'Technology doesn't decide its destiny -- humans do. We choose whether it becomes a weapon or a tool for progress.'
'Every breakthrough looks like a miracle at first, a disappointment later -- and finally, just another useful tool.'
Key Points
- Building India's Internet from scratch: 'We rented a tiny office near the Stock Exchange because a BSNL cable passed through it -- there was no Internet then. Our office literally sat on the Internet's path.'
- The man who chose purpose over profit: 'I could've chased wealth single-mindedly. I didn't. I focused on innovation. That makes me a 'good man' -- but it also means I didn't spend enough time just making money.'
- The principle that killed a billion-rupee business: 'Rediff Matrimony was No. 1 -- and it died in a day. I walked in, saw caste data being published, and said remove it. That was the end.'
- At 78, still writing code every day: 'I still spend 4-5 hours a day coding AI in Python. I'm 78. So when youngsters don't, I ask -- why?'
- Why India keeps losing its brightest minds: 'India valued innovation centuries ago. Then the elite chased clerical power, and the most creative left for the US. That pattern still persists.'
Long before most Indians had heard the word 'Internet', Ajit Balakrishnan was hunched over a keyboard in a cramped 800 square foot office near the Bombay Stock Exchange, writing code by himself, powered by nothing but conviction and a flimsy twisted-pair cable snaking up a wooden staircase.
The year was 1995. The country had no public Internet to speak of. And on February 7, 1996, Rediff On The NeT came to life on a single colour monitor tucked inside a bedroom -- India's first Internet portal, born in conditions that left visiting American investment bankers genuinely speechless.
That moment was vintage Ajit Balakrishnan: Audacious, ahead of the curve, utterly indifferent to the odds, the new-age Wave Rider.
His journey to that office near Dalal Street is itself a masterclass in intellectual restlessness.
Raised in the intellectual hothouse of Kannur, Kerala, where his doctor father demanded causal logic for ice cream and his grandfather who read Bertrand Russell aloud to a ten year old, Ajit Balakrishnan was wired differently from the start.
He took that restless curiosity to IIM Calcutta, then co-founded Rediffusion in his early twenties -- the advertising agency that became a cultural force, engineering Rajiv Gandhi's 1984 election campaign and rising from nowhere to India's top creative shop within years.
Then came PSI Data Systems, makers of India's first personal computer.
Then Rediff On The NeT, later Rediff.com.
Each chapter a different industry.
Each move driven not by wealth, but by the gravitational pull of a genuinely new idea.
Today, at 78, he remains the 'Coding Philosopher.'
His new book, Technology Innovation: Sword or Plough? asks the question that has animated his entire life: When humanity unleashes a new technology, who gets to decide which way it cuts?
The answer, Ajit Balakrishnan insists in this enthralling conversation on The Rediff Podcast with Zaki Ansari, Founder, Sigmoid Frogs, is always us.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff
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