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Every founder has an origin story they trot out for graduation speeches. Narayana Murthy has one that reads more like a hostage account than a business fable, and it starts with a conversation on a train.

It was 1974. Murthy was young, multilingual, and was hitchhiking in Europe. He struck up a conversation with two strangers seated across from him, a boy and a girl. The girl was warm, and happy to chat in French. The boy said nothing back. Instead, he got up, walked over to a group of policemen standing on the platform, and said something Murthy never got to hear.

What happened next didn't take long. His bag was torn apart. He was pulled off the train, marched into an eight-by-eight room with a toilet in the corner and nothing else, no bed, no chair, no table, just a cold hard floor, and his passport was taken from him.

Years later, in 2024 the Infosys founder had shared the same ordeal during an event'Achievements in Food Security: India's Strides Towards Sustainable Development Goals', hosted by the Permanent Mission of India to the UN at the UN headquarters. Commemorating the milestone four billionth meal served by Indian NGO -- The Akshaya Patra Foundation

Five days that stopped meaning anything
He sat in that room without a sip of water or a bite of food for what turned into nearly five days. When Thursday morning finally came and the doors opened, there was no relief on the other side. He was hauled out and locked into the guard's compartment of a freight train instead. By then, in his own words which he told Conde Nast Traveller, he'd lost the ability to think straight.

When they finally let him go, the explanation was almost absurd in how offhand it was. They wouldn't release him inside Bulgaria, they told him, but his passport and backpack would be waiting in Istanbul. He was, as they put it, from a friendly country, so they'd let him continue on.

From confused Leftist to determined capitalist
Here's the line Murthy has used to describe what that week actually did to him: it turned him from a confused Leftist into a determined capitalist. Not gradually, not over years of reading economics textbooks in some Bombay library, but somewhere in the space of an eight-by-eight room and a freight train's guard compartment.

"It happened many years ago and a lot has happened since, but I believe this event had something to do with the creation of Infosys," he told the magazine.

It wasn't only the detention that did it. Around that same period, while in Paris, Murthy had also met George Marchais, then the head of the French Communist Party, and come away unconvinced. Between that conversation and the days he'd just lost to a system that could lock a stranger up on a whim, something clarified for him. Governments, he decided, don't create jobs. Entrepreneurs do. And the only useful thing a government can really do is get out of their way and make that job creation easier.