Jul 2 Meeting · TII Book Project

Agenda 02 · The Archive

What We Hold

Thirty sessions with twenty-five people. Every transcript is parsed into passages, coded twice by independent AI models against a twelve-theme codebook, checked for agreement, quote-checked against the tape, and mined into working registers for the editors. The numbers below are computed from the corpus, fresh today.

Recorded sessions

Voices on tape

37.0

Hours of testimony

4,087

Passages coded

571

Usable quotes (ev4+)

Top-shelf (ev5)

516

Wit-register entries

519

Counter-evidence flags

Counter-evidence flags mark passages that cut against our own storyline. We count them because the book should survive its own cross-examination. The three planning calls are coded too (301 passages), so funder intent stays on the record.

The interview ledger

Voice	Sessions	Recorded	Duration	Passages	Quotes (ev4+)	Wit	Counter-ev.	Status
Charlie Simon · first MD	2	23 Nov 25 + 27 Jun 26	2h 06m	235	54	28	26	Pass 2 queued
Ravee Nerur	2	28–29 Nov 25	3h 09m	215	45	37	35	Coded ×2
Ram	2	24 Jan + 5 Feb 26	2h 44m	284	36	32	39	Coded ×2
Ramesh Dewangan	2	12 + 25 Feb 26	2h 21m	258	35	32	19	Coded ×2
Anirudh	2	3 + 10 Feb 26	2h 17m	171	25	28	17	Coded ×2
Giri Krishna	1	10 Apr 26	1h 36m	201	32	29	49	Coded ×2
Sattam Dasgupta	1	26 Mar 26	1h 32m	210	24	23	34	Coded ×2
Pradip Shah	1	24 Mar 26	1h 29m	120	23	21	18	Coded ×2
Mohan G	1	20 Jan 26	1h 34m	187	22	21	21	Coded ×2
Srini Rajam · first Indian MD	1	23 Dec 25	1h 50m	118	22	24	17	Coded ×2
Arun Garg · 756002	1	5 Feb 26	1h 19m	86	21	27	14	Coded ×2
Ashok Bareja	1	17 Dec 25	1h 22m	102	21	10	7	Coded ×2
Mahitha	1	17 Feb 26	1h 20m	160	21	30	27	Coded ×2
Uttiya	1	20 Feb 26	1h 04m	96	21	12	11	Coded ×2
Sharada Satrasala	1	15 Apr 26	1h 17m	129	20	7	19	Coded ×2
Pallab Chaterjee	1	13 Dec 25	51m	104	19	12	21	Coded ×2
Gans (Ganapati)	1	27 Jan 26	1h 22m	167	17	26	16	Coded ×2
Nagi	1	12 Jan 26	1h 20m	132	17	7	15	Coded ×2
Jaidev	1	28 Jan 26	1h 11m	159	16	22	14	Coded ×2
Sushil Gupta	1	1 Apr 26	1h 09m	144	16	27	22	Coded ×2
Gangadhar Burra	1	27 Mar 26	1h 01m	97	13	14	10	Coded ×2
Sanjive Agarwala	1	3 Apr 26	1h 02m	96	13	9	8	Coded ×2
Mahesh Mehendale · still at TI	1	7 Apr 26	1h 09m	137	10	9	12	Coded ×2
Ravishankar	1	16 Apr 26	1h 00m	88	10	10	10	Coded ×2
Soumitra De Sirkar	1	13 Apr 26	53m	90	10	9	6	Coded ×2

Click a column header to sort. Charlie's 27 June re-record replaced the audio lost after minute 40 of the first sitting: 38 usable quotes in 52 minutes, the densest session so far (coded in-house this week; the adversarial second pass runs with the next batch). "Coded ×2" means two frontier models coded independently, agreement was measured (mean κ 0.62 on the June run), and 438 priority disagreements were adjudicated by hand.

Recorded, but not in our archive yet

Voice	Recorded	Why it matters	Status
Group discussion · Geetha, Champaka, Logi + Praveen	30 Jan	Four voices in one sitting, including two women we count as missing. Wrong filename prefix kept it out of the folder.	GIRI UPLOADING
Praveen Prathivadi (1:1)	Before 17 Jun	Forty years at TI, retired last year. The Dallas side of the decision-making, and the infrastructure story. The group session was the fun; this one has the specifics.	GIRI UPLOADING
CN Kumar	~17 Jun	HR director in the nineties; later helped some 250 companies set up in Bangalore. Bridges TI to the GCC wave.	GIRI UPLOADING
Satish (facilities)	~26 Jun	Confirmed on the call: recorded. The last founding department gets its voice, and his session already surprised us once (Hegde visited during construction).	GIRI UPLOADING
Charlie Simon · session 3	~30 Jun	A third sitting, two days before this meeting. Downloaded manually; transcription and coding queue behind the uploads.	TO TRANSCRIBE

Agreed on the call: Giri moves every missing session (raw transcript and summary, both; the pipeline uses both) into the shared folder and pings Nikhil. The archive then gets reconciled against Sharada's pinned list from 17 June, which covers everything except Satish. One open question from that reconciliation: the list may show a Mohan Rao session we do not hold; verify before celebrating or mourning.

