In 2002, Yuan Taur, a professor at the University of California, San Diego, who by then was already a doyen in electrical engineering circles, asked a master’s degree student from India, Anuj Grover, to stay on and do a PhD under his supervision. It was a major opportunity — Grover would be working on device design. But he hesitated, knowing that there were few job prospects to pursue based on this work were he to come back to India — and he wanted to come back. He turned the offer down.
“Today, if I had to make that same decision, I would have jumped at the opportunity,” Grover says from his office at the Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Delhi, where he teaches full time and heads the Centre for Intelligent Product Design (CiPD).