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One man was deliberately left out of the invitee list: S. Janakiraman ("Jani"), who at the time was president of Wipro’s Global R&D. Jani and I had worked together in Global R&D. After I moved out as its first chief executive, Jani took over from me and by 1999 grew its manpower from 600 people to 1400. We worked like the left and the right hand of the organization and complemented each other extremely well. When I left Wipro to join Lucent, Jani was heartbroken. While contemplating the making of MindTree, the founders never thought of asking him in as he was considered to be doing too well for himself. KK, Partha, Kalyan and I had worked closely with him, as had Ashok, whom Jani was directly reporting to until the former left Wipro.

Sometime in July, as the news of Ashok’s leaving Wipro got to the world, Jani was devastated. Jani thought the world of all of us and there was no way he would stay on at Wipro. After a few rounds of discussions, it was settled that he would be our tenth co-founder, a fact that could not be made public on August 18, 1999, when Part 1 of the Making of MindTree was released. Wipro was still working on the modalities of retaining or letting Jani go. Given that background, Jani was not a part of the gathering of friends and family the night before.

Jani was born to a village postmaster in Tamil Nadu in 1957. His father was a man of little means, but had a burning desire to see his son get the best possible education. That ambition conflicted with his frequent rural transfers to places that did not offer good educational facilities.

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Subroto Bagchi is co-founder and Chief Operating Officer for MindTree Consulting (P) Ltd. The "Making of the MindTree" is told in the first person by Subroto Bagchi. In condensed form, it was published by Business World, filmed by InfiniTV, and aired on CNBC, IT Hour. Websites: www.mindtree.com & www.mindtree.com/subrotobagchi