The wave writer

The Wave Rider

Ajit Balakrishnan

Macmillan

Rs. 599

Pg 213

“I’m a great fan of Ernest Hemingway. His writing has influenced me a lot. I admire some other American writers like Tom Wolfe,” he says. He also calls his tepid, realist yet evocative non-fiction-writing style “inspired by the likes of The New Yorker and Granta”, And no, he’s not a writer (well, professionally) and neither a scribe earning his paycheck putting ink on paper. He’s written a book alright, and done a good enough job of it too. But Ajit Balakrishnan was and still is one of the pioneers who opened India’s windows to the World Wide Web. His book, The Wave Rider—A Chronicle of the Information Age is a mix of an autobiographical account of his professional journey over the past couple of decades that saw him establishing Rediff.com. It is also a piece of business literature giving an insider’s analysis of the information age and how the world has been undergoing a transition from the industrial age to the information age in the past one decade.

It’s the story of how from a tiny Internet venture, that too after a failed computer hardware business, Balakrishnan took off on a journey that was topsy-turvy, bumpy, fraught with danger and adversaries and ultimately was about vision, dreams and the entrepreneurial spirit in him. A journey that saw Rediff going from a

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