On his third visit to India in the past two years, and coinciding with the completion of two years of the NDA government, Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella on Monday said India’s creativity and the importance of “dreaming big”.
Nadella, who met Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Telecom & IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad earlier in the day, was addressing a conference on ‘Technology for good, Ideas for India’.
“It’s so inspiring for me to come here to see this broad spectrum of student developers, entrepreneurs, artistes and even some big brands, e-commerce companies, who are all changing the landscape of India and thereby, the world,” Nadella said.
He said his two passions — poetry and computer science — had driven his dreams, and quoted Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib’s famous lines: “ Hazaaron khwahishen aisi… ” Nadella encouraged youngsters in the audience to be bold and ambitious. “Our mission is to empower every person and organisation on the planet to achieve more. It’s not about celebrating our technologies. It’s about celebrating technologies that you all in India create. In fact, I want us to be the platform of creators that foster ingenuity of what is happening in India,” he added.
Changing landscape On the changing landscape of technology, Nadella said the “idea of conversations as a platform” was a transformative change. “When you change the way you see the world, you change the world you see,” he added.
“Think about the kinds of applications you could build, but more importantly, think about what it does to democratising the experience…In fact, you will build bots (robots) that have fundamental understanding of human language, just like how you built websites in the past, just like how you build mobile apps in the past. You are going to build these bot interfaces that understand human dialogue,” he added.
Minister of State for Finance Jayant Sinha, who was present at the event, said technology was a platform of growth for India.