Sudha Murty: “I don’t go to restaurants. Why drive, park and waste time in traffic when you can eat at home?”

There’s no pomp when Sudha Murty enters the room. In fact, no one really notices. The videographers are busy priming their cameras, her staff is whirring around the sidelines and I am admiring a painting depicting the Mahabharata—made by a Kolkata-based collective of the Bengal School, she tells me later. “Which magazine?” she asks, smiling, as I hurriedly turn, take notice and mutter an answer. “Ah yes, please sit.” So I do. In videos and pictures, Murty seems larger somehow, a powerhouse of a person, but here, in the upstairs atrium of her office in Bengaluru’s Jayanagar, she seems slighter, smaller, even simpler. She is dressed modestly, in a green cotton salwar kameez, and it’s her face that fills in the absent details when I show her a video of my daughter thanking her for writing one of her favourite children’s books, The Gopi Diaries, starring her real-life Golden Retriever, who now snoozes lazily by her feet.

As a staff member arrives bearing a tray full of spiced coriander-sprinkled buttermilk, the conversation turns to whether it is homemade. “It is,” she nods sagely—as are most other things she eats. “I don’t go to restaurants. Why drive, park and waste time in traffic when you can eat at home? It’s easier and faster.” When the cameras flick on, framing her face, we are on the topic of kitchens and cooking, and how she and her husband, N. R. Narayana Murthy, co-founder of Infosys, managed to build both a healthy company and healthy eating habits back in the day. “When he was building Infosys, he never had time to cook,” she says, adding that there was never a day when he finished a meal without washing his plate. “He was very helpful even then,” adds Murty, whose own plate, in those days, was overflowing. “I’ve always been working, so I never became an expert at cooking. I know the basics—rice, sambar, roti, sabzi—but not dishes like holige [a sweet flatbread from Karnataka]. Our meals are always simple.” That explains why she sought help from her mother in the kitchen. “My parents lived below us, so my mother cooked for the family for a long time. It was only when she became old that we sought outside help.”

As a Padma Shri awardee, Rajya Sabha member, founder of the Infosys Foundation and a prolific author, philanthropist and educator, Murty is no stranger to breaking stereotypes. She earned her bachelor’s degree in engineering from BVB College of Engineering and Technology as the only girl in her class. “There were no toilets, so I wouldn’t drink water from 7am to noon. Then I’d walk home, use the restroom, have lunch and be back in the lab at 2pm,” recalls the multihyphenate, who went on to complete her master’s degree in computer science from the Indian Institute of Science. Her grandmother discouraged her from studying engineering, insisting it was meant for boys and warning that it would hurt her prospects in the marriage market. She persevered, repeating history upon becoming the first female engineer at Tata Engineering and Locomotive Company (now Tata Motors) in 1974. When she married Narayana Murthy in 1978, she did so with one condition—she would spell her surname as Murty, not Murthy, as it aligned with the Sanskrit alphabet.