Subroto Bagchi, born and raised in small-town Orissa, and educated in government schools in the vernacular medium, is not your usual, garden variety technology entrepreneur-CEO. Bagchi is not a techie by either education or qualification. He holds a degree in political science. He does not act or speak like a techie. Rather than industry outlook or quarterly results, he prefers holding forth on multiple intelligences. He can talk eloquently and with insight about the vulgarity of amassing wealth or about Pakistan. For instance, he prophecies that Pakistan cannot come anywhere close to India in technology capability even in the next 500 years because it is a feudal society.

And now with his book, the Hollywood-ishly titled The Professional — his third in as many years — Bagchi proves yet again that he is singular. His prose is more appealing than that of most techies. How can a full-time top executive find the time to write so prolifically? He writes columns and management journal pieces frequently too. Bagchi explained tongue-in-cheek recently, “I don’t play golf.”

His first book The High Performance Entrepreneur was about co-founding and building MindTree. The second, Go Kiss the World, his dying mother’s last words, is based on his own life story. In India, successful entrepreneur-CEO authors are a rarity. Kishore Biyani of Pantaloon Retail/Future Group whose 99-rupees-a-copy ‘Big Bazaar’ priced bestseller is a standout example. Infosys founder Narayana Murthy’s A Better India, A Better World, and co-founder Nandan Nilekani’s Imagining India: Ideas for the New Century are among the recent handful of Indian entrepreneurs nearly as successful in writing books as in running companies.

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