If not already obvious, I hail from India. I was born and raised in the suburbs of Calcutta, a major port city on the east coast of India.

I did most of my schooling in Calcutta. After high school, I attended Birla Institute of Technology (BIT) and earned my bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering. My specific area of interest was automobile engineering and manufacturing. My first job was that of a supervisor in a Cold Rolling Mill in one of southeast Asia's largest supplier of tinplates - TCIL, Jamshedpur. It was hear that I got my first feel of serious computer application: designed a flange on an AutoCAD system and got a feel for COBOL programming language. After a couple of months, I got this opportunity to work for one of the largest UNIX solution vendors in the country (ref. resume) in their Sales and Marketing department - Tata Elxsi. From that point onwards, I moved into the IT sector for good. For the next five years, I interacted with a wide cross-section of Indian industry. It helped me build a deeper understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of IT products and services being offered to customers. More importantly, the experience helped me tremendously in understanding the customer's viewpoint and perception of IT products and services.

After working five years in India, I decided to go back to school - in USA. I got my MBA degree from San Francisco State University (SFSU). My major was Information Systems. I specifically focused on building my expertise in the design, development, deployment of enterprise class Web based applications and product development (ref. resume). During my MBA program, I met some fabulous people - mentors, friends and colleagues I worked with, professors, advisors - who made these last few years the best and the most fruitful of my life.

Currently, I am based in Santa Clara, California. I live with my wonderful kid brother (well, guess he is toooo BIG to be called a kid anymore !), my lovely wife, and my beautiful baby boy who came into our lives on 5th February this year (2004).