VoW Book Review
By Dr Sanjeev Chopra
The founders of Infosys – the software firm identified with India’s IT boom – Narayan Murthy and Nandan Nilekani – wrote ‘Better India, Better World’ and ‘Imagining India’, respectively, to discuss the trajectory of their lives – as well as their dilemmas, hopes and expectations from India.
Their spouses have been equally good at penmanship if not better: Sudha Murthy is an award-winning author of inspirational books for young adults and children, and Rohini Nilekani has written a treatise on ‘Samaaj, Sarkar and Bazaar’ – a template for partnership among civil society, government and markets.
However, the story of India’s finest hardware firm -Hindustan Computers Limited – was waiting for a muse, and who could do a better job than one of its own co-Founders, Ajai Chowdhry. His book, ‘Just Aspire: Notes on Technology, Entrepreneurship and the Future’ (Just Aspire) fills an important gap in India’s business history, tracing the origins of India’s knowledge economy through the PC revolution and the subsequent explosion in mobile telephony. In fact, it is important to place on record that, both, Infosys and HCL were founded by young engineers from non-business families.
Now for the offering itself: Just Aspire is the memoir of the HCL co-founder who dons many hats – entrepreneur, sportsman, salesman, engineer, educationist, jazz aficionado, patron of classical music, Dev Anand fan, angel investor and a passionate advocate for the Right to Repair – all with equal ease. Growing up in the sleepy but picturesque town of Jabalpur in a family that had migrated from Abbottabad in the throes of Partition, his parents, like all of India’s middle class, wanted their prodigal son to take the IAS exam, and follow his father’s footsteps for the stable, secure and well-respected life of a powerful mandarin. But that was not to be, and even though his father was initially disappointed by his son’s decision to opt for a career outside of government, in retrospect it is clear that this was indeed the road he was meant to travel.
The sixteen chapters in the book talk about the milestones in his life – and I do not wish to make a precis of the narrative – for the purpose of a review is to edge the reader to buy and read the book in original. Together with his band of techno dreamers: Shiv Nadar, Arjun Malhotra, Yogesh Vaidya, Subhash Arora and DS Puri, he went on to establish one of the most valuable computer enterprises in the country Hindustan Computers Limited (HCL). With limited financial resources, it was actually driven by the passions and commitments of these techno dreamers, who left their secure jobs to dream and aspire beyond the known horizons.
But before you say, “So what’s the big deal?”, let me put this achievement in the context of the political economy of the seventies. We are talking of the year 1975, when the word ‘socialism’ was inserted into our Preamble by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi through the 42nd Constitutional Amendment; profit was still a ‘dirty word’, and Ease of Doing Business (EOBD) was nowhere in the lexicon of governance or entrepreneurship. There were no Investment Summits to honour and acknowledge entrepreneurs, and the kind of bonhomie that we see today among corporate honchos and the government was well beyond imagination.
Anyway, let’s get back to the HCL story. Within a decade of its founding, HCL became the largest IT company in India, and in the first of its kind initiative, HCL also took a leap of faith by becoming a multinational when it started a hardware manufacturing plant in Singapore. And then there was no looking back! In his own words: “We really created the hardware market in India. When we started, there were just a hundred computers in India. In those days, you had to design everything, hardware, and software; and if you notice, all software companies, the large ones are born out of the hardware.’ The book provides interesting details of the two significant tie-ups that sky-rocketed HCL’s fortunes; the first with Hewlett Packard to manufacture minicomputers and distribute PCs in India. The second was the tie-up with Nokia – as the national distributor for its mobile handsets. Ajai also echoes Bob Dylan’s verse, ‘If you are not busy living, you are busy dying’, for two iconic brands of his times – Kodak and Nokia – who lost out by resting on their laurels, rather than exploring new possibilities.
As this is a book on aspirations, lets dwell more on this concept. To Ajai Chowdhry, the aspirations of a person define his hunger for achievement. “A is always greater than R, where A stands for Aspirations and R for Resources. If you have the aspiration, resources will happen. And it is wrong to postulate that aspirations are bound by the constraints of geography. The aspirations of rural India are the same as aspirations of urban India. A person in a rural area also wants an Apple or a Samsung phone. Why should she settle for anything less?”
What then are the key takeaways from the HCL journey: first, present the product as the solution by focussing on the benefits rather than the attributes. The second is about brand image: a name, (like Hindustan) has power, and a logo is a visual connect with customers. Third, be restless and scan the ecosystem for opportunities and possibilities, and last but not the least, building relationships is good for business, because it ensures your venture’s sustainability. But like any true relationship, it must be based on mutual trust and a genuine appreciation of the needs and requirement of the customer rather than from the need to ‘sell’ and complete the monthly or quarterly sales target.
But the book is not about HCL alone. It’s also about the future of India. It raises difficult and uncomfortable questions about our failure to keep pace with our requirement of semi-conductors, without which we are critically dependent on China. Why are we not moving up the value chain in IT? Why are we not designing the IT architecture for AI? Why are we content to work for Google and Apple? Where is brand Bharat? But he is not just asking questions, he is also designing templates to address them through the EPIC Foundation, a non-profit that is working to make India the world’s electronic hub global player by putting policies in place to enable electronics system design and manufacturing. Given his track record, and his ability to build partnerships, this ‘aspiration’ will also bear fruit in the not so distant future! Meanwhile, grab a copy of the book, and make your own notes on technology, entrepreneurship and the future!
Sanjeev Chopra (born 3 March, 1961) is a retired IAS officer of the 1985 batch, from Kapurthala, Punjab. He is a resident of Dehradun. He is a former Director of the Lal Bahadur Shastri National Academy of Administration and has written a book, “We, the People of the States of Bharat: The Making and Remaking of India’s Internal Boundaries”, published in 2022. He is now the patron and honorary consultant to a literary festival, the Valley of Words International Literary Festival, held annually in Dehradun. Chopra has held the Hubert H Humphrey Fellowship (Cornell), the Robert S McNamara Fellowship (World Bank) and positions at Royal Asiatic Society, London, the Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (Harvard).
