How Mohanur's 'Chandru' ran to success

Not academically brilliant, not one to give up either, say friends and family about N Chandrasekaran

If it is 5 am, Chandra starts running — whether he is in Berlin, Tokyo, Mumbai, or his village Mohanur.

The town panchayat, about 415 km southwest of Chennai, is home to N Chandrasekaran, the newly appointed chairman of Tata Sons. His friends who still live there recall that even as a teenager, Chandru — as they call him — was interested in sports.

“He was a left-handed batsman and a spinner. Chandru was the captain of Agraharam cricket team; I was the vice-captain,” said P Narendran, who was his classmate at the Tamil-medium government school in the village.

Chandrasekaran’s teacher from the school, K S Natarajan, fondly remembered his student’s cheerful demeanour. “He always had a smile on his face — that smile is still there,” said the 72-year-old.

That’s a smile many in the town, with a population of 14,000, are eager to see again. The media has laid siege on its outskirts since Thursday, when the news of Chandrasekaran’s appointment to the top job in the Tata group was announced. Journalists have been accosting his family, friends and acquaintances to know more about the town’s most successful son.

“For many, it is unimaginable,” said G Ajeethan, a cousin of Chandrasekaran.

Now a resident of Namakkal, he added, “It is phenomenal for a boy from a village to reach such a pinnacle of success.”

Chandrasekaran was born in 1963 in a farmer’s family at an agraharam — where the Brahmins in the village live. His father Natarajan Iyer practiced law at Madras High Court, but returned to the village to become a farmer. Chandrasekaran, too, tried his hand in tilling the soil during his schooldays.

Iyer’s father, Srinivasa, was one of the pioneers who formed a primary cooperative bank in the village. In the 1950s, he also helped establish a modern rice mill.

The Iyer family had about 100 acres of land. Chandrasekaran has three sisters and two brothers — one of whom is N Ganapathy Subramaniam, who was elevated to become TCS chief operating officer on Thursday. Subramaniam is older than Chandrasekaran, but younger to N Srinivasan, who is the finance director at the Murugappa group.

Their sisters live in Erode, Bengaluru and Chennai, and their parents live with their sister in Erode.

Those who knew him in his childhood recall that though Chandrasekaran was not academically excellent, he was very hardworking. “He would never give up easily,” said Narendran.

The first time he moved away from the village — and the orthodox Brahmin life — was when he joined Coimbatore Institute of Technology for a bachelor’s degree in applied sciences in 1981. He stayed in a hostel. Then, he completed his masters degree in computer science at the Regional Engineering College, Trichy (now, National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli) in 1986.

The next year, he joined TCS as an intern. He was the first computer science graduate to be hired by the company.

“The person hiring me said, ‘You are the test case. If you do well, we’ll hire you and more MCAs’,” Chandra has said elsewhere.

His success in the company is now a chapter of India’s corporate annals. Since taking over as chief executive officer of TCS on October 6, 2009, he has made the company the largest cash generator for the Tata group.

But success hasn’t made him a very different person, nor altered his happy disposition.

“Whenever he comes to the village, he visits the temple, and behaves with us in the same way he always did,” said his teacher Natarajan.

When he returns to the village next, he will be felicitated at the school to which he used to walk every morning. Now, a successful marathon runner, Chandru might just run to it.