Alumni in the news - Jan 9

Former President Dr.APJ Kalam will inaugurate the Editorial Cartoonist of Hindustan Times Shreyas Navare’s (08) collection at the Indian Institute of Cartoonists on the 10th January 2010. Shreyas Navare is a technology manager by profession with an MBA from IIT Bombay and BE (Information Technology) from VJTI, Mumbai. He started his career with a supplement of The Times of India, Thane Plus. Since 2007, Hindustan Times has been publishing his cartoons and caricatures ... more.

Nitendra Rajput (98) has awarded National Award, on Best Applied Reaserch/Technological Innovation Aimed at improving the life of persons with disabilities, by President of India Ms Pratibha Patil. Nitendra has developed disabled friendly technology called `Spoken Web Technology'. The Project has been tested and successfully carried out at National Association for Blind New-Delhi, Blind Relief Association New-Delhi, Byrraju Foundation Andhra Pradesh etc, a very pervasive technology easy to use.  Spoken Web technology is going to introduce dynamic changes in the life of the visually impaired. They will now easily create and access contents on the web just through voice. People with other disabilities like cognitive etc will also be able to use voice sites. Even non-PC literate people can use it ... more.

Kashyap Dalal, an alumnus of IIT-Mumbai and IIM-Lucknow, thought of getting T-shirts designed by designers online and selecting the top 10 or 20 most creative designs for production. In 2007, Dalal put in Rs 2 lakh, the bulk of his savings from the one-and-half year stint at HUL. His partner Rai chipped in equal amount. A couple of family friends and relatives contributed to take the corpus to Rs 10 lakh in 2007. Inkfruit had started. The team now sells about 12,000 T-shirts a month at Rs 350-700 apiece. The business idea is catching on, says Dalal. Not for nothing could inkfruit.com raise about Rs 60 lakh from angel investor Pinstorm in 2008.

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3 Engineers who took the 3 Idiots path ... Mahesh Chauhan, Group CEO, Rediffusion India, too pursued metallurgical engineering from IIT Bombay for job security, but eventually changed track. “Six months into IIT, I realised that wearing a lab coat and performing experiments is not what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. But I had to continue because those were the early days of liberalisation and one needed the cushion of a job,” says Chauhan. A chance meeting with advertising executives lead him to gravitate towards advertising as a career.

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