An Author’s Afternoon with Subrata Bagchi

March 30, 2016: Today evening was the 29th edition of the series An Author’s Afternoon and the Guest Author was Subrata Bagchi of MindTree fame. Subrata Bagchi gained name and fame as the co-founder of MindTree Ltd – a Bengaluru-based information technology and outsourcing company founded in 1999 that has grown to become a US$ 540 million company employing over 16,000 people. An Author’s Afternoon has come a long way since it was started in July 2012. This series will be completing four years in few months from now. Subrata Bagchi, like many other guest authors earlier, was very impressed by the format of the event. On the other hand, Subrata impressed the audience with his take on concepts like goodness, greatness and their subtle differences. Subrata recounted his enterpreneurial journey had begun from a 20 by 20 feet room in Kolkata near Mother House on AJC Bose Road. He also said during the session that he visited that office after many decades and picked up two stones from there as a memento of his emotional connect with that place. The novelty of An Author’s Afternoon event is that the Guest Authors often share many unknown facts and anecdotes of their life for the first time during the interactions.

Subrata Bagchi, who called himself a “Gardner” at MindTree Ltd, is all set to pass on the baton of executive chairmanship of the company to a younger member from Friday April 1, 2016. This Author’s Afternoon was perhaps his last event as the Executive Chairman. His charming wife Sushmita, a professor of Political Science in Delhi University for 32 years and also an author was present at the event.

Subrata Bagchi, who has so far written eight books, was first invited by Penguin to write one in 2006 on entrepreneurship. The book was titled The High Performance Entrepreneur and was popular among budding entrepreneurs. Since then, Subrata has been writing a-book-a-year on an average. The first book also established him as a business author. Among his other books are Go Kiss the World, The Professional, MBA at 16, Zen Garden for Penguin and The Elephant Catchers for Hatchette.

He is known for his ability to humanize business and his writing style is very accessible. His work has been translated in many languages in India and abroad.

Today I shall leave for Jaipur again to arrange for and attend to the Peer Ghani event scheduled for April 2, 2016.

ess bee