India rises, Silicon Valley drools

Promod Haque grew up in the old India, born into a lower-middle-class family, but he was lucky enough to attend a school in New Delhi for the children of wealthy dignitaries. His father was a bureaucrat; his mother took a job as a teacher elsewhere to cover his tuition. "I was very fortunate to go there," he says, "but I was an outsider."

After he graduated in engineering and started selling medical gear in India, he proudly bought his parents their first refrigerator. Two years later, in 1972, he arrived in the US for grad school at Northwestern -- and was stunned to see that every student apartment had its own fridge.

"I was amazed by all the affluence." Haque (pronounced "Hock") went four years without talking to his folks, who had no phone; they wrote letters. He never returned to live in India. In 1978 his parents joined him in Chicago.

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