Read India Rising: Tales from a Changing Nation for Free Online

officially run out of money. For three months, he and his five colleagues had been pooling their private credit cards. No one was collecting a salary. Then, from one moment to the next, he was over seven million dollars richer.
    ‘How did you feel in that moment, sitting there in your car?’ I ask, imagining the exhilaration he must have felt.
    ‘I was very happy,’ the modest entrepreneur replies, allowing himself the slightest of smiles. ‘I thought, “I’ll drink to this.” So I cracked open a Coke.’

Mysore
     
    Manjunathea presses ‘Play’ on the video software that sits expectantly on his computer screen. I’m back in another bare, businesslike meeting room. Only this one is located on the edge of Mysore and measures about four times the size of InMobi’s. It also has a name: The Taj Mahal Conference Room.
    As the introduction of the corporate video plays out, my toes begin to curl. The script is packed with business-speak and fulsome phrases, all of which are read out in cloying tones by an over-dramatic narrator. ‘Behind the brand is a story of excellence,’ the commentary starts. I have a foreboding of what’s to follow. The predictable ad agency behind the film does not disappoint. The company ‘explored new domains’, became a ‘mission-critical transformation partner’ and, at the end of it, still emerged with ‘the courage to dream’. It’s wince-making stuff.
    Sitting across the conference table, forty-four-year-old Manjunathea is looking elated. In a sense, he has every reason to be. For the last fifteen years, the subject of the video – IT giant Infosys – has been his employer. Narrative style aside, the story is indeed extraordinarily impressive. Starting with two hundred and fifty dollars in cash and seven founding members, Infosys has grown to become one of India’s most successful firms. A genuinely global player in the IT industry, it now employs over one hundred and thirty thousand people in ninety countries.
    The whole operation stands as a testament to entrepreneurial vigour and enterprise. Back in 1984, Infosys anticipated the market by switching from mini- to mainframe. It introduced the ‘Global Delivery Model’, arguably the genesis of India’s multi-billion-dollar outsourcing industry. It was the first Indian company to list on the NASDAQ exchange and the first to offer stock options to its employees. Today the best known of its founding fathers, Narayana Murthy and Nandan Nilekani, command worldwide respect for their creative genius. They deserve it. As their employee explains, the pet project that they had kicked off in Murthy’s front room now boasts annual revenues of over six billion dollars, more than that of the entire state of Goa.
    ‘Now it is my pleasure to spend the next forty-five minutes to an hour talking you through the learning programme for our freshers,’ Manjunathea says, before quickly correcting himself. ‘Sorry, our “fresh entrants”, I should say.’
    He scrolls his keyboard mouse across to the PowerPoint icon and brings up a set of slides on the projection screen. Like Tewari, Manjunathea is a graduate of Kanpur’s Indian Institute of Technology. The two have little else in common, however. The grey-moustached Infosys manager is undoubtedly smart and articulate. Dressed in his ‘crocodile’ chinos and prescription black shoes, however, he isn’t what the corporate video would call a ‘game-changer’.
    Before his current post, he spent fifteen years as a software developer. Everything about him, from the leather mobile case on his belt to the pens in his breast pocket, speaks of a steady,dependable, meticulous employee. Manjunathea is the kind of man on whom successful corporations depend: loyal in his affections, unstinting in his work ethic and essentially content with his place on the career ladder. He is, I realise, the perfect candidate to be training Infosys’s new employees.
    The first slide shows a graph with the total