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A soft tale of hardware (appeared in Business Standard, June 21, 2023 ) |
 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 t odo 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
managements 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 BOOK REVIEW SHIVANAND KANAVI Just Aspire: Notes
on Technology, Entrepreneurship & the Future Author: Ajai Chowdhry Publisher: HarperCollins Pages: 252 Price: ₹ 599 |
