CEO Reflections

Meeting your classmates from engineering school after almost 16 years can be quite an experience, as I found out a few days back. Even though I am not a heavy Facebook user, I have become a fan since using it, one of my classmates who lives in Melbourne got all of us together. I flew to New Delhi, a 26 hour flight, and the next day met my classmates in a resort hotel near a town called Gurgaon, one of the major software cities in India.They all seem to have done well in life. All but one (other than me) are in various industries other than software/IT. One of them manufactures shoes for a leading international brand, employing 1200 people. Another one runs a financial trading firm focusing in commodities and futures, and has grown to 600 people.It is heartening to see the progress each person has made, the progress being symptomatic of the growth of the Indian economy. There has been tremendous wealth creation in India in the past 5 years. Indeed, this is the place of tremendous opportunities. As one of my classmates aptly said “here, the initial wave of opportunities is in solving simple problems, a situation that the US faced in the 70’s and 80’s”. The society is mirroring the consumption patterns of the West from those times as well.All in all, there is tremendous optimism and confidence in people here. If they ever did the consumer confidence index calibration here, it will probably be 10 times of that of the current day, US :)