HYDERABAD: The year was 1955. A tall frail man arrived in London after a 28-day-long ship journey from India, with no money in his pocket and no home to go to. He sat by the road, wondering what to do, memories of home returning to him as trauma. A man in a suit passed him and then came back and scanned him from top to bottom. “Who are you and where are you from,” asked the man in a suit. “I am from Hyderabad,” the traveller replied. “Which Hyderabad?” asked the man in the suit. Not knowing that there was more than one Hyderabad, the arriver said, “Hyderabad-Deccan.”
The man in the suit, a Pakistani working as a ticket checker on London Tube, paid for a room and food for the arriver for months to follow. The arriver was BK Gupta, who later became one of the founding employees of what is now known as Tata Consultancy Services.
Sharing his unique story, BK Gupta says that his parents had to flee to Nagpur from Hyderabad when the “Hindus had to bear the atrocities of the Nizam,” said the octogenarian.
He went to London to pursue higher studies but had no idea which courses or colleges to apply to. The Pakistani, “Either Akbar or Azeem, I don’t remember, since it’s been a long time, helped me survive in London while I figured everything out,” said Gupta.
After a year of dabbling, he ended up pursuing a Master’s in Applied Psychology from Liverpool University and worked as an educational counsellor. However, it is an MBA from Oxford University that kickstarted his career in management. Without any hurdles, he landed a job with Birla Brothers in West Bengal as a development manager. “My job was really to survey the Bengal coalfields. I was posted in Asansol but would frequently travel to Kolkata, Delhi and Madhya Pradesh,” said Gupta. “At that time everything was cheap, Gold was around `100-a-tola, (11.66 gram) but there weren’t any good transport facilities. We had to travel 25-30 km to buy essentials,” he added.
After a five-year stint at Birla Brothers, he moved to Jamshedpur to work for Tata’s Steel Management and Planning Development Center but did not like it functioning as a “government company”. A major breakthrough occurred when he joined Britania Biscuits in 1967. “It was a madhouse, rushing from home to office, catching a local train and then a cab, around 30 km of travel everyday, but then a man from Century Group of Industries came and asked me to have a look at their documents. He wanted me to take leave from the office and study their plans and offered double the money to do it! After a month or so, he offered me a job at DCM in Delhi. I was 42 years old and had three children by then.”
Owing to the fact that my children were growing up, I decided to move to my place of birth, Hyderabad, where all my friends and relatives were living. I joined CMC (Computer Maintenance Corporation), which was a public sector undertaking, so didn’t offer much in terms of money. However, I took a conscious decision and moved here. The company was taken over by the government after IBM was asked to leave India and a 1,500-employee-strong company began to function as a new start-up.
“It was one of the first software companies in India. We started recruiting non-IBM staff. Being the country’s Project Manager at CMC, I donned many hats and by the time I retired, the company had around 5,000 employees,” he said. “At that time, the governmental policies focused on disinvestment. Our company also bore the brunt, but in the first year of our operation, we functioned as a private company and earned profits. It was a singular computer company. Slowly new industry emerged and now India is leading it,” said Gupta.
ALSO WATCH |