Alumni in the news - April 15

Ashank Desai's ('74) story is about his ability to rise from a childhood of hardship and municipal schooling to an engineering degree from the Goa Engineering College when he often studied in the light of a kerosene lamp. An MTech from the prestigious IIT, Mumbai, he was recently declared a "distinguished alumnus" of the Institute and his citation recognises “his visionary leadership in global positioning of the Indian software sector”. After a short stint at Godrej, he studied management at IIM, Ahmedabad where he was bitten by the entrepreneurship bug and got together with a few colleagues to start Mastek. To us, the story is even more remarkable because Ashank Desai remains proud of his middle-class value system, his family’s involvement in Goa’s freedom struggle and his emphasis on ethical business. Ashank Desai now wants to make time for the Mastek Foundation, which introduces its employees to a gamut of social issues in an effort to make them conscious about their obligations to society ... more.

What goes through iPad will matter more ... The crowd at the Apple Store in Chicago's Michigan Avenue was the kind you see in India for the "first-day-first-show" of Bollywood movies ... as I walked past the eager salespeople sporting bright blue T-shirts, I spotted an Indian face stylishly signing, "Ashish" on the touchscreen interface as he tested out the product he had just bought. It turns out that Ashish Rangnekar, a graduate of IIT, Mumbai, is a business school student at Chicago by day, and an application developer on the side for usage on Apple devices. He runs Watermelon Express, which has already developed 66 applications to run on Apple's iPhone, and plans to migrate the apps to the iPad platform. "The iPad can transform education," he says with evangelist zeal ... more.

Making moolah out of people’s emotive memories ... Riding on this mileage –– of emotions attached with photographs –– and the potential in what is still a largely unorganised sector, Canvera Digital Technologies, a start-up, is speeding its way through the market of digital photography and customised photo books/album. Growing four-fold year on year, from two people in 2007, when it was conceived, Canvera now has over 300 people working and has its presence in eight cities with Bangalore as headquarters. The company, which has raised around $500 million via three venture capitalists: Footprint ventures, Draper Fisher Jurvetson and Mumbai Angels is promoted by two IIT Bombay graduates –– Dhiraj Kacker ('93) and Peeyush Rai ('93) ... more.

Karnataka team in Mumbai to woo investors ... Karnataka principal secretary, commerce and industries, V.P. Baligar ('78) has planned one on one meetings with industry tycoons like Ashok Hinduja, Adi Godrej and Harsh Goenka. Baligar, an IIT Mumbai gold medallist who later joined the IAS, said the Karnataka government "has a very robust policy to attract investments and investors to the state" ... more.

Money stretched more those days, reminisces Dr Rama Iyer in ‘Backwaters to Boardroom’ , while talking about his experience in IIT Bombay in the early 1960s. "The scholarship I received was a princely sum of Rs 150 per month… I spent Rs 60 for food, Rs 10 for room rent and Rs 10 on monthly fees,” he recounts. The author, one is among the first three or four PhDs from IIT Bombay ... Iyer writes about how one had to make an application to the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) for each and every trip; “and till the date of travel one was not sure whether one would get foreign exchange for the trip ... more.