When the technology sector in India was still in its infancy, a young man was admitted to the Mechanical Engineering Department of IIT Kharagpur with a JEE AIR of 39. Today, that same not so young man holds a patent for Motivating Machines to Learn without human intervention. The arc between these two points traces intellectual evolution of Prithwis Mukerjee.
The first pivot came after his PhD in Management Science from the University of Texas at Dallas, when he joined India's nascent software technology sector. Through two decades at Tata Steel, Tata-IBM, PricewaterhouseCoopers, and IBM India, he designed and built complex software systems, translating business ideas into digital artefacts.
The second pivot proved more surprising. At the height of his corporate career, Prithwis returned to IIT Kharagpur – as a tenured professor. Now, as Director of Praxis Business School in Calcutta, he shapes minds rather and guides the next generation of technology thinkers.
Between silicon and the soul lies his literary quest. His science fiction trilogy – Chronotantra, Chronoyantra, and Chronomantra – flows through spaces where carbon meets silicon, where human meets digital. His earlier work pSingularity weaves together three seemingly distant strands: computers, genetics, and Vedanta.
Each role in this journey – engineer, programmer, teacher, author – seems less a career change than a natural evolution of a mind unwilling to accept conventional boundaries.
For more information, do check out his portal, his formal CV or his LinkedIn profile
