Saturday, 18 October 2025

🖼️ Howard Gardening Story #42 Ashok Soota and the Coders recreating canvases

 


🎨 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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Bangalore, Karnataka, India
My purpose is to manufacture success and happiness