From Curiosity to Conquests: The Myriad Adventures of MD Ramaswami
Navigating Disparate Worlds
MD Ramaswami, known affectionately as MD among friends and family, learned early that exceptional communication skills could reap extraordinary dividends. Belonging to an era when the nation still suffered from a colonial hangover, such communication was necessarily in English, the language deemed a gateway to wealth and power and a certain kind of cultural swagger.
School-going MD, whose parents conversed fluently in Tamil but didn’t know a word of English, was determined not to fritter his “convent education.” There wasn’t just a linguistic divide but a striking material difference between his home life and those of his peers at St. Joseph’s, Bangalore. MD’s father was a bookkeeper at a farm, and their home bore a stark emptiness. “There was no furniture, no cots, no chairs, no sofa or dining table.” The family slept, ate, worked and studied on the floor, an aspect that MD started becoming mildly ashamed of when he visited other homes. As a result, he never invited classmates into his house: “We would talk and play outside on the street but not inside. That way I continued to develop long lasting friendships without exposing the inside of my house.”
Moreover, his parents, wary of bumping into incomprehensible teachers or snobby English-speaker families, never attended school PTAs or events. MD grew up in a markedly bicultural universe: the somewhat Europeanized, cosmopolitan world of St. Joseph’s and the colloquial Tamil of his parents. Who also strove to ensure that MD himself was never short on food, school uniforms, books – anything to fuel his prized education. Paradoxically, MD always donned shiny new uniforms and shoes each year.
Fueling Ambition, Outsmarting Expectations
While recently addressing a gathering of students at Welingkar Institute of Management, MD realized that the internalized shame of those school-going years sparked a lifelong hunger in him, a flaming desire to learn and outrun others. He describes it as a positive, motivating force that still fires all his actions – even if his definition of “success” might have shifted beyond material aspirations.
At high school, MD realized that he couldn’t rely on parental guidance. Rather smartly, he chose to mimic a peer – Rajesh Gupta – who seemed to have a fix on rung-climbing to-dos. Gupta goaded MD to attempt the hyper-competitive IIT-JEE, an exam that MD cracked in his 11th Standard (at that time, 11th Standard entry was allowed), gaining admission into IIT-Madras. His parents hadn’t heard of the IITs till then. When his father transmitted the news to a friend, he was buoyed to hear that his son was “set for life.”
From Chemical Engineering to Code
At IIT, MD found Chemical Engineering rather desultory. Fortunately, he was allowed to explore courses outside his assigned field. Lit by an exploratory curiosity, he dabbled in fluid mechanics and even nuclear physics. Struck by his zeal, the physics prof even organized an internship at Kalpakkam, a township in Tamil Nadu that houses nuclear plants. Though MD was moved by the hospitality of his scientist hosts, he sensed nuclear physics couldn’t quench his own intellectual yearnings.
But a data structures course completely riveted him. With a knack for logical reasoning and pattern detection, he reveled in manipulating machines. He had found his calling. Rather than applying for an uninspiring Master’s in Chemical Engineering – an admission he could have swung easily, with his decent GPA – he opted to work for a year, while swotting for the Advanced GRE in Computer Science.
Honesty: The Ultimate Hack
One of the companies conducting campus placements that year was Infosys. After an aptitude test that eliminated 50 of 70 applicants, 20 awaited an interview with the founders: Narayana Murthy and K. Dinesh. At the meeting, MD recalls being asked to write code. Impressively for someone who hadn’t formally studied Computer Science, his code passed muster. When asked by Murthy why he wasn’t heading abroad, MD responded: “I’m planning to apply a year from now. If I get a full scholarship, I will go. If not, I will continue at Infosys.” On his way out, other candidates berated him for being so honest.
That evening, MD was one of the four to receive an offer. He says that experience cemented a principle that has withstood the roughs of life: “It’s better to tell the truth. That way, you don’t carry any baggage.”
Side Hustles and Motorbikes
At Infosys, where he was deployed to work at MICO on their ERP systems, he finished his Cobol programs inside a typical 9-to-5 schedule. Thereafter, he’d wolf down an early dinner at home, and head back to the office. To practice C programming. Working on his own till late night, he wrote small games, experimented with multi-threading et al and became quite proficient in C.
Always infused with an entrepreneurial streak, he also chased side hustles with colleagues. Once they approached a trucking company owner to automate his systems. When the business owner asked about their charges, they hadn’t readied any rates. One colleague brightly suggested: “How about you buy us three motorbikes?” MD laughs: “He threw us out then and there.”
Cancer, Sacrifice and Resolve
A year down the line, awarded a full scholarship at Michigan State, MD headed to Chennai with his father for his visa. On their return, his father felt ill. Symptoms seemed mild: a fever, some vomiting. A few days later, MD was jolted to hear the diagnosis: late-stage liver cancer.