What's missing

Most-mentioned · 62 mentions · verify first

Mohan Rao ("Monroe")

Plot twist from the call: Sharada's master list suggests a Mohan Rao session may already exist outside our folder. Reconcile the pinned list against the archive before anything else. If it does not exist, he stays priority one.

Dallas voices · after the story pass

Watson · Roseboom · Belay

Mike Watson (53 mentions, the shutdown ultimatum), Robert Roseboom (50), Jeff Belay (28). Per the call: we have enough interviews for now; the story work runs first, and any further sessions are targeted at specific gaps it exposes. A Ravee Nerur follow-up, anecdote by anecdote, is the likeliest first ask.

The thin chapter · ✓ decided 2 Jul

Ch 8: What It Cost · 40 passages

Decided: targeted follow-up questions to narrators already on tape first ("tell us everything about that missed birth"), and if the chapter stays thin, it reshapes into a shorter interlude rather than getting padded. Spouses and children stay off the plan for now.

Government side

The state's own memory

N. Vittal has passed away. Praveen has written to J.A. Chowdhury on LinkedIn; CN offered B.V. Naidu (ex-STPI, likely later era). If none land, we commission a researcher to reconstruct it from records.

The building

Valliappa / Sona Towers

The landlords of the founding site. Praveen has sent a note and is pursuing; Charlie is checking his contacts. C. Valliappa's own PDF memoir has inauguration photos (Mohan Rao, Ambassador John Gunther Dean, Hegde), which means he is sitting on a fuller album.

Women's voices · ✓ agreed 2 Jul

A women's round-table

The one definite new session: bring the women of early TII together for a group conversation on how it actually was, gender dynamics included. Geetha and Champaka are on the 30 Jan group tape, but group sessions run shallow; this one gets designed properly. Sharada's tech-ladder story shows how much sits under it.

Outside the fishbowl

Contemporary voices, via Commission 3

The GCC-legacy piece is now planned as investigative journalism: a commissioned writer finds and interviews the companies that used TII as a template. Leads from this group make it faster; an early Intel Bangalore hand would still be gold.

Agenda 02b · Method

How We Process What You Give Us

Every step is scripted and logged, and can be re-run from the raw files. Nothing depends on anyone's memory of what was done.

Step 1

Parse

Grain transcript to speaker-turn passages with timestamps. 33 documents, 4,087 passages, reproducible from the raw files.

Step 2

Code, twice

Two frontier AI models from different labs code every passage: themes, chapters, people and places, humour, editorial value, counter-evidence. Neither sees the other's work. Every call is logged.

Step 3

Measure & adjudicate

Agreement is measured per theme (Cohen's κ). 438 priority disagreements were settled one by one. Where the coders disagree, a person decides.

Step 4

Check the quotes

Every edited quote traces to the tape. Fabrication check on the flagged set: 17 of 17 clean. Every quoted speaker signs off before print.

Step 5

Fix the names

Speech-to-text mangles Indian names ("Vittal" becomes "Mr. Whittle"). A merge-map has repaired 177 garbled mentions; the unsolved ones are in your homework sheet.

Step 6

Build registers

The coded corpus becomes working documents: a chapter-aligned quote bank, a 516-moment wit register, a counter-evidence ledger, and watch-lists for the editors.

On privacy: transcripts stay on our machines and off the public internet. Charlie's re-record was coded entirely locally. Interviewees keep redaction rights, and narrator review is a scheduled production step.

Agenda 04 · The Story

The Spine

In one sentence: a handful of young engineers, given a chance nobody thought would work, proved India could do frontier work, and set off everything that followed. A prologue, eleven chapters, an epilogue. Each chapter earns the next.

"The satellite equipment arrived and they didn't find transport, so they brought it on a bullock cart to the premises. Once it was set up, we started the first export, and that was the exciting day. Not even the inauguration. It was the installation of the satellite, and the first export."

