Back home to Bihar
Irena Akbar: Feb 27 2011, 22:52 IST
Growing up in his village in Bihar, Amit Kumar Das dreamt of owning a big tractor so that he could double the produce in his father’s farm. But for that, he needed Rs 25,000 and that meant going to Delhi, as a friend advised him. His father didn’t think much of his dream and so, Das ran away from home. While he did his BA from Delhi University, he applied for a basic computer learning course at NIIT. He was refused admission because he fumbled for an answer when the interviewer asked him, “When did you come here?” He enrolled for a crash course in English, after which he was taken in by NIIT for a six-month course that was extended to a year. He completed the course and joined NIIT as a faculty member. It was at that point that he dropped his idea of owning a tractor and instead, decided to become a “computer entrepreneur in Delhi”.
From then on, Das and his dream set off on a new journey. In 2001, with his savings of “a few thousand rupees”, he started his software development firm, Isoft, from a cyber cafe in Bharat Nagar, a run-down south Delhi locality. Isoft today has 40 clients across India, UAE and Australia, and 150 employees in its offices in Delhi, Dubai and Sydney.
Meanwhile, Das, who was by now in Sydney, kept dreaming till that dream turned full circle in 2009 and reached his village, Mirdaul, in Bihar’s Forbesganj district. His
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