Infosys manager:  Why IIT graduates cannot dance
By Bala Shah

By any measure, Aditya Jha who heads global branding for Infosys has had a successful career.  An IIT graduate (degree in Chemical Engineering), Aditya has worked for a number of international advertising companies and won a number of prestigious awards.  Like many successful employees, he tried his hand at business and stumbled and has returned to full-time employment.  Aditya may be regretting some choice of words in a recent article for Indian Express.

Aditya’s article for the prestigious newspaper ‘Indian Express’ starts off with a passionate but logical view that if the Indian Govt increased the number of IITs to 19, it would have a negative affect on brand IIT.  And that this is another move by power hungry politicians to control the best and brightest in the country.  There is certainly some merit in such an argument.

And then the article goes on to a bit of an elitist ‘we are the chosen ones’ mode.  Aditya says: “Brilliance is elitist. There is a difference between brilliance and above average. The IIT entrance exam, the JEE, was designed to shock and awe and separate the brilliant from the above average. There is a difference between JEE rank 500 and 50,000”.  He goes on to say that IIT undergraduates are so special that they would never accept people who only did their masters from IIT.  By the way, Infosys founder and his boss, Mr. Murthy never did his Bachelors from IIT, but merely did a Masters from IIT.

If sniping at the IIT Masters students was not enough, Aditya talks about an incident in which an IIT graduate puts an air hostess in her place.  His article quotes the incident: “An IIT-ian friend of mine once went out for an arranged date with an air hostess in Hong Kong. As the music changed gears, the air hostess kept asking him to dance with her and my friend kept declining with a polite, “I can’t do the twist/disco/cha-cha-cha.” Finally, the air hostess lost her cool and is reported to have demanded, “What? You can’t even do the Can-Can? What can you do?”

To which, the proud IIT-ian responded, “I can do second order partial differential equations; can you?”

Not surprisingly, readers of Indian Express were incensed and they lashed out at such views.

What prompts an obviously intelligent, super successful man like Aditya Jha to write such things?  Was it just a bad day and bad judgment like many of us have at least once or twice a year?  Was it a drinking session with fellow IIT graduates where everyone pumped up each other?  Was it something bubbling in him since an air hostess asked him to dance?  Was the article done in a hurry and so quality was comprised?  We will never know.  But it definitely does not help brand Aditya or brand Infosys

Techgoss note:  At the end of the article there is a footnote which says the writer is the head of Global Branding at Infosys. But the views expressed here are his own.  (Kind of cute wanting to use the respected brand value of Infosys, but keeping a legal distance from the organization)

Techgoss note:  Check out the article and comments at
http://www.indianexpress.com/story/295891.html