Mahitha · corroborated by a dozen witnesses · the opening image

Prologue

The Dish Arrives

The future lands in a country with no category for it. Graphic-novel treatment; art tests exist. And per Sharada: the dish never left. It still sits on the Sona Towers rooftop, owned by DOT (to verify, and to photograph today).

12 witnesses · 63 passages tagged

Ch 1

A Thing the Rules Could Not See

Forty approvals, a bonded warehouse, a man in a small room auditing printouts of zeros and ones. Charlie arrives ex-military via Dallas, two of three finalist MDs having fled, and Windsor Manor becomes TI's first hiring room. Nuance from the call: phone links existed before the dish; the dish ended the where-is-the-break hunts and put the operation under the state's gaze. Two eras of the state: learning, then reforming.

"We would buy the satellite dish, install it, pay for it all, and turn it over to VSNL." · Charlie Simon

13 witnesses · 127 passages

Ch 2

The Bet

Mark Shepherd meets Rajiv Gandhi. Managers get a choice: one engineer in Dallas or four in Bangalore. New from Charlie: two of the three finalist MDs withdrew after seeing India.

24 witnesses · 203 passages

Ch 3

The First Batch

Who says yes to a company they've never heard of, via the smallest ad in the Hindustan Times. Anirudh's sister still has the clipping.

25 witnesses · 327 passages

Ch 4

Training at the Frontier

Bedford and Dallas turn graduates into engineers TI will trust.

"After the first six months, they knew the people had the intelligence. To create something is different than being book smart." · Charlie Simon

24 witnesses · 161 passages

Ch 5

The Culture Machine

Open doors, 360 feedback before India had words for it, unlimited chapatis. And its shadow: "tissue rejection", Sharada's term for how fast the culture shed people who did not fit. The heart of the book, and the corpus's largest chapter by far.

25 witnesses · 850 passages

Ch 6

Tiny Incomes, Large Ambitions

TII paid third quartile on purpose and trained like an academy, so people left four ways: ambition, salary, cultural misfit, and Dallas closing whole businesses under them (software ~40, memory ~150, wireless 300 to 400, per Giri; verify on tape). Intel stood up a thousand-person office almost overnight while TII capped every manager at eight reports. The tension chapter.

23 witnesses · 214 passages

Ch 7

The Work Becomes Real

First export. The seconds-versus-milliseconds bug. A junior engineer briefs the TI board.

"Now I know what DAD does." · a board member, via Anirudh

25 witnesses · 278 passages

Ch 8

What It Cost

Absence, missed births, sleeping under tables. Our thinnest chapter; see the asks.

17 witnesses · 40 passages

Ch 9

The Fishbowl, the First GCC

TI proves the model and everyone comes to look. This is the chapter the 17 June call sharpened: TI India was a product-development centre, not an IT services shop, and that distinction organises the whole ending.

"Weekly I'd have some company wanting to meet with me and understand our experiences." · Charlie Simon

25 witnesses · 269 passages

Ch 10

Bangalore Learns Its Future

The city as a character. Photo-led, which is why the photo archive matters tonight.

23 witnesses · 124 passages

Ch 11

The Return of Hardware

Roughly 2,100 GCCs and 2.36 million jobs later, the semiconductor bet is live again. Every present-day figure carries a source and a date.

16 witnesses · 47 passages

Epilogue

756002

Agreed on the call: the interviewers write it. Giri, Sharada, Praveen and Gangadhar co-author the epilogue after thirty-eight hours behind the microphone and counting, saying in their own words why this story matters now. "Bangalore was not inevitable" opens or closes the book; we will know which when we hear it.

6 witnesses · 28 passages

"The theme is more like: here's a love story set up in the '80s. A bunch of young guys who made it all happen, joining TI India. They figured it out, and they made it all happen."

Arun Garg · planning call, 17 June · the steer we're building to

The engine

Why this story matters now

In 1985 the world believed India could do cheap work. The first batch proved it could do frontier work. Forty years on, AI makes cheap the machine's job, and the question returns. What made TI India work was engineers making hard things work under hard constraints. The book ends on the semiconductor bet because that is where the logic points.

The discipline

The flaws stay in

The culture pushed out people who didn't fit. It couldn't hold its best. And Dallas made the choices, so TI India's fate was never fully its own. 519 counter-evidence flags keep every chapter honest.

The rule

The joke reveals the system

A coffee machine on trial in Delhi says more about the Licence Raj than a policy summary can. Humour is structural in this book. See the register below.

Agenda 04b · 516 moments and counting

The Wit Register: Six Exhibits

Every funny moment in the corpus is tagged with why it works and what it shows. Six samples, three of them from Charlie's re-record on Saturday.

