A soft tale of hardware

Ajai Chowdhry's autobiographical tale is a charmingly narrated account of his journey from Abbottabad in Pakistan to Jabalpur in India, and his rise to becoming a key figure in the Indian IT industry

Just Aspire: Notes on Technology, Entrepreneurship & the Future

Author: Ajai Chowdhry

Publisher: HarperCollins

Pages: 252

Price: Rs 599
 

In his book Just Aspire, Ajai Chowdhry tells an autobiographical tale that starts in Abbottabad, Pakistan.

Nope, nothing like Zero Dark Thirty — that 2012 Oscar and Golden Globe winner about the US commando operation against Osama Bin Laden.

This story starts with a well-settled family in verdant Abbottabad in the hills near Kashmir, the starting point for many a trek into Hindu Kush and Karakoram. Mr Chowdhry’s father was a well-known, well-to-do lawyer, secretary of the District Congress Committee and an Urdu poet who also organised and patronised many a mushaira.  

The partition of the subcontinent upended the family, which had been well integrated in Abbottabad and had cultured neighbours of all communities. Arriving in Delhi as refugees from the communal violence, Chowdhry senior’s organisational skill sets and knowledge of law got him involved in the government’s refugee resettlement programme. His efforts were quickly recognised and he was absorbed in the bureaucracy and tasked to persuade some of the Rajputana princes to sign the Instrument of Accession to the Indian Union. After completing that assignment, he joined the newly formed Indian Administrative Service and was sent off to Central India as commissioner of Bundelkhand and Baghelkhand. Mr Chowdhry is naturally nostalgic about his early childhood in a large colonial bungalow fit for a sahib with a tiger cub as a pet. Eventually the Chowdhrys settled in Jabalpur.

Mr Chowdhry is eloquent about his childhood, school and college days in Jabalpur. After graduating in the newly introduced electronics and telecommunication engineering, in Jabalpur Engineering College, he found he was more attracted to marketing electronics rather than working the public sector telecom organisations and joined DCM Data Products as a sales executive. That began a lifetime in marketing electronic products, starting with clunky and expensive electronic calculators.

Mr Chowdhry’s hard work and ingenuity in selling these bulky machines paid off. For example, while everyone was targeting academic institutions he found that chemists in sugar mills needed a quick calculation of the sucrose content in the cane and the final sugar recovery in the production process. Persuaded by him, they found this new gadget really handy and started convincing their management to buy them. Mr Chowdhry had spotted this opportunity and visited literally every sugar mill in rural Maharashtra to achieve his sales target. Similarly, he found that irrigation engineers in Maharashtra needed quick calculations to release water to farmers and successfully targeted them too.

When PCs were two decades away and only a handful of large companies in the government and private sector could afford mainframes, these calculators, especially the programmable kind, were very useful for fairly complex and quick calculations. This reviewer used one of these DCM Data Products’s programmable calculators for tedious and complex calculations while doing research in theoretical physics at IIT Bombay in the 1970s, yielding results worthy of publishing in peer-reviewed international journals of physics.

Mr Chowdhry’s tales of marketing advanced tech products hold a major lesson for today’s marketing executives. If you are diligent and observant, then you can find opportunities in surprising corners and even in remote and rural India.

Though he was doing well in DCM, he was bitten by the entrepreneurial bug in his 20s, which was unusual in 1976. So he struck out with his seniors and mentors, Shiv Nadar and Arjun Malhotra from DCM Data Products, to found what went on to become one of the leaders of the Indian IT industry, HCL.

HCL (then known as Hindustan Computers Ltd) was then into producing and marketing hardware starting with microcomputers and then PCs and so on. Since the components and PCBs and later motherboards were not being made in India most people were importing them from Singapore. Some were accused of screwdriver technology, profiting from high protective tariffs, and some of even using the grey market.

After his first assignment in selling microcomputers in Tamil Nadu, Mr Chowdhry was sent to another frontier, Singapore. Shiv Nadar of HCL had taken the bold decision to establish a unit in Singapore, named appropriately as Far East Computers to make and sell hardware there.  Mr Chowdhry made that a success, spending his time gaining valuable international experience in the highly competitive markets of South East Asia. His tales of the social life of an expat in Singapore in the 1980s are charmingly narrated.  In 1994, he became the  chief executive officer of HCL Info Systems in India. Within a few years as telecom policy changed in 2002 making mobile telephony more lucrative, Mr Chowdhry’s long relationship with Nokia came in handy in persuading the Finnish multinational to make and sell affordable mobile phones in India. HCL took the lead in selling those phones via their marketing network.

Overall, the book is a good read and the blemishes are few and far between. It lacks an index, for one and  a few events are not dated. The reader will be disappointed if he expects an analysis of the history of the hardware industry in India, its challenges and the future from a veteran.

The author also has a penchant for long quotations from various favourite management gurus. It may have been more exciting and instructive to young executives reading the book if he had drawn anecdotes and lessons from his own extensive marketing experience in India and abroad.

The reviewer is adjunct faculty at NIAS, Bengaluru and former VP of TCS. skanavi@gmail.com