Venkat Bala

When Balakrishnan (aka ‘Bala’) stood atop a jeep with a topi on his head and a broomstick in his hand, in a made-for-television moment, he fired the imagination of an entire nation. A dollar millionaire from corporate India joining the biggest startup experiment in politics was vintage stuff. The AAP movement planned to wipe the daag of corruption from the country’s face. Earlier, Bala’s former boss, Nandan Nilekani, did something nearly similar: give up his job as CEO of Infosys, head the government’s path-breaking Unique Identification Authority (Aadhar), and then jump into electoral politics. A year after Bala’s entry, newspaper headlines screamed Wall to a wall, Kejriwal as the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) swept Delhi Union Territory, 67-3.

But we are getting way ahead of the story. To get the full picture, we traveled down to India’s startup capital, Bengaluru, and met the man himself.

Bala opened up instantly. “The first defining moment of my life was the decision to do chartered accountancy,” he said. The son of a DMK corporator from Vellore, Balakrishnan longed to become a computer science engineer and work in the US. However, life had other plans. Fifteen days before his school board examinations, tragedy struck at home. His father passed away at the ridiculously young age of 54, and the trauma haunted the lad to the point that it affected his academic performance. He did not get the marks needed to make the cut into engineering. The year was 1982, and there weren’t as many engineering colleges in India. You had five IITs, eight RECs, and a few other institutions of repute. The probability of getting in with his score was zilch.

Bala recalls the Sunday evening when he sat at Adayar’s Gandhi Mandapam, upset over his academic performance and fearing a bleak future. It was then that his brother-in-law, Arunachalam, a CA, suggested he pursue a career in Accounting. For good measure, he added, “If you do that, you can be on your own.” The idea appealed to Bala. But ahead of it, he needed to do graduation. The choice was between B.Com, the prima donna course, and BSc (Mathematics), the subject he loved. In one sense, it was a Hobson’s choice.

Much like today, it was difficult to get admission into a good college to study B.Com. And, it was next to impossible if you came from the mathematics, physics, and chemistry background. “I chose to study B.Sc. and comforted myself that, in a way, mathematics was connected to accounting.”

Life in A M Jain College college was fun. The hostel stay was his first away-from-home experience. Bala made great friends; he hardly attended classes (not the model student!) borrowed notes from classmates and did lots of self-study.

“Because of my love for mathematics, it was easy to self learn. We came from a middle-class background. Apart from paying the hostel fees, I used to get Rs.20 every month as pocket money. I hardly spent, and saved a greater part of it. The only household income was from my sister who worked in CMC, Vellore. There was a hostel administrator who knew astrology. He once saw my hand and told, ‘You are destined to be wealthy and famous.’ It looked laughable at that time, but in hindsight it was prophetic.