IN THE BLIP OF AN EYE
It was probably inevitable that Ambarish Mitra would start an augmented reality company like Blippar, which lets you look at real-world objects enhanced with text and digital graphics through your smartphone camera. After all, Mitra seems to have lived his entire life in an augmented reality of his own, one that reads like a mash-up of Charles Dickens, Gabriel García Márquez, and Salman Rushdie.
JUST LISTEN TO MITRA’S TALE of how he got his start as an entrepreneur. In 1997, he was a 17-year-old runaway in the slums of New Delhi, sleeping in a shack with mud-and-cow-dung walls and making his living peddling tea and magazines, when he came across an advertisement for a business-plan contest run by an Indian tech company. First prize: $10,000. A feminist movement was then sweeping India, and Mitra had the idea of providing free internet access to women who couldn’t afford to pay for it. He wrote up his pitch and mailed it off—then returned to his life as a chai vendor, confident that was that. How could it not be? Even if the judges liked his plan, what were the chances they would be able to find him in his mud shack, with no telephone or mailing address?
Except they did. A postman following the instructions he’d written out in lieu of a return address left a letter with the local tobacconist, informing Mitra that he’d been shortlisted and inviting him to pitch in person. He did, and won. Three years later, WomenInfoOnline, the company born of that idea, went public, making him a wealthy man—and vindicating his decision to leave home and a life of predictable middle-class comfort. (If this sounds suspiciously close to the plot of the movie Slumdog Millionaire, well, the parallels have frequently been noted in press reports. Mitra’s sister and a friend from that era confirm parts of his account, though documentation on the contest is thin.)
“That post shouldn’t even have
