The father-in-law of the new British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – Narayana Murthy, was in a Bulgarian prison.
The story is told by himself at a technology festival in 2020. Murty recounts how and why he ended up in prison in Bulgaria in 1974.
The father-in-law of the new British prime minister describes his stay in the Bulgarian prison as a “bitter accident” that turned him into a “compassionate capitalist”.
“It was a defining moment in my life. I was in Nis, then in Yugoslavia, and I had to take a train to Sofia. I got on the train and inside I talked to a girl. We were talking in French about life in Bulgaria, when the the guy who was with her told me he got mad about something, I didn’t understand what, “she says.
The angry boy called the police. Narayana Murthy was removed from the train and the policemen took her passport and her luggage.
“They threw me in a cell two by two. There was only a toilet in the corner, no bed, chair or table. The floor was cold,” Murthy says.
Murthy spent 72 hours in prison, during which time he was not given food. After the third day, the police took him to the platform and loaded him onto a departing freight train. He remembers being told that he was let in because he was from the “friendly country of India”. His passport was returned when the train arrived in Istanbul.
Narayana Murthy has repeatedly claimed that this incident transformed him from a “confused communist into a compassionate capitalist”.
“If a country treats its friends this way, I never want to be part of a Communist country,” he says.
After this incident, Murthy decided to become an entrepreneur, his first attempt to start a business was unsuccessful. He claims that what happened in Bulgaria made him realize that a country can only thrive by creating jobs that can only be provided by entrepreneurs.
Today, Narayana Murthy is one of the innovators in the Indian tech industry. He founded his own company Infosys in 1981 with no experience, with the money he borrowed from his wife. He is currently among the richest people in India.
