Biography | Arvind Krishna — The Electrical Engineering Degree Taken on This Kanpur Campus

People treat IBM's chairman as a product of an American graduate school.

The first engineering degree was taken here, on the Kalyanpur campus of the Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur.

Arvind Krishna was born on 23 November 1962 in West Godavari district, Andhra Pradesh, into a Telugu family.

His father, Major General Vinod Krishna, served in the Indian Army.

His mother, Aarathi Krishna, worked for the welfare of army widows.

The public record of the years before Kanpur names Stanes Anglo Indian Higher Secondary School in Coonoor and St Joseph's Academy in Dehradun.

In 1985 he received a Bachelor of Technology in electrical engineering from IIT Kanpur.

The institute had moved to this Grand Trunk Road site in 1963.

The academic core — lecture halls, departmental buildings, the library — sits inside a planned campus of about a thousand acres, designed by Achyut Kanvinde.

That degree is the documented start of the technical line that later ran through wireless networking, security software, IBM Research, and the Red Hat acquisition.

IIT Kanpur later named him a distinguished alumnus.

The campus is public.

The pin marks the academic area, not a private room and not a family house.

A visitor should expect a working institute, not a shrine.

Photo: Johannes Bader, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons