Bangalore, March, 2019: City-based CMR Institute of Technology (CMRIT) inaugurated its annual national-level inter-collegiate Cultural, Technical & Management fest ‘CMR Cultura’19’ at their campus today. Mr. Abhijit Bose, CEO, WhatsApp India was the Chief Guest of the inaugural function.

Dr. Sanjay Jain, Principal, CMRIT, Dr B. Narasimha Murthy, Vice Principal CMRIT, Dr. M S Shivakumar, Vice Chancellor, CMR University, Dr. Praveen R, Registrar, CMR University and Mr. K.C. Jagannath Reddy, Secretary, CMR Jnanadhara Trust were also present on the occasion.

Speaking at the event, Abhijit Bose said, “Talking about the history of technology, what many of us may not even know is we are sitting in a window of immense potential. In the next few years, despite whatever you have seen in the previous 10 years as this city and country has grown, will be beyond anybody’s imagination. We are entering probably one of the greatest opportunities to be a business leader, an engineer, somebody coming into the workforce, not just in India but anywhere in the world. The next WhatsApp, the next Ezetap, the next Flipkart will not be coming from the US, but from India and I sincerely believe that. My wife and I left California 14 years ago because we genuinely believe that the next 100 years will be Asian and Indian-centric; it’s been 14 years I thought I was going to be back in San Francisco 10 years ago but I am still here. I envy and congratulate everybody here for the opportunities that are there in front of us. It’s once in a lifetime. These windows really happen once in a generation, whether it is the invention of the Microprocessor, massive computing, personal computers, software, and internet.”

He further added, “Applications and integration over the mobile internet is the next wave. A hockey stick curve is whatever a company aspires for-a little bit of investment and hyper growth. Ezetap and most Indian companies never go through this-we go up, go down and sideways. Hopefully, we go up in the right. When you go through hyper growth (all of us wish for), actually what happens is you miss out on the important lessons of toughness. A lot of companies when they face adversities while scaling don’t know how to react. Whether you are a person or a company, when you face adversity time after time and you pick yourself back up, move forward, it builds a certain quality that is impossible to take away from you. It builds that DNA in your company and it allows you to survive and that becomes a competitive advantage. A lot of times we get caught up in vanity metrics-how much money have we raised, how many people do we have, what do our top line numbers look like. Remember that the greatest companies actually deliver value and they don’t focus on all the good stuff. One of the things we did incessantly was focus on the negatives and ask why.”