S.M. Krishna, the flamboyant former Chief Minister of Karnataka credited with sowing the seeds of the tech boom, recalls the initial years when Bengaluru was evolving from a ‘pensioners’ paradise’ into the ‘Silicon Valley of India’.
In an interview with The Hindu, the 91-year-old talks about those initial years of tech growth that involved a lot of challenges as getting everyone concerned to work together was a tough proposition, especially when no one, at that point, could foresee that Karnataka would once emerge as the tech flag-bearer for the entire county and shine in the global tech arena.
In an exclusive conversation, he also spoke about his passion for reading The Hindu, a ‘Madras newspaper’ his father bought daily to his village home in Somanahalli, how he was glued to its sports pages with elaborate coverage of tennis, and how he became a big fan of tennis stars such as Frank Sedgman, Roy Emerson, Dick Savitt (Richard Savitt) and others, way back in early and mid-1940s.
