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Azim Premji Foundation. Azim Premji University. Azim Hashim Premji: The most generous Indian. Wealth must have a definitive social purpose: Azim Premji. Azim Premji at Davos. Leave this field empty. Recommended Reading. About Us. Follow Us. Featured Post. An insight into the incredible career journey of Shaktikanta Das. An inspiring story of Sahil Barua, starting with a spark to establish a business of his own.
In , he signed The Giving Pledge to give away half his wealth. He is interviewed by Anil Dharker, journalist and former editor. We were there for the week-end, starting with a moonlit party on Friday night.
He joined us and, surprise, surprise, was very much like us. What did we subconsciously expect, a crown and cloak? Here, instead, we talked about the sea, the lack of pollution, which let us actually see stars at night, the freshness in the air. The usual sea-side chatter.
At some point, talk turned to the trip back to Bombay. I needed to get back on Sunday. It turned out that Premji wanted to get back on Sunday too.
The driver will pick it up from the jetty. A third point hit me rather forcefully when I saw the car I was to drive. A Mercedes S series? A BMW 7? None of the above: it was a Maruti Even I had a Maruti Esteem! On the way I asked whether he still travelled economy on domestic flights, as one had heard. But then, Azim Premji is not like any other rich person either. A by-product of the oil manufacture was the laundry soap Name chosen, but I am speculating, to be as close to the revered number ?
The canny business sense works this way— if the Big Boss travels economy, how can anyone else in the company do anything different? Just imagine the kind of money Wipro must save every year by this one simple idea!
The Premji family was comfortably off, but not rich. One account tells us that Jinnah invited Premji senior to Pakistan at the time of Partition, but Premji said no. But what sets him entirely apart is his wish to give. So big that his announcement that he would give away half his wealth was greeted by a collective intake of breath from Indian industrialists and businessmen. The announcement was made without any fuss: fuss, you think, is not in the Premji nature.
The campus is spacious and green, and the buildings are unfussy that word again! They are not, you can clearly see, about to win any architectural prizes. But perhaps in their straightforward functionality, they are making the statement: we do not travel business class. When Azim Premji arrives, he apologises for being five minutes late. Premji obviously likes to get his non-work work out of the way first thing.
He has a shock of white hair, he is tall and fit, and speaks unhurriedly. At no time do I get the feeling that I am encroaching on his time. In speech, he uses the first person plural pronoun to refer to himself rather than the first person singular. What surprises me later when I listen to the transcript of our conversation is how open he has been about the state of the nation, the feeling of minorities, or his opinion of a few fellow industrialists. The onus is on me. I feel trusted, I feel responsible.
I was only 21 when I was called back from Stanford in August to run Wipro. I did go back for one summer school, but I still had about eight or ten units left, which I finally convinced them to let me do by correspondence twenty years later.
Electrical engineering came closest to IT, but there was no specialised course in Information Technology.
When you came back from the US, did you first concentrate on building up on what your father had started? We were primarily in commodities, in Vanaspati, which we sold to the wholesale market. We diversified into selling to retail with a brand and starting a distribution network.
Then we went into toilet soap. We did a sensible thing in our diversification: we invested a lot in manufacturing plant machinery, which made it difficult to exit. Our first product launch was a failure, but because of our investment, we had to do a second launch of Santoor, which became a major success.
We expanded that to toiletries. There was a lot of latitude in course selection. I took a lot of courses in liberal arts, in the history of western civilisation, in the English language. I took a course in Shakespeare, an advanced course! It was very mind-opening. I also played a great deal of tennis there and I joined, not a fraternity, but an Eating Club.
An Eating Club is where you just eat together, instead of eating in the cafeteria. I made good friends there, and the club organised a lot of programmes. Hobbies: No Hobbies Revealed Yet. Not Revealed Address Yet. Under Graduate. School: SchoolSt. Mary School Mumbai, India. Azim Premji Height In Feet:. Body Measurements:. Body Type:. Skin Tone: Very Fair. Hair Color: Dark Brown. Eye Color: Black.
Salary: Not Known Approx.
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