The 100-plus-year-old Harcourt Butler Senior Secondary School in New Delhi, built in Englishstyle architecture, counts amongst its alumni politician, Bhupinder Singh Hooda; cricketers Mohinder and Surinder Amarnath; and countless engineers and army men. One amongst these ‘countless’ dropped out of a pre-medical course to join engineering, later founded and steered software-major Polaris, and today runs the IT product company Intellect Design Arena. A titan in his own right, his calling card reads Arun Jain.

Almost sixty years ago, as the closing bell of 1959 rang, Arun was born into a middleclass family in India’s capital city. His father worked as an officer in the Post and Telegraphs Department. Arun was the ninth among ten siblings. Lost in a large family, the advantage of being born late was that there were no expectations from him! The size of the family also meant they often were in debt.

Those were interesting times. In 1960, Mughal-e-Azam was released a good 15 years after work had first begun on the movie. A year later, the Indian Army threw the Portuguese out of Goa. India was, according to the theory of Rostow’s Stages of Economic Growth, positioned under ‘preconditions to take-off.’

It was not until 1967 that Arun Jain started attending school, and he began with class 3. Indifferent health had kept him home. After that, he changed five schools as his father was on transferable jobs! “To live amongst ten siblings was an experience in understanding human beings, and later as an entrepreneur in dealing with people.” The frequent chopping and changing of school helped him learn to deal with uncertainty.

In 1977, India voted with its feet and for the first time elected a non-Congress government.

That year, Arun Jain got into pre-medical. “Getting into medical was logical in a middleclass family where a brother had gone into IIT and so the younger one should become a doctor!” But six months later, the Delhi-lad realized that medicine would put him into a soup and had the wisdom to step out. It was a bold decision and would be reminiscent of similar unpopular decisions the later-day software architect would take.

“My attitude was to tinker with things. You can tinker with products and afford to make a mistake. You cannot do the same with human beings.” It was so that he stepped into Delhi College of Engineering to study Electrical and Electronics Engineering, the hot course of the time. When he graduated in 1983, he had two options: move to the US or work in India. What did he do? Was it either-or? Or did he do both, in addition to a third one!