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and pitch to become the next IT minister, he didn’t laugh away the suggestion as usual.
Instead, he admitted, he now wanted to be Prime Minister, as only then could he drive
IT policy in such a way that India became a superpower. He was so serious, that I bit
back my disbelief: with Dewang you could never tell how far his evangelism/ambition
could take him.
One thing I’m sure of: wherever he is, he has no regrets and he will read this obit with
quiet pride. Here’s why I know. Within hours of the Gujarat quake, Dewang was on a
flight to rush assistance to his native land. At a village near Anjar, he told me, he came
across a 10 year-old injured boy huddled in the rubble. The boy suddenly reached out to
grab Dewang and said: “Aren’t you Dewang Mehta?” Dewang was taken aback.The child
sobbed: “I’ve seen you many times on TV and used to tell my parents that I want to be like
you when I grow up. But they are dead now.” Dewang hugged the boy and brought him
back to Delhi and later told me, that he will never forget those words. Dewang: you won.
How many of us, after all is dead and gone, can claim to be role-models?
n
(
Manjari Raman and Dewang Mehta's friendship goes back a long way
—
to when Dewang wore a journalistic hat and he and Manjari
were colleagues in a leading publishing house. Manjari witnessed the metamorphosis of Dewang close up: from a shy, retiring
person, to one of India's better known IT industry faces. Despite their busy lives, they remained friends and Manjari could always
count on Dewang for the "exclusive, inside story.")
The master lobbyist with Prime Minister Shri Atal Bihari Vajpayee
