🎨 Time for a corporate fairy tale
This story comes from a personalized book I created to honour Ashok Soota, then the founding CEO of Mindtree, who contributed handsomely to the IT boom of India.
This is the story of how a software campus became home to an Impressionist art gallery.
Here it goes,
In 2006, during a conference at MIT Sloan, Ashok wandered into an M. F. Husain exhibition.
Ashok didn’t know much about art — but by the time he left, he’d made a friend - M. F. Husain, the legend himself.
Weeks later, Husain visited Mindtree’s campus — a buzzing hub of young, hopeful India. Moved by what he saw, Husain said:
“I want to paint something for you — something that captures this emergent India.”
🌟 That canvas became a masterpiece.
And a revolution began.
🎨 Weekend art classes.
📚 Booklets on great painters.
🖼️ A mission to recreate the world’s greatest works — by hand.
Teams researched Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Berthe Morisot, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Degas, Sisley, …
They painted. They wrote. They shared.
And walls across the company turned into a walking museum of Impressionism.
But it didn’t stop there. - “Why not build our own gallery?” someone said.
📍 They crowdfunded it
🏛️ They called the gallery - Reproduction Material — cheeky, defiant, unforgettable
🧑🎨 Over 500 masterwork reproductions adorned its walls
📖 Each one came with a story — researched and written by the employees.
And on September 17, 2012 — Husain’s 97th birthday — Husain inaugurated the gallery himself.
The media called it Bangalore’s hidden Louvre.
Tourists lined up. Students learned. Families came to marvel.
🌟 What if your workplace became the place where your other self comes alive?
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Like a good trailer, this is just a teaser. The whole film? Housed in Ashok’s book. Try asking him — nicely.” 🎬🙂
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