Insightful narrative

The Wave Rider opens in a true thriller fashion in the trading room of Goldman Sachs’ San Francisco office with the author chewing his fingernails, worrying at what kind of price the stock of Rediff.Com, the Internet company founded by him, would open when the trading begins on NASDAQ on 14 June 2000.

Balakrishnan then takes us on a fascinating journey as he recounts one of India’s biggest entrepreneurial success stories of the Internet era. He begins his flashback by tracing the origin of his dream as he sits punching holes in the paper cards of the Unit Record System of IBM in the classroom of IIM Calcutta in 1970. He remembers a country-made bomb exploding in the fields of the campus in the Naxalite era. Then he joins the dots to map out the other periods of great social unrest in the world. He draws upon the findings from Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared M Diamond to establish the similarity between ‘domestication’ of the computer that was happening around this time with the domestication of the horse in an earlier era. What makes the book such a rewarding read is the ease with which Balakrishnan encapsulates the entire history of technological evolution of the last 300 years within the 200-odd pages of the book.

But Balakrishnan’s entry into the world of Internet did not happen right away. His first entrepreneurial success was in the form of Rediffusion, the wildly successful and highly regarded advertising agency that he founded with another IIM alumnus, Arun Nanda. Balakrishnan does not dwell much on this venture but he does tell a little more about PSI Data Systems, the Bangalore-based IT company that Rediffusion invested in. The venture ended in failure as India was not ready for hardware manufacturing in the IT sector then, as it is not even now. The failure led to some soul searching and he signed up for an executive development program at Harvard. It was here that he came across the ‘case’ of how AOL stole a march over Compuserve with the introduction of real-time ‘chat’. This gave him the glimmer of an idea about what he wanted to do next.

Balakrishnan takes us through the ups and downs of Rediff.Com’s chequered journey. The first involved a market survey that revealed that only two per cent of Mumbai’s netizens visited Rediff.Com. What were they doing on the Net? Receiving or sending emails and chatting. That led to Rediff.com introducing these features. There was the class action suit filed by the infamous litigation lawyer in US and the many takeover bids. When an investment banker from Singapore called him to ask, “What it would cost to buy you out from your company?” Balakrishnan shot back, “Are you married? If you come to Bombay to meet me, I am going to ask you what it would cost me to have sex with your wife.”

The book is well researched with copious notes at the end, but it wears its scholarship lightly. He recounts his experience with an Ayurvedic clinic which successfully treated his chronic backache. Why did this system get marginalised if it works, he wonders? He debunks the generally held belief that this was due to ‘the advent of foreign invaders’ and ‘the Britishers who did not encourage the system’. He attributes it to the system’s inability to keep pace with modern medical science that identified active ingredients in herbs and produced these ingredients from cheaper synthetic sources and to its rejection of the Germ Theory of Disease and the consequent inability to combat illnesses such as cholera, typhoid, tuberculosis and small pox.

He touches upon the five waves of technology development, commenting on how ascendance of each new technology ended the dominance of a particular class of professionals, bringing another set to the fore. He brings this forth dramatically as he stands admiring the imposing structure of the London Guildhall, originally built in 1411, symbolising the enormous power that the guilds of different craftsmen held in society at that time.

But the most dramatic and moving moment in the book appears at the end when he sits on a cliff facing the sea in his hometown Kannur, looking at his father’s tomb with the inscription worded by him: ‘Dr T P Balakrishnan. Doctor of Medicine. Man of Duty. Son of Kannur.’ He wonders what the inscription on his own tombstone would be. Instead of being a sentimental digression, this illumines Balakrishnan’s inner mindscape. It is not the multi-million dollar valuation, but the sheer high of riding a new technology wave and feeling connected to all the pioneers of human progress that powers his entrepreneurial dreams.

If there is one book on business and technology coming out of India this year that you should read, I strongly recommend that it should be this.