Anand Mahindra recounts how he made Bill Gates laugh in 1997

In March 1997, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates made his first-ever visit to India. An iconic visit for India’s then-nascent software industry, Gates marked it with praise for the Indian IT sector, saying that India was well-positioned to become a software superpower.

Among the many dignitaries who met Gates then was Anand Mahindra, who became Managing Director of Mahindra and Mahindra just a month after Gates’s visit.

Now, a photograph of Gates and Mahindra’s meeting has circulated social media, after it was featured in the recently-released Netflix documentary Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates.

A nostalgic Mahindra talked about the photo of twitter, saying “Haven’t seen the series..Didn’t know this pic was flashed in it. Thank you for sharing, because this meeting was in ‘97 during Bill’s first ever trip to India & I had no record of it since there were no cell cameras at the time..Just a photographer from Fortune(?) magazine.”

Bill started at Harvard College the same year I did (‘73) and famously dropped out to start Microsoft. But the Microsoft team didn’t request this meeting because we were classmates; they asked to meet us because M&M at that time was one of the 1st adopters of WindowsNT 4.0.”

He then recounted an anecdote of how he startled Bill Gates’s team by telling Gates that he had a grudge against him.

“Funny story from that meeting: When Bill entered, he said “So I believe we were at Harvard at the same time?” I said ‘Yes, we never met, but I have a grudge against you.’ His team froze, thinking they had arranged a meeting with a wacko!”

While Mahindra passed out of Harvard in 1977 with a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Studies (Film), Gates who joined Harvard in 1973 and dropped out two years later, has been called the college’s “most successful dropout” by The Harvard Crimson.

“Bill kept his cool & asked “Why the grudge?” I replied: ‘My daughter asked which of my college classmates were now famous & when I told her your name, she said:’What a loser you are Dad!’ So thanks to you, I’ll always be a loser to my kids!’ We had a big laugh at that” Mahindra tweeted.

Mahindra has recounted the story before at the Future Unleashed summit in Mumbai in 2015.

On December 20, Mahindra announced that he would be stepping down as Mahindra & Mahindra's Executive Chairman from April 1, 2020. 

Inside Bill's Brain: Decoding Bill Gates is directed by Davis Guggenheim, who also made An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Waiting for Superman (2010) and He Named me Malala (2015).