That was the second wave in terms of the journey of multinationals in India — when the market was becoming mature enough to warrant moves such as the one Cisco made; when Chambers moved one of his top four executives at the time, Wim Elfrink, to India. “At the time, we must have had 30 SVPs or VPs in India, unthinkable for any technology company,” he says.

The first wave, in the 1990s, saw multinationals being lured by a non-existent “250-million-strong” middle class, and making unrealistic bets (“$2 billion by 2000”, said one), before realising that India was not just more complex, but also offered other opportunities than just revenue (which, often enough, it didn’t). “I bet my legacy as a CEO on that move,” says Chambers, 74. “And we turned out to be right.”

Chambers was no stranger to audacious bets even then. In the mid-1990s, when he was still new to his CEO’s role, he bet on China, working closely with Chinese political and business leaders to forge a partnership. “We brought tech manufacturing into China,” he remembers, but over time, China got “off-track”, with the Chinese leadership seeing the relationship with the US as a “win-lose”.

In India, he admits, “at times it took longer to cross the chasm”, but “we eventually ended up much bigger (than I thought we would) although it took much longer to get started.”

Chambers must have liked what he saw even back then — he has since transformed into one of the country’s champions. This writer has known Chambers for over two decades and remembers him referring to India as the world’s first “digital country” as far back as the late 2000s. He serves as chairman of the US-India Strategic Partnership Forum, which has the articulated intent of “working closely with business and government leaders in both countries to create meaningful opportunities that have the power to change the lives of citizens”. Chambers’s India espousal hasn’t gone unnoticed. So much so that in 2019, the Indian government decided to award him its third-highest civilian honour, the Padma Bhushan.

***

Three things have changed the trajectory of the relationship between the two countries, fundamentally altering how the US sees India, Chambers says. The first is India’s track record, he explains; essentially the experience of the early movers among companies doing business in and with India. The second is relationships — government to government, companies to companies, and people to people. The third is trust. And underlying all three, Chambers indicates, is a fourth: the leadership and vision of prime minister Narendra Modi, who, he believes, “gets it”. Modi’s ascension to the top elected post in the country was part of “India’s crossing-the-chasm moment,” Chambers says. “And I am not a politician; I’m with whoever gets the results.”

There are other factors overlaid on these, Chambers points out. The first is the relationship between the two governments, which, over the past seven years, has reached a new level. The second, he adds, is the fact that there are “so many American technology giants” that are headed by Indians or people of Indian origin. His reference is to Google, Microsoft, Adobe, and a bunch of other technology companies where Indians occupy the corner rooms. And the third, Chambers says, is the number of start-ups that have one leg in India and another in the US, employing people in both countries.

In some ways, Chambers suggests, the hi-tech partnership that India and the US recently signed, formalising the desire to work on and share critical technologies — the GE jet engine deal with HAL, which involves a significant quantum of technology transfer is one such — is a natural extension of these. “We are moving so fast,” he says. And going forward, he adds, with artificial intelligence (AI), the next big horizontal technology innovation after the internet itself, the opportunities to partner will be so much more.

Chambers’s passion is evident when speaking about India. The tech executive also runs a small fund (with his son John J Chambers; JC2 Ventures) which has invested in some Indian companies. The standout among these, he says, is Uniphore. That’s this writer’s cue to remind him that HT’s sister publication Mint was instrumental in introducing Chambers to it. Back in 2016, Uniphore’s founder Umesh Sachdev was one of the people identified as an “Innovator under 35” by Mint and MIT Technology Review, published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Chambers, then the executive chairman of Cisco, was the keynote speaker at the event, and didn’t just insist on spending time separately with the winners, but also promised to spend time with them every quarter. Sachdev was a beneficiary. He soon moved to Palo Alto. Uniphore has since transformed into an enterprise-AI company focused on customer touchpoints.

“Uniphore is the top business-to-business AI company out there,” Chambers says. “But the major investment I really made was the commitment to the country of time.”

That’s paid off for everyone.