By Dhrumil DhakanWith an intention to help as many people as he can by creating a community of CIOs and other CXOs that can help share their knowledge and skills with youngsters looking to work in the field of technology, Rajeev Gupta along with his two sons are now ready to launch a startup called EAASEE.COM (Everything as a service for everyone everywhere) after years of hard work.
A dream of his that is years in the making, he hopes to kickstart it this year with the help of his children. Even when he started working at his first job, it was always his goal to help people with his work, and can now say, he has done so having worked in the airline industry since 1990. Working in the airline industry even today, for almost 30 years, with AirOne has proven beneficial for him as it allows him to travel freely across the globe.
Born in Mumbai and brought up in Chandigarh, Gupta has seen his fair share of traveling even as a kid, as he finished his higher studies in the capital city of Delhi. It was in 1976, during his 5th grade when his tryst with technology began when it so happened that his cousin, who worked at IBM at the time, inspired him to study electronics and Gupta understood the subject quite naturally due to his affinity towards Maths & Science as a student.
Speaking on his inspirations, he continued, “That was one side of it and the other side of it is, my father has been an artist, he used to make architect pieces of PoP, we started making designs of some temples and masterpieces, so he was more focused on art, I was focused on electronics.” In 7th grade, inspired by poets and their pseudonyms, he coined the word aRtonics to describe his love for art and electronics and still refers to himself as Gupta ‘aRtonics’.
He remembers introducing electronics LED lighting systems in his father’s model business when he was in the 8th grade in an effort to merge the two worlds of art and electronics.
Like many others, he had a dream of becoming big, although at that point he did not know exactly the what and how of it. “If you want to become big, you have to follow the things the big people have done, so I used to study the articles and books on the people, those who really made it rags to riches, what were their habits, what they followed and all these things,” Gupta reminisced on what pushed him at a young age and still does today.
A bright student since his school days, he did not stop at academics but participated in extracurriculars such as being a part of NCC and winning the Best Guard award, being a billiard player, a published writer in the school magazine. And yet his favorite snippet comes from his college days when he was pursuing an electronics diploma from Pusa Polytechnic and he was the chief editor of the college magazine – TEKNOX-87, which had not been published for 17 years and he was quite instrumental in bringing it alive.
“So, I missed my final year exam of one subject because before I got a message from the publisher that I need to be there the next day to approve the entire thing, otherwise before the closing of the college, they would not be able to deliver the magazine and again, it would not be published,” After attempting half the exam, he rushed to get the magazine approved and published, which was successfully done so with him failing the subject and having to appear for it again later that year.
Despite this setback, he managed to get 4 appointment letters from various firms during college placements, and Gupta decided to join HCL in Chandigarh. Although, after a short period of time, he left the firm due to various reasons, and came back to Delhi to join Logic Systems as an engineer.
Working there for almost 3 years, Gupta’s experience there was nothing short of impressive. Recalling his days at PCL, he says, “I, again, did a lot of things and I was always the best achiever, in the top 5 best employees in the company,”
He remembers receiving a ₹1000 bonus on his ₹2000 salary, that an employee got for achieving 100% of their targets and earning the necessary points, something which he had successfully done and was then promoted and shifted to a much more suitable position for his caliber.
During this time, he gave a thought to helping his father in the family business, Gupta Modelors for making temple models, and one of their infamous Golden Temple models was gifted to Gyani Zail Singh, the former President of India, and still resides in the Rashtrapati Bhavan today.
To assist in his family business, he left his job in PCL and joined Concept Data Management as the Resident Manager for the KLM Royal Dutch Airlines as he found it a lucrative opportunity to work with an airline, while also supporting his father’s business.
“So, what I did was, in the first three-four days, I understood the entire problem and told my reporting manager, that we need to change all the faulty components of the network and all the connectors that were loose, and get the screws tightened for monitor connections,” Gupta stated on how he managed to solve the downtime problem that the company faced when he joined, which in turn made his job much easier, “After that, the whole 5 years, I didn’t face any downtime because proactively, we would do all the testing and checking and all, so it does not fail on a working day,”
In 1995, KLM was a partner with Jet Airways, and Naresh Goyal, Founder Chairman of Jet Airways, offered Gupta a job opportunity to join them full-time and work exclusively for reservations and airports.
“He said I would be exclusively accountable and responsible for all my legacy systems working. He had an office in Bombay but I wanted to be in Delhi, so he let me do it from here,” Gupta recollects, “My first target with Mr. Goyal was to make Delhi a model station.”
And he did just that, Expanding their capacity from 6 counters to 18 counters and also managed to introduce various new systems that helped boost their popularity. “So, that’s why, Jet Airways became very popular and we grew from 12 aircraft to 28-30 aircraft within a year because the load became quite heavy, and we were able to check in the people faster,”
Having so many feathers in his cap, it is difficult to keep track of all of them, one of them of which Gupta is quite proud of is the EPROM system that minimized the boarding pass & baggage tag time from 90 seconds to 45 seconds.
He has made many significant shifts in his career, as in 2001 he was offered a job at ModiLuft by Alok Sharma, which changed its name to Royal Airways, now known as SpiceJet, and was their first employee to join them, as they were still making their footing in the market.
Gupta later joined AirSahara, after being invited to do so by Mr. Sharma and finish what they started with Spicejet. “So, SpiceJet we did that I saved a lot of money for them but it could not work out, so all the things we had for SpiceJet, I introduced them in AirSahara,”
“So, my struggles have been my achievements, I have converted my struggles into my achievements. At every stage, there has been a struggle, I overcame those struggles and it has converted them into achievements,” Gupta talks about the way he looks at challenges.
A vast career such as his was no hindrance to him when it came to pursuing higher education, and he did so in 2008 when he completed his MBA from the National Institute of Management Studies, Mumbai.
Having achieved so much in his career, his personal life is no less, Gupta proudly boasts of his wife, Sunita, whom he has been married to for 26 years, and his two sons, Piyush and Aayush both of whom have an avid interest in technology.
