Sudha Murthy was born in 1950 in Shiggaon in north Karnataka. She did B.E. in Electrical Engineering from the B.V.B. College of Engineering & Technology, Hubli. She stood first in Karnataka for which she received a gold medal from the Chief Minister of Karnataka. She also completed her M.E. in Computer Science in 1974 from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, stood first in her class and received a gold medal from the Indian Institute of Engineers.
She was also the first woman engineer to be selected in Telco (now Tata Motors), Pune. She had written a postcard to JRD Tata complaining of the gender bias in Tata Motors (Telco then had a men-only policy) and she was invited for a special interview by Tata Motors.[1] She was living in Pune from 1974–1981, later she moved to Mumbai. It was her savings of Rs. 10,000 that was instrumental in the founding of Infosys; N.R. Narayana Murthy proudly mentions this fact on several occasions.
Books
Sudha Murthy is a writer and has written many stories, mostly published by Penguin, which deal with common lives and her views on donations, hospitality and realisation. Some of them include Sweet Hospitality and Wise and Otherwise (book).
Some of them are following -
1- How I Taught My Grandmother To Read 2-The Bird with Golden Wings 3-Gently Falls the Bakula 4-Dollar Bahu 5-Mahashweta 6-Old Man And His God 7-Wise & Otherwise 8-Magic Drum & other Favourite Stories 9-fasal cut 10- A wedding in Russia
Awards
On November 19, 2004, she was presented with the Raja-Lakshmi Award "in recognition of her outstanding contribution to social work" by the Sri Rani-Lakshmi Foundation, Chennai.
In 2006, she was awarded the Padma Shri , a civilian award from the Government of India and received an honorary doctorate
Personal details
Mrs. Murthy is the wife of software industrialist N.R. Narayana Murthy, the sister of Jayshree Deshpande (wife of billionaire telecom tycoon Gururaj Deshpande) and renowned Caltech astrophysicistShrinivas Kulkarni.
The couple have two children - Rohan and Akshata. On Aug. 30, 2009, Akshata Murthy tied the knot with her Stanford classmate Rishi Sunak, in a well-attended ceremony at the Hotel Leela Palace Kempinski, Bangalore. Akshata, is a former associate of Siderian Ventures, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. Rishi Sunak, a British citizen of Indian origin, is a partner at the UK-based charitable hedge fund TCI, The Children’s Investment fund.
