Early Life and Education
Rajat Gupta was born in Kolkata, India to Pran Kumari Gupta and Ashwini Kumar Gupta. His father was a journalist for Ananda Publishers. His father was a prominent freedom fighter and had been jailed by the British for his efforts. His mother taught at a Montessori school. Gupta has three siblings.
When Gupta was five the family moved to New Delhi, where his father went to start the newspaper Hindustan Standard. Gupta's father died when Gupta was sixteen; Gupta's mother died two years later. Now an orphan, Gupta and his siblings "decided to live by ourselves. It was pretty unusual in those days."
He was a student at Modern School in New Delhi. After high school, Gupta ranked 15th in the nation in the entrance exam for the Indian Institutes of Technology, IIT JEE. He received a Bachelor of Technology degree in Mechanical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi (IIT-Delhi) in 1971. Declining a job from the prestigious domestic firm ITC Limited, he received an MBA from Harvard Business School (HBS) in 1973, where he was named a Baker Scholar. Gupta remarked that the first time he saw an airplane was when he flew to ITC to inform them he would be attending HBS.
Read more about this topic: Rajat Gupta
Famous quotes containing the words early, life and/or education:
“I believe that if we are to survive as a planet, we must teach this next generation to handle their own conflicts assertively and nonviolently. If in their early years our children learn to listen to all sides of the story, use their heads and then their mouths, and come up with a plan and share, then, when they become our leaders, and some of them will, they will have the tools to handle global problems and conflict.”
—Barbara Coloroso (20th century)
“I devoutly believe it is the writer who has matured the film medium more than anyone else in Hollywood. Even when he knew nothing about his work, he brought at least knowledge of life and a more grown-up mind, a maturer feeling about the human being.”
—Dudley Nichols (1895–1960)
“A woman might claim to retain some of the child’s faculties, although very limited and defused, simply because she has not been encouraged to learn methods of thought and develop a disciplined mind. As long as education remains largely induction ignorance will retain these advantages over learning and it is time that women impudently put them to work.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)