When did Dr Deshpande first realise that he too wanted to be an agent of change?
"I think it first started when I was studying at IIT Madras," he said. "When I left home and a very comfortable environment, something more opened. That was in the 1970s. The university experience was very nice. But I got a taste of the philosophy that you could do things a lot better than what you thought you could do was when I was in Toronto. My career goal was more to be a professor, researcher and so on.
"But Professor Peter Brackett, who had become my friend while I was working on my PhD on data communications from Queens University, was the head of the engineering of a little company. It was not doing that well and he left that company to come and teach since he had a PhD. A year later, Motorola bought that little company and then they asked him to come back and be the head of the engineering again. So he went back and that was the time I was just about finishing my PhD. Peter said, 'Instead of doing more research why don't you come and join us? It is going to be a lot of fun.' So I went there and joined them, not knowing what it would be like.
"In the next four years, the company went from 20 to 400 people. And it became a $ 100 million company. When I look back to that year, 1984, I remember that the experience was very exciting. This was probably my first big taste of what it means to reach out a little more than what you thought you could do. Then we moved to Boston just to be able to do that and we started a bunch of companies and from then on it has always been trying to reach out and doing things that are hard to do but when you get them done, it is exciting and fulfilling."
Image: IIT Madras. | Photograph, courtesy: Ambuj Saxena
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