"He had to sit in that little bitty room and see all those reams of paper with zeros and ones on it, and he had no clue what he was looking for. So I just tried to keep him happy."

Charlie Simon · 27 Jun · the DOE monitor

Why it worksA security audit of the unreadable, and instead of contempt, pity. The absurdity belongs to the system; the man inside it keeps his dignity. That is the book's whole argument about the state, in one beat.

"I think the caterers only wanted to give two chapatis to each individual, and I had to negotiate paying them more so that we could have unlimited chapatis."

Charlie Simon · 27 Jun · then: "You got to keep the people happy if you want them to produce."

Why it worksThe man who fought forty approvals is renegotiating a chapati ration. Satellite clearance and lunch diplomacy were the same job. His own punchline is deadpan management theory, which tells you the kindness was policy.

"We allowed people in India to put titles on their business cards that weren't approved in the US. There were some of the games we played."

Charlie Simon · 27 Jun · HR and the title economy

Why it worksA confession delivered as a shrug. The company that outlasted the Licence Raj is defeated by its own HR department, so India routes around Dallas the way it routed around Delhi. Jugaad, it turns out, works on any bureaucracy.

"Every hour he goes out for fifteen minutes, because he's getting bored. Government can't figure out what exactly we are talking about. We are talking VLSI."

Ramesh Dewangan · the chain-smoking babu

Why it worksThe same room as Charlie's monitor, seen from the engineer's desk. The precision ("every hour, fifteen minutes") turns complaint into comedy. Two witnesses, one truth: the watcher and the watched were both stuck in the form.

"Show me where your shipping dock is." "According to the satellite [dish], that's the shipping dock."

Pallab Chaterjee · the excise officer's category problem

Why it worksThe paperwork demands a loading bay for software, so the engineers point at the sky. Nobody is mocked; the form itself is the punchline. Chapter one in two lines of dialogue, print-ready as it stands.

"They would always stall us. And we'd wait for someone like Roger Cornish to come from the UK, take him along to meet the government official, and things would get done so much faster."

Praveen Prathivadi · 27 Jun · the pattern Pallab called "send a white guy"

Why it worksA rueful laugh with a bruise under it, told by the people it disadvantaged, with the pattern still holding decades later. Two independent witnesses make it a finding. The book should let it be funny and let it sting.

Agenda 08 · Homework, as assigned on the call

Who Owes What

The information sheet becomes a Google Sheet in the shared "TI Oral History" Drive (Nikhil sets it up); everything below lands there too.

01 · The information sheet · all funders

Employee numbers, batches, departments, dates, post-TI paths for all 25 voices, plus 15 identity puzzles the tapes can't settle (who is "Bobby"? which Mohan is which?). Back by 16 July. A blank is better than a guess. Giri's suggestion folds in: start listing the startups ex-TIIers founded or seeded, for the end-of-book journeys spread.

02 · Recordings & artefacts · Giri, Sharada

Giri: move the five missing sessions into the shared folder (group discussion, Praveen 1:1, CN Kumar, Satish, Charlie's third sitting), raw transcripts plus summaries, then ping Nikhil; ask Santosh for Charlie's 25th-anniversary packet, and use that opener for board minutes from the first years; reach Narayan for Bangalore pictures. Sharada: two hours with the "TI 25th anniversary" email folder, attachments to the Drive.

03 · Decided on the call ✓

(a) Interviews: enough for now; story work exposes the gaps, follow-ups are targeted. The women's round-table is the one definite addition. (b) Ch 8: targeted asks to existing narrators, else reshape as an interlude. (c) Open call blessed; its commercial terms stay private. (d) 48-hour turnaround stands through August.

04 · Amplify · everyone

When the call for submissions goes live, push it into every TI-alumni group you're in. The first 300 employees are the audience; you are the distribution. Dig out your own drawers too: employee cards, wooden plaques, notebooks. Giri has his red and blue cards; Sharada has a drawer full.

The information sheet lives as a Google Sheet in the shared TI Oral History Drive (moved off this site 28 Jul). The open call ↓

Agenda 05 · Staffing

The Team: Editorial Goes In-House

The outside editor we pursued could not commit by the end-June deadline we set on the 17th, so LURU is taking the book on with its own bench. The people below already know the material.

Nikhil Ravichandar

Project lead · Story editor

Stakeholder and project management, and the story, edited with Drishti. Your single thread for decisions.

Drishti Rakhra

Editor

Co-edits the story with Nikhil; owns manuscript coherence across written, commissioned and visual chapters.

