Microsoft alumnus promotes Vedic Mathematics

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May 13, 2007

 

Slipstream

 

A Microsoft Alumnus Shares His Good Fortune

 

By JASON PONTIN

NEW DELHI

 

TARUN ANAND, the co-founder and chief executive of the Perfect

Future, a start-up near Delhi, made his fortune in the United States,

but returned to India to become an entrepreneur. He wants to use Web

and mobile telephone technology to reform, or at least begin to

improve, the uneven condition of education in his homeland.

 

I met Mr. Anand on a recent trip to India, where he introduced me to

his company. Wearing a chartreuse cotton kurta, the traditional

knee-length shirt of northern India, he arrived at my hotel and drove

me through the squawking chaos of Delhi’s industrial suburbs.

 

Mr. Anand, who is 34, grew up in Delhi, where his father taught

political science at the University of Delhi (his mother was a

chemistry teacher at a local school). He was always a tinkerer and

engineer. “At the age of 10, I built a film projector and watched

strips of Indian cinema projected against a white wall,” he said.

“Around the age of 14 I got hooked on computers and started

programming.”

 

He learned computer science at the Indian Institute of Technology in

Kanpur and at the University of Texas, Austin. In 1995, he joined

Microsoft, where he helped design a number of successful systems,

including Windows NT and 2000, as well as Microsoft’s most important

software development tools.

 

In 2001, Mr. Anand returned to India to work for Microsoft as a

“technical evangelist,” with the unenviable job of persuading other

software developers to embrace Microsoft’s technical standards,

products and services. Even then, he said, he knew that he would

eventually leave Microsoft to start his own business in India.

 

“I was honest with my boss, but I was building contacts and a

network,” he told me.

 

He achieved limited institutional fame when he was named Microsoft’s

Worldwide Software Architect of the Year in 2003. But the next year,

when his stock options vested, he quit the company to start the

Perfect Future.

 

Mr. Anand financed his company (which is named for a favorite book,

“A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Promise of Globalization,” by

two Economist editors, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge) with

$25,000 of his Microsoft money. He describes the venture as

“dedicated to bringing innovative solutions to emerging markets.”

 

“That’s where the most demanding customers exist today,” he said.

“Emerging markets also offer you the opportunity to experiment on

both the mobile and Web platforms since the largest number of Web and

mobile users exist in those markets.”

 

After a number of false starts, and, like so many Indian software

firms, some service work (in this case, developing the Web site of

The Hindustan Times), the start-up decided to focus on education.

 

“We realized that in Indian schools, children find education boring

and static, and teachers and administrators are overburdened,” he

said. “Parents are also out of touch with what’s happening. But most

importantly, children are unprepared for real life.”

 

India’s international reputation for educating so many to high

standards is deserved, and is the more remarkable in a nation whose

per-capita income was $3,700 in 2006.

 

But that reputation disguises significant disparities.

 

According to India’s Department of School Education and Literacy, 90

percent of the country’s children enroll in school, but after five

years in class around 50 percent of the students fail basic reading

tests and are unable to perform single-digit subtraction. Ninety

percent of Indian children drop out before they reach high school.

 

When I visited with Mr. Anand, his company had just moved out of a

garage into its new offices (an undistinguished low-rise office block

in a dry, sun-blasted field in an industrial park) and was weeks away

from shipping its first branded product, called “School in a Box.” In

the 115-degree heat of a Delhi afternoon (the air-conditioning in his

company’s new offices had failed), Mr. Anand’s small team of

programmers and educational advisers proudly showed me their answer

to the problems of Indian education.

 

School in a Box offers Indian primary and upper primary schools (that

is, for children from 5 to 14) an array of services which the Perfect

Future hosts and manages. Teachers and others can use the services

either on the Web, on mobile phones or even, in many cases, print

them out at an Internet cafe and take them to school.

 

Among the tools that School in a Box users can deploy are simple text

messages to notify school administrators, teachers, parents and

children of important events; online student assessment tools;

interactive question-and-answer examinations; and something called

“activity-based learning,” or 25 games (most of them traditional and

Indian) that teach children chemistry, physics and vocabulary.

 

By far the most interesting and radical element of School in a Box is

how it attempts to promote Vedic mathematics, a system that Bharati

Krsna Tirthaji Maharaja, a Hindu mathematician and scholar of the

last century, claimed to have rediscovered in the Vedas, or Hindu

sacred literature.

 

Vedic mathematics is controversial. It is associated with Hindu

nationalism. The section of the Vedas where Mr. Tirthaji unearthed

them is notoriously obscure, and some mathematicians believe that Mr.

Tirthaji was a fabulist whose inventions distracted from the genuine

achievements of ancient Indian mathematics.

 

While I am no great mathematician, Mr. Anand’s short tutorial

revealed to me a system of remarkable power and elegance, ideally

suited to calculations that must be performed without pen or paper.

 

Mr. Anand believes that traditional Indian learning, of which he

thinks Vedic mathematics is an example, was suppressed by the British

during their administration. “Most Indian children are unaware of the

rich traditional knowledge and educational system of a great

civilization,” he said.

 

The Perfect Future will earn money from School in a Box by charging

schools about 15 Indian rupees, or around 40 cents, a month for each

child, according to Mr. Anand. But he says the company will give away

the service to the poorest schools or schools in rural areas.

 

Still, School in a Box, for all its high-minded promise, faces real

challenges. To flourish, it would have to be purchased by Indian

school administrators, who are typically conservative, and who have

limited resources.

 

For his part, Mr. Anand believes that his service will succeed

because it doesn’t threaten administrators, but will help them to do

their jobs better. In the meantime, he is seeking the patronage of

the minister of education for Delhi State, Arvinder Singh Lovely,

whom he hopes will recommend School in the Box to administrators, and

he is pursuing partnerships with other companies with interests in

Indian education.

 

More tellingly, it’s not clear how much the new service can help

Indian education. But for Mr. Anand, at least, it’s a start. “It’s

not an easy task to uproot an existing system, no matter how bad,

with a new one,” he argued. School in a Box, he said, won’t foment

any revolution. “It was designed to bring an effective, affordable

and user-friendly interface between technology and education.”

 

Tarun Anand is one member of an intriguing and growing group: Indians

who have done well in the United States, and who, in preference to

becoming even richer in their adopted country, have come home to see

what commercial technology can do to improve the intractable problems

of the subcontinent.

 

Jason Pontin is the editor in chief and publisher of Technology

Review, a magazine and Web site owned by M.I.T. E-mail: pontin.

 

 

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