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topic of momentum, the young Rajat insisted on sitting next to the classmate to examine the work he did. He later borrowed the classmate’s paper to review the work further. That was the first and last time the classmate got the top marks in Rajat’s class.
    Modern’s virtue was that it brought together students from all walks of life. A classmate of Rajat’s was a maharaja from a princely state who lived near the school but sometimes showed up in a fancy chauffeur-driven car. Young Rajat, by contrast, traveled to school on the creaky, often overcrowded buses of Delhi Transport, the public bus system, with a pack of close friends, carrying khaki knapsacks.
    Within the walls of Modern, the differences between the high and mighty and the hoi polloi were imperceptible. Boys all came dressed in a uniform of blue shirts and gray-blue shorts. Almost every interest was nourished—riding horses, playing soccer, and bowling on a cricket pitch with a grass wicket, the type favored by professionals. Rajat soaked it up, acting in plays, reciting poetry, and studying Sanskrit. Often, during the lunch break, he and his friends would take to whacking a tennis ball along the walls of the assembly hall, playing a game akin to handball.
    By the time Rajat was a teenager, he was a force. His nickname was Gaju Gupta—a moniker that fit him well. It rhymed with Raju and was a play on the Hindi word for “carrot.” With his hair close-cropped at the base and rising straight up, he looked like a flattened carrot top. Well liked, he was a standout student and succeeded in securing a place for himself in Section D—a group of high achievers focused on the sciences, a sure path to future success in India. “People were in awe of him because of his intensity,” says a classmate. One year, he prepared so hard for a public speaking contest that involved the recitation in English of a passage from an Indian religious tract that he won the first prize in the competition. What was impressive was that he unseated a classmate who was widely regarded as a shoo-in because he’d spent his early years in England.
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    After his father died in 1964, friends noticed a new seriousness sweeping over young Rajat, who applied himself more vigorously than ever to his studies.
    Few knew it, but Rajat had no choice but to be strong and focused. His mother was frail; she had been diagnosed with incurable heart disease. It fell to him as the eldest son to hold the family together and to be a father figure to his younger brother, Kanchan, who was only seven years old when his baba passed away, and his younger sister, Jayashree.
    Every morning, Rajat woke up at the crack of dawn to help his younger brother pack his schoolbag and get dressed, even seeing to it that his tie was properly tied. At night, he supervised homework. One time when Jayashree came back crying from school after having to shoulder her heavy schoolbag on the public transport system, Rajat patiently wiped away her tears and consoled her, assuring her that the difficult times would soon pass.
    It wasn’t clear they would, though. One of Rajat’s responsibilities as the eldest son was to manage the family’s finances. Faced with mounting expenses, he, like his father, started tutoring young children to earn extra money.
    Debasish Bhattacharya, who grew up with Gupta in Delhi, says that Rajat may have coped admirably with his father’s death because he had no choice. “He did not come from a big family that showered him with money,” says Bhattacharya. After their father died, the Guptas realized “they had to make something of themselves.”
    Rajat quickly showed he had every intention of doing exactly that. In his final year at Modern, he placed fifteenth in the national entrance examination for the Indian Institutes of Technology, then a little-known collection of state-sponsored universities that in twenty years would be harder to get into than Harvard or Yale.

A Family