[Business Today]

Within the space of a week, I met N.R. Narayana Murthy for a long and friendly conversation at his airy venture-capital office in Bangalore’s Jayanagar suburb and then conducted telephone interviews with the company’s Chairman, K.V. Kamath, who was in Mumbai and its CEO, S.D. Shibulal, who was attending the World Economic Forum at Davos in Switzerland. Not many companies in India are so open and transparent, and so unaffected. About a decade ago, when Murthy was still very much in the saddle as executive chairman, I visited the sprawling Infosys campus at Electronics City in Bangalore and the man himself gave me a guided tour of every building and even each sapling planted by a string of visiting foreign leaders who made a beeline for the miracle of free enterprise. When I checked with him if Infosys had indeed been conceived by seven men around a Pune dining table 32 years ago, Murthy texted back: “No, it was conceived in my one bedroom apartment in Bandra West on December 30th 1980. The idea was crystallised in the next six months.” Murthy has not changed very much. His simplicity and plain-spokenness are refreshing in this era of image managers and spin doctors. “The softest pillow is a clear conscience” was an early Infosys motto, and Murthy’s son Rohan credits him with it on his Harvard website. Indeed, Infosys has always boasted of the highest ethical values, so any hint of anything untoward and there have been a couple-triggers a frisson of excitement. It is important to get a crow’s-nest view of this giant ship with more than 155,000 passengers as it navigates waters that have become more choppy and treacherous over the past few years. Who is going to be up on the bridge in March 2015 when CEO S.D. Shibulal steps down? The company has been a disruptor-it was the first in India to create salaried millionaires through its share options. So what happens to Infosys and its bottom line is important, and Associate Editor Goutam Das did quite a bit of investigating, helped by Jyotindra Dubey with data and research. Murthy’s voice resonates throughout the cover story starting on page 50 and excerpts from his interview on page 62. We did a thorough job of reading the company’s financial entrails on pages 66 and 67.

I don’t know what you were doing at midnight on December 31, 1999. I know I was up all night, anxiously monitoring customers’ trading screens at the company I headed then lest they explode with the Y2K bug. Nothing happened then, but cyber attacks are not only more frequent, they could potentially cripple India’s financial markets, knock out power, trigger nuclear crises. throw aviation into a tailspin, and silence all communications. Indian authorities are trying to set up better monitoring safeguards and systems, but we are certainly not hacker-proof. Manu Kaushik and Pierre Mario Fitter piece together a gripping story on this invisible terrorism starting on page 68.

Not long after he won power for the third time running, Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi presided over his sixth Vibrant Gujarat summit, and the hyperbole was true to form. Senior Associate Editor Sebastian PT spent several days in the state separating the wheat from the chaff, and his report on page 78 goes some way towards pulling up our jaws from where they had fallen. To put things in context, and to underline how regional satraps now exert a strong centrifugal influence on India’s economics, equity analyst and author Ruchir Sharma reminded the Jaipur Literature Festival that no fewer than six Indian chief ministers have won power three times in a row: “NaMo” is just one of them. Something to chew on with your khaman dhokla.