about how you came together. If you know European history, countries hate each other internally after the second world war specifically and this gentleman John Money brought them together under one roof, called them European Union and then EU. so he is the one again i bought his book which he had published and I read about how. I realized one thing; the solution to getting these people together is to focus on the common enemy. If we have a common enemy, chances are people will open up and talk. So in our case there were 100s of regulations strangulating the software industry. Governments don’t know what software is. In the book again I have talked about…..

Ya, you have talked about you flopping.

Exactly. So all different kinds of solutions and the rules of hardware were applied on top of it. Everybody thought that software is something that is to be put in a box or a board or a table or whatever. Intangible as a product or a service was just inconceivable at that time with almost everybody including the government, including the corporate customers. Tech industry dint exist from that perspective. So that brought in together, how do you create co-petition and finding the common enemy and focused on the discussion that started opening up. Then of course in the evening we will go out, one of the co-founders of Nasscom Mr.Ramni, in his hotel room people will gather, the drinks will flow, dinner will flow and all of that would be very natural for people and we will not talk about in the initial years about the business. More about personal life. So then people suddenly realized that he or she is like me only. He may be representing company X but people started opening up. I remember Dr.Prakash Hewalkar of UNICEF called me and asked, Harish , are you running a serious software association or are you running a social organization? Drinking and eating and all that and not talking about the business. I said, but Prakash nobody is opening up, so we will try this. It's not me only, many of us have contributed in bringing in this change and that's probably we started planting the seeds of that collaborate and compete and when we went to the government and wicked few victories, people realized in the power of commuting, going to the government with a single voice made huge- huge difference in the way the government responded to our queries and what not. We had decided collectively at that time that we will not bribe any officer anywhere for policy change. Now some of you may not even get an idea but in those days it was difficult to even imagine such a situation, not to give a bribe. We waited even 5 years sometimes for a policy change.

In fact this thing is very interesting because Harish Bhai, Tanuja who could be in touch with you from FSM, she was having some troubles with some taxes and all that and everybody was asking her to settle. She said Harish bhai was the only one to say no, if you are right you must fight it. That was the reason he said you must get him on the show, he was the only one who told me fight it if you think you are right and not go and settle.

So Harish bhai a quick question before we move into the next segment. While writing the book I am sure you have had some phenomenal memories which are fun and then there must be the whole, there's author’s block which runs when you are writing a book. Can you share some of those moments with us? Some of the highs and lows of writing this book.

See, first of all I have a habit of writing my personal notes. Sometimes I do it once a week, sometimes I do once every 2 whatever, and there is no time as such. Introspect and write down whatever I like and write down stories in the book. Many stories were written there, not full stories but as a bullet point.

I did get that sense in the first chapter itself when you detail out the scene at the airport and things like that. So it does show through as a diary moment.

