Adieu Comrade! Subroto Bagchi Remembers Cyber Astro’s Satrajit Majumdar

Satrajit Majumdar. Benu Majumdar. Benu-da. Benu. As many names he had, more were the facets of his personality. Brilliant. Original. Hyper-Energetic. Irreverent. Unpredictable. Joyful. He drew people in with a charm that is very rare. The nascent IT industry in the 1980s when we met, had three very different kinds of people in it. There were the ultra-sophisticated ones from multinationals like IBM and ICIM who wore a tie even in their sleep, then there were some from companies like ORG and DCM who were so serious about their work that they never laughed and finally, the complete ragamuffins of HCL who disrupted everything from who had the birthright to buy a computer to the very idea of authority at work. They pushed crazy ideas like “even a typist can operate a computer” which was as blasphemous in the day as to say a barber from the street could baptise a child. Leading this pack were a band of self-styled Marxists like Amit Dutta Gupta and Benu Majumdar who saw the march of technology as class struggle, they upended everything remotely smelling “corporate”. The highest recognition at work for people like us, much younger colleagues, from Amit Dutta Gupta was if he called you Comrade and the highest rebuke from Benu Majumdar was if he called you a Petite Bourgeois. All of us in the office yo-yoed between the two states based on the day’s performance.

From the way they created strategy, gathered and exhorted the troops, dressed, smoked, drank, ate, laughed, worked their backs off, it was the Long March, the opera and the circus. All happening together in real-time. While Amit Dutta Gupta was the voice of sobriety among the two, Benu Majumdar was a complete maverick. He did it all with a brilliance and innocence, mischief, playfulness wrapped in sheer joy that he became one of the most loved people in the industry. When I joined the industry, as yet another refugee from a smokestack company, I was simply baffled to see him. I was just twenty-four at that time, he was 37. He was my boss RK Gupta’s boss. It was a sheer joy, liberation to be around him, work happened organically. Then he became by direct boss at MMC and then, even as I was his co-founder at Project.21, he was still the Boss.

At each of those places, he was the centre of energy. In every place, three things were his hallmark: his love for the seemingly absurd, his total rejection of pessimism in the face of the worst disaster and his complete empowerment of people like me, way junior, way less capable. He saw the proletariat in us and conjured tricks like a magician every day that made us feel like we were the chosen ones. This meant we could bum cigarettes off him, steal the last three hundred rupees from his pocket to drink away our woes, make jokes about him and regale him in the process, along the way, sharpening our claws and learning to stalk, hunt, play like a bunch of lion cubs who are constantly tolerated by the Big Mane. Eventually, many like me, got to reach where we did, because he was there for us. He allowed us to pull his tail, bite his mane, startle him when he was snoozing.

Today, the IT industry from India is a global force. But if we were to go back to 1981 when many like me were grafted by him and showed us what it was going to be in 2025, we would have cursed the man and suspected drug overdose. It is akin to someone who says today, that he can get you a round- trip ticket to Mars for $10,000 in 2035 and asks you to pay an advance on the booking. But don’t take the man lightly. That man is Benu Majumdar.

Marx, Hegel, Lenin, Stalin, Chairman Mao, Amit Dutta Gupta and Benuda are seated together this very moment, at the same table, somewhere in the galaxy and he is giving them all a preview of the future of AI. Adieu, Comrade. Long live the Revolution.

(Subroto Bagchi is Chairman, Odisha Skill Development Authority. He was Chief Executive of Wipro's Global R&D and Co-Founder of Mindtree.)

Also Read:

In Memoriam: Remembering Satrajit Majumdar, Founder of Cyber Astro

Remembering Benuda: A 28-Year Journey with Satrajit Majumdar

Note: Cyber Astro is a subsidiary of CyberMedia