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Ripped from the headlines
New mysteries are lifting their plots out of the newspapers. And that's not a bad thing.
By Jacqueline Carey
[12/03/99]

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"How Good Is David Mamet, Anyway?" by John Heilpern
A passionate critic tosses a few firebombs at the New York theater.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[12/03/99]

Ivory Tower
Sexual pedagogy
All the rules in the world against romancing students can't explain away the elusive emotions of this vocational hazard.
By David Alford
[12/03/99]

A good man is hard to write
Hemingway-tough or Fitzgerald-sensitive? Today's novelists scramble for a masculinity that doesn't seem fake.
By Jonathan Miles
[12/02/99]

Reviews
"The Walking Tour" by Kathryn Davis
The pastoral collides with cyberspace in a pulse-quickening novel that's totally confusing, but worth the trip.
By Virginia Heffernan
[12/02/99]

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He only needed to score 50 out of 100 points to guarantee his admission. But suddenly this seemingly lax criterion appeared all but impossible. His eyes sifted through a litany of seemingly impregnable questions -- about Bernoulli's principle, Doppler's effect, Lorentz's forces, ionic equilibria and combinatronics -- things that would never appear on an SAT in a million years. Nothing in his life had prepared him for this.

"It was extremely stressful. You just looked at the thing and not a single question made sense to me. I thought, 'Boy, I'm going to flunk this thing,'" recalls Harinarayan.

But like every other fear-wracked student taking the exam across India, Venky knew his future rested on this grueling 3-part mental torture course. He knew he had to beat out tens of thousands of other eager high school students -- a regiment of valedictorians, salutatorians and district math champions in a country of nearly 1 billion souls. And he knew this examination was his best chance to escape India -- in all its poverty and stratified caste system.

Despite feeling at a complete loss, he managed to navigate his way through the arcana. And six hours later, he had nailed a spot in arguably the most competitive, influential undergraduate school in the world, the Indian Institute of Technology. Not only did Venky pass the exam, he placed an astounding 40th in the country. With this ranking, he got a coveted spot as a computer science major at the IIT campus in Madras.

Flash forward to the summer of 1998 when Amazon.com purchased an e-commerce software company named Junglee for $180 million. That day, Venky Harinarayan, along with four other Junglee co-founders (also IIT graduates), became an overnight multi-millionaire.

The trajectory of Harinarayan's career has certainly been dramatic, but not exactly unheard of. Like so many expatriate Indians educated at IIT, Harinarayan has ridden his sheepskin to high-tech fame and fortune. In fact, per capita, IIT has probably produced more millionaires than any other undergraduate institution. A glimpse at how Harinarayan's classmates have fared shows just what his diploma means in the high-tech world.

"Out of 25 people (in the computer science major), I think 13 of them are in Microsoft right now. Four of them went in 1988 when Microsoft came to IIT to recruit. Three of them are at Qualcomm [a telecommunications firm whose stock has risen 1200 percent this year alone]," says Harinarayan, currently an executive at Amazon.com. He then adds modestly, "I have done reasonably well."

Next page | Has Nehru's brain child created Indian brain drain?