F.C. Kohli on Bootstrapping

Faqir Chand Kohli, born 19 March 1924 in Peshawar in a Punjabi Hindu Khatri family, studied at Khalsa Middle School and National High School in Peshawar before earning a BA and BSc (Honours) at Government College, Lahore, where he was a university gold medalist — a colonial-era education foundation for someone who would later be called the 'father of the Indian IT industry'.

At the request of J.R.D. Tata, Kohli helped set up Tata Consultancy Services in 1969, after Tata Electric installed a computer system to control the Mumbai-Pune power lines — only the third such utility deployment globally — and TCS initially served Tata Group companies before signing its first external contract with Burroughs Corporation in 1972 for software services.

In 1945, in his final year at Government College, Lahore, Kohli's father died; the emotional shock and need for independence pushed him to apply for the Indian Navy, but a chance newspaper advertisement for a government scholarship to study electrical engineering at Queen's redirected him to Canada in 1946 — a single small ad rerouting the trajectory of Indian IT.

The article notes that Kohli's family had to flee Peshawar for India during Partition's violence and start over — a personal upheaval that preceded his Tata career and that the piece frames as part of the determination he brought to building institutions in his adoptive country.