Sunil Jain

New Delhi, April 12: At a time when India’s infotech industry is facing its worst battering due to the massive slump in the US, its most well-known face died at 38.

Dewang Mehta, who acted as a one-man public relations army for the industry through NASSCOM, died in his Sydney hotel room today, as part of a delegation to sign a declaration between, what else, Nasscom and the Australian Information Industry Association.

During his 10-year association which saw Nasscom grow into a formidable PR machine, Dewang organised more than 100 international seminars across the globe and signed up more than 150 formal joint ventures/strategic alliances. During his tenure, Nasscom’s membership grew from under 40 to over 800.

As infotech minister Pramod Mahajan who accompanied him to Sydney put it, Mehta was actually the country’s unofficial infotech minister. And he did his job with panache. At a recent art exhibition, the man who brought back Elvis’s trademark hairdo into our lives, said that he liked a particular painting of the lord Ganesha, but would buy it only if the mouse was re-done in the shape of a computer-mouse!

Dewang’s low-key yet unabashed style, of course, did wonders for the image of an industry known more for geeks than anything else. So he’d get great press for his patrons, the country’s software tycoons, by rubbing shoulders with the capital’s chatterati every other day. At the same time, he’d lobby hard (and get the government to lobby even harder) with the US to increase the number of H1-B visas. He’d then use this opportunity to wangle all manner of tax-breaks for the industry whose cause he lived, and died, for.

And having done all of that in a typical day, the trained pilot would talk about his ambitions to join the Censor Board (to remove all restrictions), or even act in the odd film. And no, Dewang didn’t think any of this held any contradictions as far as his ultimate ambition was concerned — to get nominated to the Rajya Sabha (with just 9 million Internet users in the country, he figured the Lok Sabha was out), and then become the country’s official infotech minister.

All of us, scribes like those in this newspaper and infotech czars like Infosys’s Narayana Murthy, have our particular Dewang Mehta memories. Ours, in The Indian Express, is a story on the top exotic travel spots around the globe—the story, published today quoted him as saying he shared poet Pablo Neruda’s love for the Inca ruins and had been planning a holiday to Peru for the past seven years.

But ever the realist, he added that if he ‘‘found a good girl to marry this year, (he would) go on a typical rich Indian family trip to Bangkok or Singapore.’’ Seems contradictory, but that’s Dewang. That was Dewang.