He was the blue-eyed boy in the sprawling Infosys’ Bangalore campus earning a salary Indians have not even dreamt of until Phaneesh Murthy was credited with the biggest scandal to ever hit Infosys in its 21-year dream ride to fortune.Murthy, the former head of sales in Infosys, today is re-building his life after a messy sexual harassment case filed against him by a former employee —which goes to trial in US courts in September this year—led to his exit from Infosys last year. At the Nasscom 2003 seminar in Mumbai, Murthy took a big step to get back into the business. This time with Primentor Inc—a consultancy company founded by him and his IIM classmate and wife, Jaya Murthy.The man behind Infosys—a company that he helped take from $2 million to more than $545 million in revenue as on 2002, Murthy was finding that life after Infosys is not that bad after all.As Murthy spoke about his new company there was no mention of the muddy lawsuit that has been filed against him. In 21 years since its inception, this case is probably the first piece of negative news agains Infosys, a company known for its transparency. At that time Phaneesh had cited the need to devote personal time and attention to pursuing a successful defense of the lawsuit filed against him and the company, as the reason for his exit. Now, he is trying a comeback.As heads of BPO firms queued up to talk to Murthy and tell him about their companies and inquire whether he could spare some time, Murthy revelled in the attention. Reminding everyone politely about how pressed for time he was, Murthy kept handing his new business card until he ran out of them.‘‘Clients come to me not just because I am Phaneesh Murthy but also because they know the work I have done in Infosys, they have seen my work there,’’ he said when asked about his relations with the company that suffered as much as he did after the harassment case.Would he also be advising Infosys? It didn’t seem so. ‘‘Since Primentor is booked throughout 2003-04, there is no question of that now, but anyways, it is too hypothetical to think of all that now,’’ Murthy said.
