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“With the explosion of information on the Web,
it is very hard to have an editorial function with only humans,” Mr. Harinarayan
said. “We are giving you an automated editor for any topic.”

These ideas evolved into Sammaan (which means dignity), one of 30 Indian
enterprises shortlisted in a competition to find the country’s “hottest”
start-up. The contest, which attracted over 500 nominees, is run by the National
Entrepreneurship Network (NEN), which promotes the spirit of enterprise on
India’s campuses, and the Tata group, an Indian conglomerate, which was a hot
start-up 140 years ago. The competition’s five winners, decided by a mixture of
online voting and expert judgment, will emerge in late December.

More than 75% of the nominees are, like Mr Alam (pictured above),
first-generation entrepreneurs who do not hail from business families.
Two-thirds of the final 30 have masters degrees. In short, they have plenty of
options. Their enthusiasm for entrepreneurship represents a growing willingness
on the part of highly educated Indians to turn their backs on careers in
brand-name companies and strike out on their own. “In my early years, your
business card was very important,” says Kanwal Singh, one of the competition’s
advisers, who has carried the cards of Hindustan Lever and Intel in his time. He
now works for Helion Ventures, an Indian venture-capital fund, which has seen
some 1,500 proposals in the past three years. Inside the NEN, “we call it a
revolution in middle-class aspirations,” says Laura Parkin, the network’s
executive director.