Rohan Murty, the scion who turns into an Infoscion

Rohan Murty, 30, steered clear of media glare despite being Infosys co-founder N R Narayana Murthy's only son and a promoter shareholder worth more than $350 million. His wedding to Lakshmi Venu, the heiress to India's $1.4-billion two-wheeler manufacturer TVS Motors two years ago, briefly made headlines before he retreated to Cambridge while continuing to do quiet work at Catamaran, the family investment office.

Days of quiet are going to be a thing of the past for the Junior Fellow at Harvard as he will assist Murthy Sr in one of the most high-profile rescue acts to be attempted in India Inc.


ET Special: Narayana Murthy's comeback at Infosys

Murthy clarified that Rohan's role has no leadership profile, in sync with the founder members' tenet that GenNext of their families would not access top jobs at Infosys. "His role is to make me more effective," Murthy insisted.

Rohan, who spells his last name without the 'h' and studied at Bishop Cottons in Bangalore, says "I don't remember much from the early years but a bunch of us studied Kannada in middle and senior schools. I attended senior school with an auto-driver, a cricketer, a giraffe, a senior mugpot, another mugpot, a pianist, a geek, a brainiac, a Bong, a lawyer and a pilot," writing on his official Harvard homepage.

Little did Rohan know that his educational graph would term him a geek, having been part of three prestigious fellowship programmes — Computing Innovations Fellow at MIT, Siebel Scholars Fellowship, and a Microsoft Research fellowship, before going on to pursue his current assignment. A PhD in computer science from Harvard, Rohan's passion for maths and science had even forced NRN to make time on a day-to-day basis during his Infy days, to read up on the subjects just to share similar wavelengths.

Rohan's interests span philosophy, history and the classics, besides his current fellowship work which focuses on 'architectures for opportunistic (dynamic) spectrum access in wireless networks.' While Rohan draws a number of quotations from the classics, his favourites include those often cited by his father: "In god we trust, everybody else brings data to the table", "Progress is often equal to the difference between mind and mindset", and "The softest pillow is a clear conscience." Though his schooling days are in the past, and having lived his life abroad after school, Rohan has stepped up efforts to re-connect with Old Cottonians through a lecture series.

Rohan's shadow role at Catamaran Ventures, a sector agnostic investment fund with a corpus of around $130 million, saw him expand his interest in some of India's promising growth sectors. In fact, NRN brought on board MIT grad Arjun Ramegowda Narayan to helm the fund at Rohan's recommendation.

Both Rohan and Arjun have silently expanded Catamaran, which has a young team of six people currently. There has been intense speculation that the Murthys would plough more capital into Catamaran which resembles more of a family office. But the declining Infosys stock price would have stalled their move for time being, at least.