Nandan Nilekani to speak at Yale University

Nandan Nilekani, co-chairman of Infosys Technologies, will address the prestigious Yale University on May 1, the university announced on Friday.

Nilekani's talk, "India at the Crossroads: The Road Ahead," is hosted by the South Asian Society, the South Asian Business Forum of the Yale School of Management, the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, and the South Asian Studies Council at the Whitney and Betty MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale.

Nilekani is also the author of the recently published book Imagining India : The Idea of a Renewed Nation (Penguin, 2009). In the introduction to Imagining India, Thomas Friedman, the New York Times columnist, credits Nilekani with inspiring Friedman's best-selling book 'The World Is Flat'.

"There are not a lot of executives around the world who are known simply by their first names," Friedman writes. "Silicon Valley has 'Steve' - as in Jobs, Seattle has 'Bill' - as in Gates. Omaha has 'Warren' - as in Buffett. And Bangalore has 'Nandan' - as in Nilekani."

With a degree from IIT in Bombay in 1978, Nilekani in 1981, along with six colleagues, founded Infosys Technologies, which has been among India's leading global companies. Today, the company has more than 1,00,000 employees, as well as offices and development centers in 22 countries.