You are absolutely right. Photographs I used to keep, there was no interest in those days so there was no email or whatever but the computer magazines were there, not their articles, of course the regular newspaper articles, so all that I had kept. So my 2 years v/s a 1st year person, whatever happened I had a nice history, things that we tried to bring in the change. So that partly was captured in those notes. Then of course meeting everybody around and getting what they remembered and putting them into the book. So we talked to 20-30 people who were at that time and are still very active in the industry. So that came in partly very handy but the biggest challenge for me was when the book came in handy when I am supposed to unload, put some structure around it, review it and then you are not happy with it. Then you think why you are writing it, you will be a fool if people don't buy your argument. I myself like to read books and I used to get bored by reading many management books. I don't want to have that model. My book has to be every page after page; people should hold the people to read. One of the people in the group said that story writing means show but not tell. Now I still don't understand well how to show but not tell. But we tried that also as a key thing to keep the interest of the reader alive. So like that many such one liners we had kept as a reference as writing the book and of course after you make one line change and hopefully i am a good software programmer so I looked at it as a programming job thankfully. So you make one line change somewhere, I go back and read the para again, does it change anywhere, go ABC and read the para again, see the flow is maintained or does it conflict with another chapter. So for a month I wouldn't do anything. Just forget about the book. Then go back, otherwise I will get boxed in the same thought process. I want to look at that and take a fresh cut. That is why it took 3 years, otherwise it could have happened in 6 months.You are absolutely right. Photographs I used to keep, there was no interest in those days so there was no email or whatever but the computer magazines were there, not their articles, of course the regular newspaper articles, so all that I had kept. So my 2 years v/s a 1st year person, whatever happened I had a nice history, things that we tried to bring in the change. So that partly was captured in those notes. Then of course meeting everybody around and getting what they remembered and putting them into the book. So we talked to 20-30 people who were at that time and are still very active in the industry. So that came in partly very handy but the biggest challenge for me was when the book came in handy when I am supposed to unload, put some structure around it, review it and then you are not happy with it. Then you think why you are writing it, you will be a fool if people don't buy your argument. I myself like to read books and I used to get bored by reading many management books. I don't want to have that model. My book has to be every page after page; people should hold the people to read. One of the people in the group said that story writing means show but not tell. Now I still don't understand well how to show but not tell. But we tried that also as a key thing to keep the interest of the reader alive. So like that many such one liners we had kept as a reference as writing the book and of course after you make one line change and hopefully i am a good software programmer so I looked at it as a programming job thankfully. So you make one line change somewhere, I go back and read the para again, does it change anywhere, go ABC and read the para again, see the flow is maintained or does it conflict with another chapter. So for a month I wouldn't do anything. Just forget about the book. Then go back, otherwise I will get boxed in the same thought process. I want to look at that and take a fresh cut. That is why it took 3 years, otherwise it could have happened in 6 months.

Having said that, Harish bhai we are going to take a quick break here and move into the second segment and we will come back quickly. Please hold onto your seats, there is much more interesting stuff coming your way.

Hi, welcome back to the second segment with this very interesting chat we are having with Harish Mehta, Harish bhai as we are calling him on the show. He talked us through the whole process of his book and it was quite interesting actually. You know Samiran and Sheetal, we have talked a lot about this whole thing of growing the pie and I was just thinking of the whole collaborate and compete kind of a thing and Harish bhai I will tell you, it was so interesting when i heard you, we did a couple of projects of mobile money in Africa sometime back and we felt like that there was such fierce competition amongst the telecoms to launch their own mobile money and they were so focused on their growing piece of a pie that no one was collaborating to say let's make it more fungible, this whole mobile money thing. So you had these standalone solutions and no one figured out that if they could make it more fungible then probably the adoption will go further up. So this whole Nasscom story reminded me of that. It's just fantastic you have explained that in the book. Harish bhai, we will now like to know a little bit about the person behind this book. So i saw your profile and you work closely with noble, you mentioned it in the previous section. This is the start of the digital journey of India so it will be interesting to know how you started your career so it will help us understand you better.

And maybe just also talk to us about your early career and this US-India bit. I think that's very interesting for people who are struggling with that also, going back to India and doing all of that. I think that is also interesting.

