Indian tech entrepreneur Kesavan Kandadai has many accomplishments under his belt: launching Amazon Prime Video in India and founding his own generative-AI startup, to name a couple. But at the age of 45, when people introduce him to a stranger, they always name-check his very earliest career achievement: graduating from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.
“Even after 24 years,” Kandadai told Rest of World, “all the work I did, whether I had success or not, is secondary.”
IIT Bombay, in Mumbai, is one of India’s most prestigious higher education institutes. It’s one of the five original IIT engineering schools established in the 1950s and ’60s as the Indian government’s attempt to emulate the success of the United States’ Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Major expansions since 2008 have grown the system to 23 schools in total.
The…