After graduating from IIMA, I started my career with Bharat Forge in Poona along with Govind Apte. I relocated to Ranchi to start the office there and was glad to connect with Raman Nanda and Kitoo who were already there. We all had a great time in Ranchi. More important, I met my future wife Nithya there as well. Moved on to IDL Chemicals for a brief stint and relocated to Nairobi, Kenya to work with a UK based Consulting Company. Again had a great time in Nairobi meeting up with some senior IIMA grads (Mama Sankaran) and our own Utpal Ghosh who was in Mombasa.

 

All along, I was convinced that I was Marketing material, no doubt influenced by the B grade that I got in Prof Vohra’s first mid-term, and so I decided to pursue a PhD degree in Marketing in the US. I specialized in the analyses of large commercial databases a precursor for what is known today as Big Data Analytics. Post my Ph.D., I joined the Wisconsin Business School, University of Wisconsin Madison as a faculty member.

 

After 7 years, I decided to move into consulting and joined Andersen Consulting in their Global Customer Insight Practice. I enjoyed my stint at Andersen (now Accenture) working with clients globally across several verticals and also setting up a dedicated India practice. During this time, I continued my association with the University as an Adjunct Faculty for the Exec MBA program. In fact, they liked me even better now as I could tell better stories!

 

I moved along with my Accenture mentor to IRI a company that offered customer loyalty solutions for retailers. My stint in IRI enabled me to build my retail expertise as well as learning and understanding about how to monetize the value of data. I continue to work in this area and now I am working with a start-up company called Nuevora (Spanish for “one of a kind”) based in California. Nuevora offers platform based big data analytical solutions.

 

We live in Madison WI which was small University town in the Mid-west when we first arrived but has since become a hub for bio informatics and electronic medical records. As a result, we now have 8 Indian restaurants, a cricket team and two temples who are still hotly debating which idols to install! Last but not least, we voted a Republican Donald Trump for the first time in almost 50 years. So we have seen transformational changes in Madison since we moved in 1990!

 

My wife, Nithya is a Pediatrician by training and decided to focus on Research once we moved to the US. She heads a lab to support the Pediatric Neurosurgery group in the University of Wisconsin Hospitals. She enjoys the work and also loves mentoring the residents and under-graduate students who work with her. Her lab has a near perfect record for getting students admitted into the Medical Schools in the US.

 

Our daughter Luxme is completing her fellowship in Pediatric Ophthalmology from U Penn and Bascom Palmer in Miami. She took time off from her Medical studies to complete a Master’s degree in Public Health from John Hopkins. Her passion is to balance clinical work with policy issues pertaining to childhood blindness prevention. As an aside, she met Kanan Dhru (daughter of our own Amal) during a summer internship in WHO, Geneva and they continue to build on that friendship!

 

Nithya and I enjoy travelling and meeting with friends and family. We are founding members of a 9 family “Theen Pathi” group that meets on a regular basis. We enjoy Western and Indian musical performances. Both of us love to entertain and Nithya handles the cooking (with some help from me) and decorating and my passion is mixology! Our favorite drinks are gin and tonic (Tanqueray #10 or Plymouth or Hendricks) and single malt scotches. My favorite cocktail creation is a Lychee Martini and for the religiously inclined, I offer a Tulsi Martini!

 

Mee Casa Su Casa and we will love to host you anytime you are around.