‘She’s more spontaneous, I am the boring type’: Nandan Nilekani on wife Rohini

Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani reveals he met his wife, Rohini Nilekani, in 1977 during a quiz competition. “Obviously, we won the quiz,” quipped Nilekani, who described her as the mercurial one and himself as the sedate one. 

Nilekani was speaking with Nikhil Kamath on his podcast, ‘People by WTF’, where he said that he met Rohini in college. “What happened was we had a quiz competition, and I was representing IIT in the quiz. The quiz was in Elphinstone College. And obviously we won the quiz,” he said. He added that they had the belief that they could win the quiz as they were good at such stuff. “That’s how I met her way back in 1977,” he said. 

Nilekani revealed that Rohini is the more “spontaneous, emotional and mercurial” of the two of them, while he was the more “sedate, boring type”. He agreed that Rohini believes in saying what she is thinking. “Environment is a big theme for her, part of her philanthropy. She is probably the biggest environmental philanthropist in India,” said Nilekani. 

The Infosys co-founder said that even though he is not very actively involved in environmental philanthropy, it is something he believes in. “I completely agree with what she is doing,” he said. 

WHO IS ROHINI NILEKANI?

Rohini Nilekani is the Chairperson of Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies and co-founder and director of non-profit education platform EkStep.  She had also founded Arghyam for sustainable water and sanitation across the country. 

She is a member of the Board of Trustees of Atree, an environmental think tank, and has served on the audit advisory board of the  Comptroller and Auditor General of India and the Eminent Persons Advisory Group of the Competition Commission of India.

Rohini Nilekani, apart from being a philanthropist, was a former journalist and an author. 

She, along with husband Nandan Nilekani, had signed the Giving Pledge in 2017 that commits half of their wealth to philanthropic causes. “We believe that there is a huge opportunity to open up that question in a creative and collaborative way. No matter who we are, how we have generated our wealth or what ideologies we espouse, we all face the same situation: our desire to give forward is collectively growing, but our ability to create sustainable change is just not keeping pace. We have the resources, the vision, and the skills to create large-scale market institutions. Yet, when it comes to social change, we learn it is tougher. Something eludes us. Things do succeed, but not fast enough or with sufficient impact. We feel good about trying, but we despair at emerging challenges,” wrote the duo in the Giving Pledge letter.