“There was nobody to run the business... ...and so I had to leave Stanford without completing my degree”

Diversifying the family business his father founded away from cooking oil and soap, Premji entered the information technology sector in 1982. Today, Wipro is an IT powerhouse, India’s third-largest software company

- M.G. ARUN

AZIM PREMJI, 75

Born in Mumbai in 1945 into a Gujarati Muslim family, Azim Hashim Premji had, in his younger years, aspired to a career in public service. The son of businessman Muhammed Hashim Premji, his future seemed set—a degree from a foreign university and, to start with, a cushy job at either the United Nations or the World Bank. However, destiny had something else in store. Mid-way into his engineering degree at California’s Stanford University, Premji received terrible news: his father, only 51, had suffered a heart attack and had passed away. This led to him taking charge of his father’s business—Western India Vegetable Products, founded the year Azim was born, which manufactured a brand of cooking oil named Sunflower Vanaspati and a laundry soap called 787, a by-product of the oil manufacture—ending his dreams of a career in public service. “My mother was completely dedicated to running the charitable orthopaedic hospital for children that she had set up at Haji Ali in Bombay,” he tells India today. “So there was nobody to run the business and I had to leave Stanford without completing my degree.”