First of all, it appears from the boom that credit comes to me but that's not true. I am basically a narrator or historian from the book perspective. Large number of mavericks has contributed and we are 5 million engineers working today day in day out who are really contributing for the actual impact that is happening in the country. Just keeping that as a broad picture in the mind. So coming back to my story, I don't know how far I can go but there are lots of things which I have talked about in the book, let's say I was a database manager in the USA for an American can company, earning a great salary. My wife was earning a good salary and we both tried very hard in the early years to Americanize by getting into the local activities but we couldn't. We were very successful and you have to be part of the American culture like you have to join a duplicate bridge to a local group but as soon as it is over everyone goes back and there are hardly any social conversations with all the players. Again people were from different communities, Italian, French, German and all. So we couldn't really adjust ourselves and did not feel comfortable or at home. Then of course we wanted to live with the family, that was another thing. We were missing the family, whatever you call it, joining family, emotional bondage or whatever it may be. So at one point we decided that we will go back to India and once we took that decision for example i want to take the car back to India, we look for a car which has a bench seats because in America all the cars have bucket seats but here we travel in a family so we look for a car which has a bench seat. You buy appliances of 220 volts and you get those dual appliances and all that. So we started very seriously looking at coming back, we came back, at that time it was an emergency. An emergency meant the worst situation, the kind of news that was coming in the USA. My friends were saying, " Harish, you will be back in USA in one month, no way you will survive in India. So when we came back everyone said, why have you come? It is such a land of paradise, full of money and honey, why are you coming back here, what is kept in this country for you? So to us it was an emergency there but it didn't impact our day to day life but then there were major surprises for me. One was I thought I would join my dad’s business which was in film distribution but I realized after coming here, he was in a huge debt. I looked at the business model and it was not something I would enjoy doing. I looked at my father in law’s business, they manufacture parts for 2 wheelers so if one part I need you can supply to me so it was a readymade market and he had set up that manufacturing. So he took me to Kanjurmarg in Mumbai. When I saw those galas I was like My God, i said I have not come from the USA to work in those galas. I could not believe the unhygienic conditions of those galas. So then I met my cousin. He said Harish would take the next flight and go back to the US. I said why, he said in India whatever business you do, somebody will do customs chori, someone will do income tax chori, somebody will do excise chori, different ways. You will never know the input cost of your competitor and you are not going to do any of that so how will you compete? So all that forced me to start thinking, what do i do this is when i jumped on technology as a business, there was no market, nothing there literally and database was 20 years ahead of where India was in technology front. So I can't even use my current knowledge base here. But then I realized that I cannot bribe a jump instruction to overtake the queue the CPU and say process this faster. So corruption will not have any, in technology based business you have to believe in the solution. If you don't solve it, you can't. So that is where meritocracy will come from technology driven businesses. Later on I realized that purchase offices can be bribed and what now. It was a different level but here that game with the comfort and confidence that technology has a potential to do business for me. Then I met Mr.Sharu Rangnekar who was a management guru, leading management guru in those days in a small conference of 40-50 people. I was introduced to him saying, this nut has come back from the USA. So he said, welcome Mr.Mehta, you will be a first class citizen in a second class country with third class administration and yours and my job is to fix that. So I also looked for a job at that time. I went to Delhi for an interview with the department of electronics because that is where I thought I could contribute from that position and enjoy it. So there Dr.Sheshgiri was like the man, very close to Rajiv Gandhi, he interviewed me, took me out for lunch to a place and by the time we were back he gave me an appointment letter. He said this has never happened in our history but knowing your background in whatever I have understood about you I would like you to stay in India. He made an extra effort by passing all the processes in some processes and getting their processes by giving you an appointment letter before you leave. So I was impressed by the kind of desire they wanted for people who are technically qualified to come back to India and settle down. Then I met one major Mr.Bala Subhramaniam. He said if you don't take a job, for a person like you we are coming up with an import scheme where you can import a computer and with a 200% export commitment you can do a local ward. So I said it's a great idea. So I did a back of the envelope calculator on how much cash would be required to do this business. I met my friend Mick Shah who connected me to the company Hinditron in those days and we both decided to partner. So Hinditron said we will both take 80%, you bring in 20%. I don't even have 20% so I went back to my father in law. His factory was in big trouble, labor strike for 9 months or something. So I was afraid to ask him when he was in such a bad situation but I had no other options. He gave me 20% of the money. He said it is a loan to you but it is non-refundable and interest free. So I said that's great and that's how I started my journey in the software business. And of course there are lo0ts of stories about what happened there. I ventured out in the software product game and that failed miserably. I put a lot of money in it but we realized India is just not ready for the product game. But then the challenges we saw in doing software business were massive. So that's where the idea of forming a software association which we call Nasscom. Part of the history.

As usual, very- very interesting insights on Harish bhai’s journey and all the things he had to do.

Nobody really directly links to the world of technology, today yes but maybe in the past, no. we always have these other stories we talk about. I remember when I was in the retail industry and we were talking about the expansion and growth of retail, we would talk about 1991 as those points where liberalization was happening and that's what helped retail grow but as a company where I was working what really made us one of the best companies was the fact that we were really using amazing technology to be able to understand what we were selling, how we were selling and all of that. We never really get down to giving sometimes to giving technology the due credit that it deserves. I think we just kind of assume that it has to play its role. Today, yes.

