Niteesh Niphadkar

There are times in your worklife when you are surprised how quickly a Friday has arrived.

The man's software runs in over 10 million cars on the road right now. That alone deserves a tribute. Here is the great man's story. Ravi Pandit co-founded KPIT in Pune in 1990, two years before liberalisation, when nobody in India was building software for cars. He came from a family Chartered Accountancy practice, did his master's at MIT Sloan, and instead of staying in finance or moving abroad, he chose to build engineering software for an industry India didn't really have yet. What he built ended up running inside vehicles made by BMW, Ford, Honda, GM, and most major global automakers. Indian companies usually get to do the back-office work for global firms. KPIT got to do the safety-critical work, the kind of code that has to be reliable enough to not kill people. He spent 35 years earning that level of trust, project by project, contract by contract. He saw the EV and autonomous mobility shift years before it became obvious. KPIT pivoted hard into software-defined vehicles when most peers were still chasing pure IT services contracts. The best part was that he kept Pune at the centre of it all. He didn't move the company to Bangalore or to the US. He co-founded the Pune International Centre, which became one of India's most respected policy institutions. He started Janwani and the Zero Garbage Project, which genuinely changed how Pune handled its waste. He supported the Gokhale Institute and the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme. He was the only private-sector member on the National Green Hydrogen Mission's Empowered Group, and recently launched HRIDAY to push hydrogen adoption in India. He wasn't too social, didn't do podcasts, didn't tweet but he did do was co-write a book called "Leapfrogging to Pole-Vaulting" with R. A. Mashelkar, about how India could skip stages of development instead of just catching up. I read that book a few years ago and a lot of how I think about Indian companies competing globally came from it. A genuine builder is gone. The kind who picked unsexy industries, stayed put in his city, did civic work that lasted, and kept his name out of the headlines while doing some of the most consequential engineering work this country has produced. Rest in peace, sir. Thank you for everything you built, and for showing what was possible from Pune, India. 🇮🇳

We can confirm Andy Robertson will bring his Reds career to an end at the conclusion of the current season. He will do so as a Liverpool legend ❤️

Best wishes on Gudi Padwa!