A very rare photo of PV Narasimha Rao (PVN) working on his personal computer almost 4 decades ago.

GG News Bureau

New Delhi, 6th June. Way back in the early 1980s, the former Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, while chairing a meeting with his top ministers, started heaping praises on a new technology called “Personal Computer” and finally made a snide remark that “Old people” will not be able to understand all these.

PVN realized that the remark was indirectly referenced towards him, because he was the only senior citizen in that meeting. But instead of getting offended by taking it personally, PVN took it sportingly as a challenge upon himself, and vowed to gain mastery in that new technology. That very same week, he imported a Personal Computer (under his own expenses) all the way from US, and started going through all the manuals to understand its working without anybody’s help.

For the next few days, PVN used to wrap up his official work by evening, so that he could spend the rest of the day going through manuals and trying out new stuff on his PC. This way, by the end of that year, PVN not only gained mastery in computers, but also went on to learn 3 different programming languages and had even developed his own software programs!

PVN was one of the rare gems of India, but was caught up in the wrong party, where the constant limelight on dynasty, had eclipsed his true potential. Had there been no dynasty politics, probably India would have witnessed Lal Bahadur Shastri’s meritorious rise in 1950s itself & his agri-reforms throughout 1960s, followed by PVN’s meritorious rise and his modern reforms throughout 1970s, and would have soon become a developed nation by the 1980s itself!