HYDERABAD: Officially launching his book, “Just Aspire”, Ajai Chowdhry engaged in a fireside chat with CEO & MD of Tech Mahindra, CP Gurnani on Thursday. The chat was moderated by Harshvendra Soin, global CPO and head of marketing at Tech Mahindra. Ajai not only shared his story of making and running India’s first biggest IT company, HCL but also talked about what makes a successful entrepreneur. According to him, the Indian mind does not lack intelligence but a basic skill: how to sell. His book contains notes on the past, present and future of technology and entrepreneurship.
The dignitaries gracing the event included Jayesh Ranjan, Private Secretary, Telangana government. From what was said about him, his book makes his calm demeanour evident throughout. One can expect to hop from one decade to the next while reliving each and every moment of it. Each of the chapters not only tells his own life but of the India that was and how it changed over the years.
More than recounting his achievements, it is important to live through the story, because young people of the new generation need to hear it, understand it and choose their own elements from it to appreciate.
His family struggled for a while during the partition when among the million refugees who migrated from Pakistan, his father lost and then regained his influential professional position. As an IAS officer’s youngest son, he grew up not only in an affluent environment but also in an emotionally stable home. There was music in the air from morning to night, with swaras, Hindi film songs and Urdu ghazals reverberating the atmosphere.
He writes that he had a passion for electronics and communication since an early age, with Boolean binary blowing away his mind. “ The philosophical dimension of Boolean logic appealed to my youthful mind. A thing was either 1 or 0, true or false, open or shut, positive or negative, on or off, yin or yang. In a fuzzy or uncertain world, here was a total lack of ambiguity,” he writes.
Growing up as a cheerful lad and then becoming nothing less than a rockstar during his college years, (Dev-Anand look stands witness of that) his breakthrough happened when he landed a job with DCM Data Products as a sales executive, as not only was he able to keep up with his passion but he also met Shiv Nadar and Arjun Malhotra there, who later joined him in creating history.
“We had just Rs 1.8 lakh initially, which we all bootstrapped to start the company. At that time, the microprocessor was just making its appearance. We felt that if we could take the microprocessor, we could actually create a computer company around that. But those days were license-raj days. If you needed a license, you needed to be a big company or one with a lot of funding and we had neither. Then we found that the UP government was giving a license, so we went and made our first sales pitch, a successful one,” Ajai reminisced.
The company named ‘Hindustan Computers Limited’ was born in 1970 with the help of governmental loans. The next decade proved the game changer in the Indian market as HCL became the largest IT company in India. “We really created the hardware market in India. When we started, there were just a hundred computers in India. In those days, you had to design everything, hardware, and software; and if you notice, all software companies, the large ones are born out of the hardware,” he adds.
“In the early days of HCL, we decided to go global. At that time going global for an Indian MNC was unknown. In 1980, we started a hardware manufacturing plant in Singapore and then expanded to other countries from there. One of the big breakthroughs we got those days was to bid on contracts of the United Nations. We got our first contract in China and that really opened up the China market for us. Therefore, Singapore became the window to the world for us. We could get technologies to come to India with that window,” he further added.
Sharing some of his experiences in China, he says, “Those days there was only one hotel you could stay in in Beijing. One day, some of my customers said that we’d like to come to your room and discuss this part of the purchase with you. So I said, come. About five or six of these guys landed up and we sat in my room with my colleague Peter John. Suddenly one guy got up and went away, came back. Then the second guy got up and came back. The third guy also did the same. So I was wondering what the hell was going on, you know? At the end of the meeting, I turned to my colleague and asked him what was happening. He said, they all went and used your bathroom to have a shower!” said Ajai.
As goes the title of his book, “Just Aspire”, Chowdhry says that the aspirations of a person define his hunger for achievement. “The aspirations of rural India are the same as aspirations of urban India. A person in a rural area wants an Apple or a Samsung phone. They don’t want something cheaper,” he said, adding, “A is always greater than R, where A stands for Aspirations and R for Resources. If you have the aspiration, resources will happen. And that’s really the story of HCL.”As a member of committee on the semiconductor sector in NITI Aayog, he wants to take semiconductor manufacturing a big thing in India.