When 70 year-old Arjun Dev Tejpal received a mail from Microsoft on April 1 this year informing him that he was one of the 100 recipients of Microsoft’s Most Valued Professionals award, he hit the delete button. ‘Spam,’ he told himself.

“I thought it was a joke. I am no professional — I only offer database solutions on the Net as a hobby. Why would Microsoft be interested in a retired man living in Faridabad?” he says. But it was only when Microsoft followed the ‘spam mail’ with a call that Tejpal realised that the 100-odd application solutions for Microsoft access that he was uploading on the net had caught the eye of the software major. It didn’t matter to them that Tejpal wasn’t a professional — he was a retired railways engineer who seemed to enjoy reading books on Visual Basic and database applications as much as he liked Ken Follet and Isaac Asimov.

Unlike most of his colleagues, Tejpal thought he would sit back after retirement. “I had decided that I would not take up another job, spend time at home, away from the madness of Delhi and teach children,” says Tejpal.

But 12 years after retirement, Tejpal is a ‘solutions provider’ for people using Microsoft database applications across the world.

It all started with the Celeron processor computer that he bought to keep in touch with his daughter Archana in California. “I soon started reading up on Microsoft office and got hooked on to Microsoft Access, which is a database application. I first began with a database solution for Thai airways four years back” he says.

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