In the years 1975–1976, Ajai Chowdhry, a young engineer from Jabalpur, quit a well-paying position with DCM Data Products and teamed up with Shiv Nadar and four other friends to found Hindustan Computers Ltd. (HCL), a business that would develop and produce computers. You have to keep in mind that at the time, most people didn't use computers on a daily basis, and even Microsoft, which was created about the same time as HCL, had yet to make the first Windows operating system available. The business, now known as HCLTech, had revenues of US$11 billion last year, so they must have done something well.
The author:
Ajai Chowdhry, a co-founder of HCL, has had a distinguished career; among his many accomplishments, he is chairman of the Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (FICCI) and a member of the advisory board for the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology. In 2011, he was also given the prestigious Padma Bhushan award. Chowdhry has written a book on his life and times, as one might anticipate given the tremendous list of accomplishments he has to his credit.
What the book is about: Chowdhry's autobiography is titled Just Aspire: Reflections on Technology, Entrepreneurship, and the Future. According to him in the author's note, "I could not have dreamed that I would find myself at the vanguard of pathbreaking upheavals that would reshape India" when he left his little hometown of Jabalpur in Madhya Pradesh to seek a profession. My experiences and lessons learned at HCL are interwoven throughout my tale. He continues, "It is also about my life, both before and after HCL.
Some intriguing details
The book begins with the author's account of his early years in Jabalpur. He had a relatively fortunate upbringing (for a brief while, he had a tiger cub as a pet!), as his father, an IAS official, served as the city's municipal commissioner at the time. Chowdhry cites Christ Church, the Religious institution where he attended school in Jabalpur. The Religious institution enforced severe rules and had fierce athletic competition. It is possible that young Ajai learned some valuable lessons from this experience that would later come in handy for him in the HCL boardroom and, we are certain, in several business conflicts over the years. He also discusses his love of reading throughout his school years, including authors like Enid Blyton and Agatha Christie as well as timeless works like Lolita, Madame Bovary, and To Kill a Mockingbird.
Despite the young Chowdhry's preference for engineering, his father urged him to follow in his footsteps and join the IAS. He succeeds in getting what he wants and continues on to study at Jabalpur Engineering College, where he claims to have enjoyed watching movies, imitating Dev Anand's fashion sense, and forming pen pal relationships (there was no email back then) with people in France, Japan, the US, and the Philippines—most of whom were, of course, girls.
After Chowdhry graduates from college, he relocates to Bombay and starts working in sales for DCM Data Products. The most fascinating part of HCL's history is when it first started, when it had to overcome the difficulties of entering a new market and building a company from scratch. It also involved meeting influential people in the tech industry and working with some of the most well-known figures in the industry. The book gets some good colour from his descriptions of his encounters with notable people like Ray Kurzweil and Bill Gates.
The pages devoted to the account of how HCL expanded its operations across nations, mastered the computer technology of the day, encountered difficult management lessons, and rode India's liberalisation wave in the 1990s offer helpful insights into the tech culture that predominated in the 1980s and 1990s and the way business was conducted in those years. The author's description of how HCL expanded its company into China in the early 1980s, when that country was still a developing one with enormous potential, is particularly fascinating.
For the Chinese market, Chowdhry adopted the name "Chow Ta Lee," learned how to navigate the bureaucracy and special business practises used there, and even grew used to the cuisine, which was "a long cry from Indian Chinese" due to its "array of unusual meats."
Moreover, Chowdhry briefly discusses the collaboration between HCL and Nokia for the distribution of low-cost, accessible mobile phones for the Indian market. This also makes you ask if HCL might have done more in this particular area. Perhaps this was a wasted chance for HCL as Chinese manufacturers emerged to fill the void left by Nokia's misguided business practises, dominating the smartphone market in India to this day. We'll probably never know because the author doesn't mention anything about it.
Summary
By the time you reach the halfway point of the 225-page book, Chowdhry has already mentioned leaving HCL and concentrating on his humanitarian work and other goals, such as encouraging technical education in India and boosting tech entrepreneurship as an investor and mentor. The remainder of the book is devoted to the author's efforts in creating (and occasionally remaking or revising) significant organisations, supporting and inspiring young businesspeople, and reading widely. He explains the latter by stating, "I took a course in speed reading, which allows me to take in full phrases at a look, rather than words. In addition, Chowdhry discusses futurology, another important topic of interest to him. 'I truly think that humans will vanquish death and illness, time and space. If we're still here to enjoy it, humans, or "posthumans," have a bright future ahead of them, he claims.
This intriguing biography, which was authored by Dr. Chowdhry and was published by HarperCollins India, offers a view of what it takes to establish a tech business like HCL, a number of practical management lessons, and several amusing tales about his personal and professional life.
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