Going back to my excel sheet on the 5000 most distinguished IIT alumni. I just realised that I have known close to 500 of them for over 25 years. Many for almost 40 years. Over 100 of these overlapped with me in school, college or at work. Today, my inbox had an interview with Ashish Chauhan, someone I have known for exactly 40 years.
We met at IIT Bombay in 1985. In the early nineties , I was helping set up TRAI for the govt of India and Ashish had help set up the first satellite based trading network for NSE. Around 2000, I was leading the team that corporatised the erstwhile DOT services into BSNL, and Ashish was working on an affordable data service for Reliance.
We connected seriously in 2005 to apply our minds jointly to build a framework and digital ecosystem for India 2.0. We firmly believed that India’s time had come and all it needed was a digital push.
We spent a full five days on this when we visited HowdyModi in September 2019. The framework we started working on then expanded to include literally thousands of IIT Alumni during the Covid lockdown. We now call it the MegaSpheres. I do believe it is the most disruptive plan ever made for India 2.0. And also the most practical. Once finalised, it will be unveiled shortly in the public domain. Whilst the framework encapsulates all our points of agreements, it is also a good example of unity in diversity that epitomises the iit alumni community. Ashish is a deadline driven person. He likes to finish one task and move on. I, on the other hand am never in a hurry. I wait for the time to come. Ashish believes now is the right time. I rarely agree. But the fact that we have both worked on this for 20 years and continue to be on talking terms (leave aside friendship) is the real power of a rare commodity called trust.
The MegaSpheres philosophy combines forty years of our work across areas like public policy, regulation, startup funding, SME listing, redirection of public savings and corporate governance.
This interview of Ashish that I read today is indeed one from his heart. And also to some extent reflects topics picked up in our alumni deliberations. This is not lip service but the conclusions of tens of thousands of hours of alumni interactions – with very serious conclusions.
New paradigms and disruptions in the world order enabled by technology and with a high probability of disrupting the world order in favour of India.
Ashsih and NSE were recently selected as Vishwagurus by the IIT Alumni Council in the area of digital public infrastructure – and the seminal event which created this ecosystem was the vsat network of NSE. Ever since:
Geography has been history.
And history will soon repeat itself
With India at the helm of the
New World Order.
