Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Ben

Henderson.

The city of Bengaluru in southern India, previously called Bangalore, is renowned for its huge

tech companies and buzzy start-up culture.

The city's businesses grow faster than anywhere else in the country, and its engineers are

sought after around the world, but rewind half a century and things were very different.

Today, I'm speaking to a man right at the heart of the city's transformation into the

Silicon Valley of India.

Right from day one, we believed in austerity because there was not that much money, so therefore,

and my younger colleagues, we were five or six people, we stayed in a single bedroom apartment.

That's Narayan Murthy, founder of Infosys, one of India's biggest tech companies.

He's reminiscing on the organization's early days, back in the 1980s.

It was a pleasure in some sense, spending an evening, all the six of us together, some

of us cooking, some cutting vegetables, some washing the plates.

It was all fun, we were a team, and to imagine that a company like that is today worth 80

billion dollars.

I think that tells me that all that hard work has indeed paid off.

Murthy was born in 1946 in the state of Karnataka, not far from Bengaluru.

We were 11 in the family.

It was a lower middle class family because supporting 11 on the salary of a high school teacher

is not very easy.

In 1947, not long after Murthy's birth, India won independence from British rule.

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