It really started back quite a few years ago. In 1999/2000, when I was in New York Indian entrepreneurs were visiting here. I do remember one of the first people who came to visit here was Nandan Nilekarni of Infosys.

At the time, I had paid scant attention to the IT services industry, much less the Indian one, and he actually started educating me about how important it was in India and what was going on with Y2K and all that.

Over the next few years he would come in and so would Vivek Paul formerly of Wipro.

Our coverage of the Indian tech scene has been growing over the years. Last summer I was in Bangalore for a week for a story which we published last August. When I came back here, an editor from McGraw-Hill left a message for me basically wanting to know if I would be interested to do a book on the rise of India in IT technology. They wanted to focus on one company instead of the whole industry because it gets complicated when you want to talk about the entire industry.

The idea was to tell the story primarily through one company. I thought it would be interesting to do that through TCS, Infosys or Wipro, I mean the industry leaders.

Why Wipro?

We decided on Wipro because of various reasons. We talked to all three of them. Infosys actually did not cooperate with us and till today I have not figured out why. TCS, on the other hand, has interests in McGraw-Hill in the sense that the Tatas are a joint venture publishing partner with McGraw-Hill in India and we felt that there was a conflict of interest involved.

I am glad that is how it happened because Wipro is a company which is very open. I also thought Premji's story was a real good story.