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You would not find too many like her in the IT industry. In fact, the banking and finance industry has some big names to boast (think Naina Lal Kidwai of HSBC, Lalita Gupte, Chanda Kochar and Kalpana Morparia of ICICI Bank, Renuka Ramnath of ICICI Venture), but a CFO, well I can't think of another name in India Inc. Can you?

A gold medalist from IIM-Bangalore, Ashok attributes her success largely to her husband V Ashok, who was her batchmate at IIM-Bangalore and is currently a Partner at PwC and, of course, the two years she spent at IIM Bangalore. "I was dabbling with the idea of doing a Masters in mathematics initially. It was only when I saw my friends at Mount Carmel filling up forms for CAT that I decided to give it a shot. That was the stepping stone," she offers rather candidly.

Ashok's baptism into the IT industry happened only in 2001, when she joined the Microland Group, a privately-held IT infrastructure management services company, as executive VP and group CFO. In a little over three years at Microland, she negotiated a successful round of funding worth $7.3 mn for the company and another round worth $2 mn for a group company. Says Ashok, "Every assignment is a new challenge for me." For Ashok it is challenges like these that make her strive better as a professional. If Microland was about turning the startup into a profit-making organization, Syntel is about scaling up and Ashok is just too excited about her new assignment.

Her current role required her to shift address to Mumbai, while the rest of her family continues to live in Bangalore. Currently in the US, when she spoke to Dataquest, Ashok's heart and soul is completely focused on her new role at Syntel. The lady derives intellectual stimulation from reading anything and everything from business history to journals to fictions-her favorite author is Amitabh Ghosh. There is just one more thing that she wants to do sometime later, take a sabbatical to study a course in Literature at Princeton University.

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