- Lived:
- born Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier of British India; educated Lahore, Kingston (Canada) and MIT; the work happened in Bombay (Mumbai), where he died at 96
- Field:
- electrical engineering and industry-building — first chief executive of Tata Consultancy Services, and by common attribution the father of the Indian IT industry
- The Big Idea:
- In 1969 a power engineer was handed a tiny punch-card consultancy and decided that India's real export was its brains — that a poor country could sell software, pure trained intelligence, to the richest markets on earth. The industry he started now employs millions.
- In their words:
- "If we miss this opportunity, those who follow us will not forgive us." (to the Computer Society of India, 1975)
- If you remember one thing:
- The Indian software industry — the visas, the campuses, the five million jobs, the code inside half the world's banks — did not condense out of the air. It was started, deliberately, by one blunt Punjabi engineer almost no schoolchild can name.