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Jaswant Singh lauds NRIs in US

P Jayaram in New Delhi

The enterprising Indian American community has staked its future with that of the United States, which in no way can de-link that reality, External Affairs Minister Jaswant Singh said on Monday.

"They are now inseparably linked with the US. They are increasingly assertive -- a mere 1 per cent of the population controlling five to six per cent of the economy," Singh said after releasing a book on how Indian information technology trailblazers took the US by storm.

The book, The Horse That Flew -- How India's Silicon Gurus Spread Their Wings, is written by Chidanand Rajghatta, Washington correspondent of The Times of India.

The book, whose title, according to the author, comes from a fable about Mughal emperor Akbar and his adviser Birbal, narrates the story of how India's IT professionals spread their wings and journeyed along the information superhighway in both the US and India.

The book profiles many trailblazers who led the Indian charge in Silicon Valley, including Sabeer Bhatia, "the man with a simple idea and nerves of steel" who sold his hotmail.com to Microsoft for $400 million, Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, and Vinod Dham, the mastermind behind the Pentium chip.

Also profiled are Indian IT gurus N R Narayana Murthy of Infosys Technologies and Wipro's Azim Premji and NRI women entrepreneurs such as Radha Basu of Hewlett-Packard, who successfully set up the company's office in India, and Vani Kola, "who mothered a company and a baby at the same time".

The book, described by Singh as "unique", also looks at the phenomenon of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE), an Indian networking group in the US which made it possible for desi (home-grown) "upstarts" to seek every kind of help from their seniors -- from counselling to contacts to investment.

Since many of the horses that flew are alumni of the Indian Institutes of Technology, it is only apt that the book profiles this great institution, the most respected of Indian brands in the world today.

"The book lauds the enterprise, creativity of these Indians who became the 'horses' that flew," Singh said. "The tomorrow in IT has already come. Tomorrow is here. We have entered the age and it is this that the 'horses' recognised. May the tribe of horses that flew multiply."

Naresh Chandra, former Indian ambassador to the US, said the IT visionaries from India had changed the mindset of Americans about Indians being "half-clad and half-fed".

And then he pointedly asked: "If Indians can be so successful abroad, why not back home? We have to get our house in order."

Rajghatta said that despite the "big, bleak days" in the IT sector globally, he was confident Indian enterprise and creativity would overcome the odds and be back on top.

Indo-Asian News Service

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