'The customs officer told me that I needed to leave samples of what I was exporting with him. I was forced to leave the floppy disk of the software with him. The diligent officer immediately planted a stapler pin through the floppy disk and attached it to the form, thereby destroying the media and rendering it unreadable. For the longest time, everybody's understanding of software differed immensely. This confusion continued into the 1980s, and it was getting challenging to grow the business. The more I met young software entrepreneurs, the more I realized that my frustration was not unique. Something had to be done.'
In the mid-1970s, a young, twenty-something man living an American dream threw away a lucrative job as a database manager and came back to India. At that time, India had no IT industry to speak of; computers were a novelty, and the nation was trapped in socio-economic backwardness and a labyrinthine License Raj.