What happens here is that India has a dark history in general. If I ask anybody, what you are proud of as an Indian, you will go back 3,000-5,000 years. You don't know anything to talk about in the past and since our history was never written people don't know. I am sure in another year or 2 years people will start talking about it, they would like to know their history. Ideally I am talking about where they came from because there are so many great insights in our history to learn from. Dos and don'ts both. They would definitely benefit as they move forward. I was in London a month ago for the launch of my book and once the event was over one gentleman came for my autograph and then he said, "I have been living in the UK for the last 15 years." I am feeling proud as an Indian. So the IT story is so strong, it creates that pride. I have also written another story about Silicon Valley in the same way that they feel proud as an Indian now because of the global tech power branding of India now. So that is also equally will ask people to question what our past is and hopefully they will read history of the industry and learn from that. They will give due credit to the IT industry and whatever work they have done. Some of these things would have happened on its own also, it's not that we brought the internet. The Internet would have come into India like it has come into other countries or lets say associations, there were 5 other associations at that point in time. Nasscom was different. So what is the difference between us and other associations be it CI, FIKI, what not. That is the difference that I have tried to bring out in the book. This is the base value or the secret sauce of an association. So all the new aged industries can follow Nasscom type of model so we talked about corporate governance transparency. We are not seeing that in the startup world and the startup world should accept that their, I don't who will do it but they should start another association whatever it may be and come up with those norms. In our case, one Satyam case we were so concerned about, there are so many and that can spoil the branding of a startup as a world that can have a big backlash coming in from the investor community and what not.

So Harish bhai it is very good that you bought up Satyam and I was meaning to ask you this. Of course we only hear and remember the Satyam and whatever bad corporate governance and whatever happened after that but very- very few people know the role that Nasscom played in mitigating that situation and how y’all bought people and i think you have elaborated that and that for me bares definitely a specific mention. The second thing I wanted to also kind of ask you to elaborate on is this, how Nasscom is kind of a unique organization of its kind in the world and how other countries have tried to emulate building of the industry but they are not able to create a Nasscom. So those 2, maybe the Satyam thing and Nasscom as a unique association, if you can throw some light on that.

Ok, so let's talk about Satyam. I called in my book Satyam the way Nasscom handled it is the finest of all and partly the reason is that when Raju’s letter came out in the public we realized our president Som was called to a meeting of Nasscom of council members and we said should we do something or not. Now as an association we don't get into individual company’s challenges but when we all debated we realized it is not Satyam we are concerned about, it is not 35,000 engineer employees. We are concerned but that's not our job but it is their customers who are global customers where they had telecom companies, they had banks, those banks and telecom companies have millions of customers. If Satyam collapses those customers would be on the road and when you have millions of customers suffering India will get a bad name, our industry will shrink from now on if Satyam collapses. Because now there is no trust in the country, there is no trust in Indian companies so we all said we have to save Satyam. So some went back to our corporate office, met minister Mr.Gupta and others and they also laughed. They said it is not our job to save Satyam, it is the job of shareholders, it is the job of auditors, it is the job of board of directors, if they are all sleeping, if they are all colluding, why should we get into it? But when we explained why we wanted to save Satyam, they also agreed. They said we will come back to you. We were called back after 3 days saying the prime minister and others have agreed to help Satyam but it requires certain laws to be changed. They talked to Mr.Bawa of SEBI, if you will take over what the challenges are. We need about 30 days to change all our internal laws for the government to take over a private company. So again we all met. What can we do to save Satyam for a month? So collectively we decided we will not recruit a senior person from Satyam proactively. Proactively we will not go after any of Satyam’s customers. Now here is a golden opportunity for every company to grow fast by grabbing those customers, grabbing those people but the collective wisdom was that we must save Satyam. Even one of us in that call argued, I remember, I can dabble myself, I must go for a kill, why are you stopping me? So marketing teaches you that unfortunately when there is a weak player, act like a vulture and kill it. So with that sort of itching ingrained in everybody, that marketing is acting against us but the government understood, I mean the government worked on it parallel. After 30 days Kiran Karnik who was the president of Nasscom was brought in as a chairman, then Mr.Deepak Parekh, Mr.Damodaran and others were brought in as the directors, found a company, took over the company and then in the auction Tech Mahindra was formed. That's why I call it the finest tower of Nasscom. Collective wisdom, maturity of these entrepreneurs, which is the maverick effect. Now you can imagine the effect of the maverick globally, within India as well as globally. It reached a point where China wanted to compete with our industry. This is another story I have heard, Mr.John mccarthy himself told us who was the CEO of Foresters, china asked foresters to master a plan for china to become No.1 in IT services. John told them, you cannot dream of becoming No.1 unless you create a Nasscom equivalent association in China because I have not seen anywhere in the world TCS, Infosys, Wipro, large companies sitting together across the table, keeping India first and then a personal agenda to solve industry problems. You need to compete with that structure; otherwise it is very difficult to compete with that. The structure of Nasscom is so strong that all of our competing companies renamed their associations like Brasscom, Passcom. What was the second question you had?

