New Delhi, Sept. 23 -- Around the turn of the millennium, as India's tech boom was still finding its legs, Ashok Soota was already staring down what most would call the finish line.

He was 41 when he walked into Wipro in 1984-an era when the company was still better known for vegetable oils than enterprise code. He then spent the next decade and a half helping build the company's backbone. At 56, an age when many contemporaries were eyeing retirement estates, he walked out to co-found Mindtree with a cadre of former colleagues. At 68, he started all over again with Happiest Minds Technologies. By 79, he was launching Happiest Health.

Had Soota bowed out at any of those exits, his legacy in corporate India would have been firmly carved i...