15
O N E
Friday, April 13, 2001 FINANCIAL EXPRESS
Goodbye, Dewang
H
e was the man an astonishingly large number of people loved to mock.They mimicked
his lisp, gossiped about his hair, carped that his website
was
pretentious, sniggered at his media appearances, scoffed at his tall stories—but boy, did
this nobody from Gujarat cock a snook at them by becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy.
He picked himself up from the bootstraps—no godfather, no father, no mother, no
siblings, in fact his biggest regret in life was that he had no family left in this world at
all
—
and singly and solely by sheer dint and perseverance rose to be bigger, better and
bolder than all his detractors put together. From a wannabe, eventually, he became the one
they wanted to be with. Dewang, you won.
You won by becoming one of India’s most recognised faces
—
I bet next only to the latest
Bollywood heart-throb—within the country as well as abroad, and shrugging off the slings
and arrows of disbelievers.
Dewang was a deeply sensitive person, constantly seeking reassurance that his personal
dignity was intact. I can never forget that night twelve years ago, when Dewang was still a
journalist—and NASSCOM was not even a twinkle in his eyes.
He was assistant editor to my lowly correspondent status and we were working together
on a cover story on the Indian IT industry. That night, a sudden scrap erupted between
Dewang and another senior colleague
—
in itself a rarity, because I have never, ever since
heard Dewang raise his voice. The latter passed a wholly insulting comment in the heat
of the moment
—
instead of replying in kind, Dewang walked away, but in the privacy of
my cabin, sobbed like a child at the hurt that had been inflicted on him.The next day he
resigned and swore his journalism days were over.
Some months later he invited me to his new office. It was a dingy, small poky little half-
room, which Dewang had tried to cheer up with a mug filled with pens, a giraffe cocktail
shaker with a soft koala bear clinging to it, and neatly sharpened pencils. “I have a vision,” I
remember him saying, “We have set up this association called NASSCOM for the software
manjari raman
