Small-town India goes to big-time America

Small-town India goes to big-time America
CHIDANAND RAJGHATTA

Los Altos (Silicon Valley), JULY 23: Relaxing in his elegant new manor in Los Altos, Kumar Malavalli isn't crushed that he is not as famous as Sabeer Bhatia or Vinod Khosla or the dozens of celebrated Indian cyber-elite. He has other things on his mind: the furniture for his multi-million dollar mansion hasn't arrived and the gates to his driveway open outwards, not inwards, endangering visitors driving up to the villa.

Kumar may not be a familiar figure in India, but here among the digital divinities who reside on this crest of entrepreneurial success -- Yahoo's Jerry Yang and Cisco's John Chambers among others -- there is a faint buzz about the new man in the neighborhood.

Over the last month, as Nasdaq and its technology stocks have see-sawed crazily, Kumar Malavalli's Brocade Communications (Nasdaq symbol: BRCD) has been doing the Indian rope trick -- going up and up. In one sustained climb from mid-May when it briefly dipped below $100 a share, Brocade's stock has doubled, hit a record $ 211, and forced the new economy cognoscentito ask: Who's this guy? What does Brocade do?

Brocade, which Kumar co-founded in 1995, is a maker of storage area networks (SAN), high-speed, mass-storage suites that companies like Sony, CNN and even IBM use to stash away at offsite locations data they cannotafford to lose. Brocade is now the dominant player in the field with over 80 per cent of the market. Industry experts are calling it one of the hotteststocks of the year and one analyst said the company ``has blazed beyond the dawn of the SAN market.''

During a recent interview in Los Altos, Kumar smiled a little embarrassedly at the sudden attention, as his wife flipped chappatis in their capacious kitchen while readying a simple Indian meal. ``I didn't thinkanyone knew me,'' he said. ``How did you find out?''

Kumar is among the slew of entrepreneurs from what canonly be called middle India: achievers from rural orsemi-urban backgrounds with modest education who donot fit the billing of IIT geniuses, but who aremaking as resounding a splash in the digital world.While IIT-ians are subject to rah-rah write-ups in themedia, the non-IITians stack-up just as well in thedigital sweepstakes.

Just consider this:*Two small-town boys, B.V. Jagadeesh of Bagalur villagein Karnataka and K.B.Chandrasekhar of Tiruchinnapallitown in Tamil Nadu, co-founded Exodus, now regarded asthe Godzilla of the web-hosting business (market cap:$ 20 billion).

*Rajendra Singh, who grew up in Rajastan's Kairoovillage -- no telephone and no electricity -- istoday a telecom czar and counted as among the richestentrepreneurs in America ($1.1 billion of personalwealth according to Forbes).

*Arun Gupta, born in Kharar village outsideChandigarh, helped in the creation of Nasdaq and headsthe e-business firm NeuVis.

And in one of the most talked about cases, MallikarjunBennur, a shepherd boy from Karnataka's Hassandistrict, returned briefly earlier this month to hisvillage to look for a bride -- after he became a chiefdesigner at General Motors.

Small-town India comes to big-time America?

Increasingly, boys from the so-called backwaters arebeginning to strike out overcoming the inhibitions oftheir small-town upbringing. ``What's the big dealabout IIT? Aren't some of the regional engineeringcolleges are as good?'' Naveen Jain, Meerut-bornfounder of Infospace, a high-profile wireless portal,asked at a recent conference. Nor is the mightyMicrosoft any big deal. Jain walked out of the Redmondgiant some years back, promising tobe more famousthan Bill Gates. ``We are not natural entrepreneurs,but I think we have a lot of fire in the belly,'' saysKumar.

So it seems, going by their stories. Kumar, whose last name Malavalli is a village in Karnataka's Mandya district, studied in Mysore's nondescript National Institute of Engineering (also alma mater of Infosys' N.R. Narayana Murthy). After a brief stint in Bangalore's NGEF, he ventured out to Germany for training in advanced industrial electronics, before moving to Canada in 1974. He worked in HP for nearly two decades before summoning up the courage to hit the digital trail on his own.

Exodus' K.B. Chandrasekhar was born in Kumbakonam, grewup in Trichy, and graduated from the unheralded Vivekananda College and Anna University. His partner Jagadeesh emerged further back from the boonies -- alocal school in village Bagalur outside Bangalore. ``Our backgrounds made us even more determined,'' says Jagadeesh, who recently ploughed back $1 million into the municipal education system that he used and who has promised to wire Bangalore's corporation schools.

Bennur's story is even more remarkable. After he completed his high school in a village near Mangalore, his mother had to pledge her wedding ornaments so he could finish his engineering degree at a regional college in Suratkal. He then moved to Detroit for his doctoral research. On a recent visit to his village (in a rented chopper), he showed a reporter the field where he had grazed cattle, the pond where he had washed up, and the tree under which he napped.

While the success of the IIT elite has been celebrated everyway short of song and dance, the boys from the boonies are less well known. But already, they too are becoming part of India's IT folklore -- regardless ofwhat the distinguished thinker Laloo Prasad Yadav might say.