IIT Super techie writes popular book
By Suneetha B

For UK resident Indian techie Farahad Zama, this is the manifestation of a childhood hobby and the continuation of a family activity (his father is an author). This Vizag born IIT Kharagpur alumni wrote ‘A marriage Bureau for Rich People’ during his lonely commute to reduce the stress he felt in his job when he made the change over from writing programs to managing people.

The resultant book has brought him such unprecedented fame that he has not only completed the sequel to the book but is also being translated into European languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch. The rights to the first book has been sold in seven countries like US (Penguin), Spain, France, Sweden, Italy, Germany and Holland with more to be confirmed.

Farahad himself has had an ‘arranged marriage’ and has settled in London since 18 years with his wife and two sons.

Techgoss spoke to Farahad and here is the interview.

TG (Techgoss): What are your memories of India?
FZ (Farahad Zama): Bright sun and water from a tap sparkling like diamonds, multi-coloured grated-ice lollies bought with money my Naanima gave me, rushing headlong down a steep slope on my first rented cycle, leaving home for college, coming back home for Eid.  I have many memories of India. I was born and brought up in Vizag. I went to IIT in Kharagpur for my M. Tech and then moved to Mumbai with a software job. Twenty years ago, the software industry was just starting out and did not yet have credibility in the wider world. I feel proud that though I wasn't at the very beginning, I was still in the vanguard of an industry that changed our country - both in other people's eyes and in our own.  I settled in London eighteen years ago but I go back at least once or twice a year, so my memories of India are regularly topped up!

TG: What computing hard ware/software have you worked with?  What is the nature of your current IT job?
FZ: Over the years I have worked on many different systems and languages. I started off in FORTAN on punch cards in the University. My first commercial system was in COBOL, though I generally keep that quiet. I have programmed in a few assembly languages, PL/1, Pascal, BASIC, FORTH, C, C++, Java besides scripting languages like Perl, python, awk, sed etc, besides SQL and several reporting languages.

On the hardware side, I have worked on IBM mainframes (a long time ago), VAX/VMS, Prime, different flavours of UNIX and Linux besides PCs.

I am currently a Director in a Tier-1 financial services company and design and manage E-Commerce and Foreign Exchange systems.

TG: You are a technology person; tell us how you decided to write a book?
FZ: Reading has been a great hobby and I love books. Also, my father is an author in Telugu and he has always pushed me to write a book. A few years ago I moved away from front-line programming to management and my job became more stressful (I love programming and computers, people are a different matter!), so I decided to start writing. I've been fairly lucky that my very first book has been received so enthusiastically.

TG: What is your book all about?  Does it have any characters in the IT, BPO and KPO world?
FZ: Mr Ali, a retired man from Vizag, opens The Marriage Bureau for Rich People. It quickly becomes successful and with his wife's help he hires a local girl, Aruna, as his assistant.  Together they help many clients with their problems but Aruna herself cannot get married because of family financial problems and Mr Ali cannot convince his son to abandon his anti-government agitation and take up a career.

Many readers like Mr Ali as a character but most people seem to really love Mrs Ali or Aruna. My own favourite character in the book is Aruna because she doesn't moan or complain about her problems. She just gets on with life and makes the best she can of the hand she is given. Do things come right for her in the end? I'll give you a clue - a reviewer said that this book gave her happy thoughts and happy dreams.

TG: What do you think of Chetan Bhagat and his book One Night at a Call Centre? Have you read his other books/any of the books?
FZ: I have heard of Bhagat and his books but I have not read them. I understand that they are very popular in India and my nephew who is currently in BITS raves about them. I'll pick them up the next time I am in India.

TG: How do you think schooling in India has moulded you as a writer/techie?
FZ: Schooling in India teaches you how to work hard. Except at the IIT level, it is also geared towards passing exams. So apart from giving you lots of patience (which is important), this is not the right approach to creating good writers or even techies.

I think the process of writing software or writing novels is similar. You start with a high level design that you break down into smaller chunks. At the lowest level, you are deeply immersed in the detail of that particular scene or subroutine but you also have to be alive to the small decisions that you make at that level that can ripple up and affect your top level architecture. You can become a functional software/book writer following standard rules and the Indian education systems helps a lot at that point. To go beyond that, you need to be creative and question assumptions and our schooling works against that!

I was lucky that for some reason, most of my teachers allowed me to write my own answers to questions but this privilege was not extended to other boys and girls in my class. If they did not reproduce exactly what was in the text book they were marked wrong. My classmates must have hated me!

TG: Any plans of another book? If so, fiction/technical/what will be the topic?
FZ: I have just finished my second book - a sequel to the Marriage Bureau For Rich People. It takes Aruna's story forward into her in-law's house and Mr and Mrs Ali's son Rehman falls in love. Clients of course, keep coming in to the marriage bureau. Is a T-shirt made in India less native than a Khadi Kurta? That's one of the arguments Rehman and his girl friend have..

TG: Have you received reviews from India ? How is the reception from UK readers?
FZ: The reception from UK readers has been fantastic. It has been selected for Richard & Judy Book Club which is a very popular TV program here and I have also been on BBC Radio's premier book review program. Readers love the characters, they say they have learnt a lot about India while reading a great story and they are absolutely wild about the food. It shows how interesting India is but it also shows how open-minded and receptive British people are to foreign cultures.

 It is also being translated into many European languages - French, German, Italian, Spanish, Swedish and Dutch. These editions are coming out in 2009.

The book hasn't come out yet in India but I've just received an email from the editor of a very popular magazine in India who received an advance copy. She says that she fell in love with the book and has no doubt that it will be big in India.