By-Two Kaapi in an oilfield

Alright. I totally comprehend the deep feeling of nausea that people have begun to face just after rolling their eyeballs over my previous posts. Sorry, if it spoilt your table-cloth(or should I say keyboard). But then its all in the mind. Its the way how people look at things. As I said everything is embedded here. Its how you interface it. Yikes! I just survived that brickbat. Cool it. I sure am posting this time about something far more serious and interesting.

Yesterday, I got a message saying that a person, one Mr. Satish Gupta from MIT was coming over to BITS and wanted to have a separate chat with the core team of the Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership (CEL), BITS Pilani, oof which I am part of. I didnt know the credentials of this person, apart from the MIT tag. The memory device in my cranium beeped saying that after extensive data mining, a search result was found matching both the keywords, 'Satish Gupta' and 'MIT'.

That sure did ring a bell. Mr. Satish Gupta, one of BITS Pilani's famed alumni. When BITS Connect launched NEURON, the networking facility here at BITS in March 2004, there was a panel discussion on "Technology-Driven Enterprise". That discussion, though was lost amidst all the other conferences happening in the buildup to APOGEE. It is said,

Success is being at the right place at the right time

There I was, a nerd, who didnt give a thought of management, entrepreneurship et al. All, that drew me to the talk was the big names - Satish Gupta, Prem Jain, Gulu Mirchandani, Mukesh Chatter. And, the rest as they say is History. I discovered that I am born to be an entrepreneur (too far-fetched, but still thats how I dream). The discussion surely changed my perspective of life.

Back to the present, I was so eager to meet Mr. Satish Gupta, CEO, Cradle Technologies. A bunch of us met him at 9 pm in the VFAST Conference room. His first greeting showed the business acumen in him. His handshake and introduction, concealed in it transluscently the number of businessmen he had met and shook hands this way. I slightly rearranged the room to suit this small group who were there. We sat down and presented a brief insight on the activities of CEL. Murphy's law was at work again, as the PowerPoint presentation got screwed. The file didnt open at all. (One more reason to run Linux!). And then it began, a hour and a half of open discussion from topics ranging from entrepreneurship to leadership to Silicon Valley to rural India to BITSian alumni. It was a very fruitful discussion, one in which he showed the class of a true gentleman, the acumen of a true entrepreneur, the spirit of a true BITSian.

I shall keep posting quotes from Mr. Gupta in my future posts.

After all, knowledge is fathomless.