Hardware to humanware

Dasgupta tells Shivani Shinde why she believes there should be a PC in every child’s hand, and why India is tougher on women than the US

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It’s one of those drenched Mumbai monsoon days that can turn even the most carefully planned diaries to mush. Our lunch at Vetro, the Italian restaurant at The Oberoi, Nariman Point, Mumbai, has already been rained off once. Today, the skies are still heavy, but Ipsita Dasgupta arrives early, claiming a corner table before I manage to navigate the traffic.

Her résumé reads like a roll call of global tech royalty — Amazon, Apple, IBM, Cisco, GE — and now the top job at HP India. What's striking is the absence of battle scars so many women in corporate India recount. Dasgupta isn’t claiming the playing field is even. “India is tougher on women than the US, or even China, where the factories are full of women,” she concedes, but she wears her success without complaint.

“[grew up in the US and a handful of other countries, but my roots have always been in Calcutta (now Kolkata). Both my parents are from there,” she says. “Every summer and winter, we'd come back when the whole family — brothers and sisters scattered across the world — would meet.” Though raised abroad, she never felt di: connected from India. “Ours was a quintessentially Bengali household, deeply engaged with politics, culture, and everything happening back home. Yet, when I finally moved to India as an adult, I real-ised how little I knew about living here without the cushion of extended family.”

We order vegetarian food. Dasgupta chooses Insalata di Barbabietola Arrostita — a beetroot salad with coconut yogurt, rhubarb and glazed figs. I go for Risotto alle Melanzane.