I think you answered that, the one you talked about china and the fact that the association was the differentiator and not the technology and individual company. I think you covered that. So Harish bhai before we reach the conclusion, anything that we might have kind of completely missed in our conversation which is the highlight? I kno0w obviously the book is very exhaustive and your career is very long and checkered and illustrious and it is very likely that we have missed things but are there 1-2 things which we completely missed or any messages that you feel would be great for listeners of today and younger generation is given the fact that podcast listeners are typically between 15-30. They might be hearing most of this for the first time and taking all of this for granted.

I just have 1-2 points about the book and what the reactions are from the marketplace. So Dr.Phatak of IIT Mumbai, i don't know whether you know him or not.

He was a terror for all IT companies, we know it.

Absolutely right. He was in every tender. He won't let anyone preclude that. He read the book and he showed me the book with 100s of places he has marked, blue color mark, red color, handwritten notes and all that. He said I read your book 3 times and these are my change markings I have put. I am going to read it 2 times more because according to him every literate Indian should read it. He says this book needs that message to go across because it tells the next generation how they should behave, how they should manage their own companies, how they should create themselves in society, and how they should work with the industry and for the industry. I would say it is giving great insights for the future of changing India including the culture transformation and all. So I would say that is a fantastic reaction coming in from a person like Dr.Pathak. The other one is from Mr.Gopala Swami, former election commissioner. He said your Satyam chapter should be read by every IAS officer in the country because Satyam story is not only finance for Nasscom but for Nasscom and government to work together, it is again a phenomenal way of model for bureaucrats and government offices to follow. Government officers must trust the industry and together come up with proactive policy making, consultative ways of policies for the new aged industry and technology would be persuasive. All across that model should be adopted. There is another message coming in, I am getting calls from ISB, IIMs. They are taking 8-10 case studies emerging out of the book to become part of the MBA programs there.

I think, I don't think the others by professor Phatak’s praise is, it should actually be framed and put. We were petrified of him whenever we would go for any tender meeting because he used to tear up every proposal and say this is wrong, this is wrong. And obviously the collaboration with the government for Satyam was fantastic. So I think we will wrap up this episode with Harish bhai.

One more, I talked about Sharu Angnekar. So if it makes sense we can end by saying we have to work together now to build a country where it is first class citizen, first class country and a first class administration, that should be our goal.

I think that's a wonderful way to end this. So Samiran you want to close the episode on that happy note.

Yes absolutely. In fact if you’ve heard the whole podcast you must have heard the Sharu Angnekar remark and i think after hearing this and after reading the book and imbibing it we can safely say that India of tomorrow will be made up of first class citizens in a first class country with a first class administration. So one more thing I have to say which Harish bhai has not said. I was in a meeting where Harish bhai was asked about, "There are these great tech stocks like FB and Tesla and Microsoft, which stock will you pick?" He said I would buy the Nasscom stock. That tells you everything about the man, his belief, and his values and how strongly he is verdict to this whole thing of India first and by that only you will become great together. So it was a fantastic conversation. I would encourage everyone to obviously read the book and also give feedback about what you liked about it and how it has inspired you and how it has still failed to inspire you which will be shocking. If you like that conversation, if you liked our banter please share, review, rate. We look forward to any feedback. Keep listening to us, keep encouraging us and we will keep bringing you more episodes which are subject related and our been there done that series is getting great traction. Thank you everyone, thanks for listening.