Leaving Infosys was something we have been preparing ourselves for many months. So I got into it in a programmed manner. But I will miss the whole life revolving around Infosys.

We were all very close and I can best demonstrate that with this anecdote. Last week, I went to visit a friend in hospital, and Murthy and Shibu came in exactly at the same time. We hadn’t planned it at all.

I had lots of memorable moments in the company. The most memorable was when I was CEO and growth came back strongly in 2011. It had gone down to around 5% (during recession) and many had begun to ask if it was the end of the Indian IT services industry. But when growth returned, it felt good to say ‘it’s not over’.

Another unforgettable moment was in the mid-1980s, when we created a ‘store and forward’ solution for telegrams in India, which was used by the department of telecom. I was in charge of the project. Till then, telegrams involved sending text information in Morse code and somebody translating that into English. Ours was a hardware-software solution that involved keying in the text into a computer, like an email, sending it to an electronic switch that would route it to the right destination.

But the customer was only one – DoT. We didn’t see a large market and we felt it was not our cup of tea. So we sold it to a small Bangalore company around 1989-90. But the project was interesting because we had written the entire software and operating system. I don’t know, but this may have been the solution that was used till telegrams were discontinued last year.

I had the privilege of representing the entire global business as head of the Business Action for Sustainable Development at the Rio Earth Summit in 2012. I was the co-chair of the World Economic Forum early this year. Infosys, with the rest of the Indian IT industry, has transformed the image of India around the world, transformed the image of Indian professionals, creating huge opportunities for them. IT services account for 25% of India’s exports, 6% of its GDP. About 10% of Bangalore’s population is directly employed in IT, and many more indirectly.

I’m sure we have inspired many startups. I will continue to focus on that space. We have already started a Startup Village in Kochi and Vizag. We will start one in Kozhikode later this month.

I’ve been putting money into brain research. There are two big reasons for that. One is that India has a large ageing population, and for a poor country, old-age issues like dementia and Alzheimer’s will present a huge challenge. Solutions found outside India will not be affordable. We need to find them here.

The second is that the next disruption in computing will come from our understanding of the brain. It’s called brain-inspired computing. The current model of writing software may not extrapolate, because it will require too much of maintenance. Nobody programmes the brain, yet it keeps learning. India shouldn’t miss the emerging age of brain-inspired computing.

(As told to Sujit John)

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / Home> City> Bangalore / by Kris Gopalakrishnan, TNN / October 13th, 2014