Gaurav Krishna

Story & visual direction

Filmmaker and scriptwriter; develops the storyline and directs the book's visual language with the design team.

Raghav Krishna

Design lead

Runs design with Aditya: the engineer's-notebook system, chapter treatments, the graphic-novel interludes.

Aditya Bharadwaj

Design

Layout, production design, and the print pipeline through the September freeze.

Rashmi Kamath

Fact-check

Every name, date, number and claim verified against tape and record, chapter by chapter.

Yamuna Kali

Proofreading

Final-pass language, consistency and print-readiness in September.

Commissioned writers ×3

Guest chapters

Bangalore-1985, the GCC nation, the political backdrop. Commercial terms stay private; IP stays with the funders.

Commissioned illustrators

Graphic interludes

The bullock-cart prologue and comic inserts, in the coloured-pencil and bold-ink styles already tested.

Ways of working

Cadence

Biweekly sprint reviews

Same rhythm as now. Work in progress on the table every time, and no surprises in either direction.

Decisions

One thread, 48 hours

Decisions flow through Nikhil and the TII group. Items flagged "decision needed" get a 48-hour turnaround through August. The timeline depends on this.

Sign-off

Every quote to its speaker

Anyone quoted sees their quote and its context before print, per the agreement. Storyline reviews with the funder group at editorial milestones.

Independence

Honest by design

An independent project, not sponsored by TI. The tensions and near-failures stay in the book. That is what makes the triumphs credible.

Agenda 07 · Guest voices

Three Commissions

Chapters we commission to outside writers under work-for-hire, with our codebook and archive behind them, edited for unity by Nikhil and Drishti.

Commission 1 · feeds Prologue + Ch 10

Bangalore, 1985

The city before the boom: public-sector town, pensioners' paradise, Millers Road and Majestic. A writer with a Bangalore ear; photo-led.

Commission 2 · feeds Ch 1 + Ch 2

The Political Manoeuvring

Sharpened on the call: Rajiv Gandhi's push and Hegde's Karnataka, yes, but also young Chandrababu Naidu's play to pull TI to Andhra, the consultants Charlie leaned on, the SEZ lineage that became Electronics City, and the NRN-era playbook for interfacing with government, transfer pricing included. Investigative researcher-writer; primary documents where they exist. Absorbs the government-side gap if no official can be found. Also on tape now, via Satish: Hegde visited during construction, which cuts against the received "government stayed distant" story.

Commission 3 · feeds Ch 9 + Ch 11

The GCC Nation, Investigated

From one office above a textile showroom to roughly 2,100 capability centres. Upgraded on the call from a reported essay to investigative journalism: find the companies that studied TII as a template and interview them. Leads from the funder group make this piece; the fishbowl chapter is only as good as the fish who visited.

On the reading shelf: "Against All Odds: The Story of IT in India" (via ithihasa.com), flagged by Praveen on the 17th; it references TI throughout. Format direction from the call: 100 to 150 pages (Arun: 100 reads in one sitting, and this should live on a coffee table), a strong lean to hardbound with mixed paper stocks, dimensions possibly keyed to the engineer's notebook. Raghav brings a mood board with two or three format options to the next call, and one in-person session gets everyone holding reference books before we commit.

Agenda 06 · The push

Sixty Days to Editorial Lock

Print in October means design freezes 30 September, which means the manuscript locks 31 August. Sixty days from tonight. It works if decisions come fast and the asks come back on time.

✓ 2 Jul

Alignment, done

Decisions (a) to (d) taken, homework assigned, open call blessed, M1 reconciled in full, BLF placeholder email cleared to go out.

By 16 Jul

Inputs land

Information sheet (now a Google Sheet) returned. Five pending sessions in the folder and reconciled against Sharada's pinned list. Artefact actions moving: Santosh, Narayan, the email folder. Women's round-table designed. Commissions briefed and signed. Mood board at the next call.

Jul → Aug

Drafting

Anchor chapters drafted in-house; commissions in flight; the open call harvesting photos; fact-check running behind the drafts; quote sign-offs begin.

31 Aug

Editorial lock

Full manuscript assembled. Every chapter drafted, every quote signed off or substituted.

Sep

Design & verification

Design system and graphic interludes in production; proofreading; fact-check pass two on final layouts.

30 Sep

Design freeze

Print-ready files. After this date, changes put the production window at risk.

Oct

Printer trials, paper, binding. The physical book gets made.

11–13 Dec

Bangalore Literature Festival

Launch, forty years and two months after the first export left Sona Towers. Panel pitch email goes to the BLF team this week.

Last Time

The Agenda

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