A family friend suggested that MD abjure his US plans. But his father wouldn’t hear of it: “So many people recover from cancer, why do you assume I won’t?” In that jittery state, MD set out to Michigan, where he soon landed a research assistantship at a prestigious lab. “It was headed by Dr. Anil Jain, considered a whiz in pattern recognition.” While other lab-mates were doctoral candidates, MD was the only Master’s student.
Since his parents did not possess a phone, at frequent, scheduled intervals MD called a neighbor’s place. On each call, his parents reassured him that his father was getting better. “By 10% or 20%. Over time, the percentages might have added up to 2000%, so I assumed he was fully recovering.” Unfortunately, a few months down the line, he received a dreaded call. Flying back, he was stunned by the skin-and-bones appearance of his father, who briefly held his hand before slipping into a coma.
After his father’s passing, MD decided to return to India sooner, rather than pursue a PhD in Computer Science as he had planned to earlier.
Climbing Ladders, Taking Leaps
Armed with a Master’s, he landed a job at PSI in Bangalore, where he also met Vibha, his future wife. While he started out coding, he was soon leading teams. This brought its own lessons, some of which he absorbed the hard way. He jokes now about how, in the early days, he made people cry.
Engaging in another side hustle, he penned two monthly columns for Computers and Communication, a magazine. One column dwelt on Microsoft Windows and the other on UNIX. To support this, he bought a desktop with two partitions, using one for each operating system. The monthly remuneration from his columns exceeded his salary.
In 2004, MD and a few others launched Find One For You, a U.S.-based venture where users called a 1-800 number for local info—like the nearest Pizza Hut in Fremont. Requests were routed to a team in India, who found the answers and relayed them back, all within 45 seconds. The plan was to monetize the gap with ads, but Google launched a similar service, leading the team to back off.
Joining Verifone, MD was part of a 10-member team: “In three months, I was promoted to be the boss of that group, and my former boss became one of the team members, reporting to me.” He still wonders at the gumption of senior leaders, who dared to make such an offbeat swap.
From First Hire to Founder
Meeting Pradeep Singh at a bar at Windsor Manor was momentous. Singh outlined his plans for a new company to service Microsoft’s global customers. MD ended up being the first hire at Aditi Technologies – which turned into a memorable 6 ½ years stint across Aditi and Talisma (a division spun into a separate entity), where he learned the ins and outs of founding and running startups.
When pitching their outsourced support services to Dell, MD thought the meeting had gone exceptionally well. That evening he received a cryptic call from a headhunter, who said some senior executives wished to meet him. The visitors at Taj Residency were the Dell duo he had pitched to earlier. They said they could not hand over their business to Talisma, but would like him to consider heading Dell’s outsourced services in India. MD eventually accepted the role, with an intention to spin off his own entrepreneurial venture in two years.
Which he did with Celtycs, an advisory service focused on customer experience and loyalty. Deploying the adage that “the best service is no service,” he analyzed service calls from large operators like Airtel to identify fixable systemic issues. To build enabling technology, he hired fresh graduates from small towns or rural areas, and had them guided by experienced part-timers – often senior women on parental breaks. Well before the pandemic ushered concepts like WFH, MD had already established a remote team, located in various corners of the country, tapping into rare skills and saving on office rentals. Eventually, he sold Celtycs to Activeo in 2013, a French System Integration company.
Next came Polama, a platform for comparing holiday packages. Initially, users could compare prices and features, with data passed to companies like MakeMyTrip as leads. But when vendors bypassed their insights, the team pivoted to delivering full holiday packages—a costly shift that ultimately ended the venture after two and a half years. In hindsight, MD views this pivot as a key learning moment.
Curious Minds Never Rest
That restless urge to keep learning led to live Zoom interviews with notable personalities during the pandemic. These interviews were sponsored by corporates, covering his operational costs. Of late, while fiddling with AI, he created a virtual podcast about Bangalore’s Airlines Hotel. Owned by his classmate Diwakar Rao, MD crafted a conversation with quirky facts that Rao’s mates weren’t aware of. Like, why is it called the Airlines Hotel, to begin with? (Apparently it was the site of an erstwhile Indian Airlines office.) When the podcast received a rousing response, he started getting requests to create others. He’s currently forged a WhatsApp group, that has swelled to 300 members in a month, where he posts short, AI-generated podcasts on AI topics.
Alongside these projects, MD angel invests, diving into mentorship with each startup he backs. Some ventures flourish, others falter, but each teaches him something new. He’s considering a more structured approach to venture investing, aiming to put his insights and experience to work for a new generation of entrepreneurs.
He embodies a kind of curiosity that Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett describe in their book, Curious Minds: “Curiosity connects. And it does so within the connective tissues of brain and body, system and society.”
References
Perry Zurn and Dani S. Bassett, Curious Minds: The Power of Connection, The MIT Press, 2022