Microsoft VP’s memoir of growing up in India makes unexpected case for what matters in the age of AI

One of Ravi Vedula‘s strongest memories from childhood is seeing his name in the Deccan Chronicle. He and his friends in a government housing colony in Hyderabad, India, had been solving the Sunday Jumble puzzle in the newspaper every week, mailing in postcards with their answers, and he’d finally been chosen as the winner.

The reward was 25 rupees. They used the money to buy a set of cricket wickets, a prized possession shared by kids who had very little and came together to make the most of it.

Vedula is now a corporate vice president at Microsoft, a 25-year veteran of the company, leading the data and insights organization behind Microsoft 365 and Copilot as the software giant and the rest of the tech world charge all-out into the fast-paced world of AI.

His new book, “Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” is filled with vignettes from a different place and time. But the lessons in humanity are more relevant than ever.

“This book isn’t about the past,” Vedula said over coffee in Seattle on Friday afternoon. “It’s about the value system that we carry forward into the future.”

Writing to remember

Vedula leads IDEAS (Insights, Data Engineering, Analytics, and Systems) the Microsoft organization that manages data and analytics across the Experiences and Devices division, covering Microsoft 365, Copilot, Office, Windows, and Microsoft security initiatives. Before that, he was the first engineering manager for Microsoft Exchange Online.

He is also a heart transplant recipient. He had been living with heart failure since 2001, telling almost nobody at work. By 2015, he was hospitalized, and used a mechanical heart assist device for 18 months while waiting for a donor. He received the transplant in January 2017.

Vedula wrote much of what would become “Hyderabad Days” on medical leave. He wasn’t working on a book at the time. He was just getting everything down, unsure about his future.

The book is filled with scenes from colony life. On Sunday mornings, three generations of his family crowded around the TV set to watch Mahabharata, a mythological show that was popular across India in the late 1980s. He and his friends played cricket with a ball bought from everyone’s pooled pocket change. His mother cooked for a house full of family and guests and never sat down to eat with them, scraping her meal together from what was left in the pan.

Each chapter is followed by a postscript connecting the memory to a lesson about leadership, engineering, or life. The device was inspired by “The Wonder Years,” the TV show where an adult narrator caps each episode by reflecting on the meaning of childhood events.

In one postscript, Vedula recalls how a fishing trawler cut an undersea cable and took down Microsoft’s Dublin data center while he was managing Exchange Online. Everyone panicked. He thought of Parimal, his colony cricket captain, who never lost his cool. He wasn’t the best player on the team, but he kept everyone on track when things fell apart.

“My education in computer science did not prepare me for this moment,” Vedula said last week. “Did I miss the class about fishing trawlers?”

He told himself he didn’t need to know everything. He needed to be level-headed and help his team through the process, just like Parimal had always done on the cricket pitch.

The AI disclosure

A note in the preface says “the telling has been shaped with the assistance of AI,” which initially made me question which passages were Vedula’s and which weren’t as I read, wondering if some parts seemed a little too polished. But in our conversation on the side porch of a Fremont coffee shop, I quickly realized that Vedula’s voice in person was the same as in the book.

He explained that he used Microsoft 365 Copilot primarily for proofreading and formatting, and as what he called a “thought partner,” interrogating each chapter for weaknesses. 

In one case, the AI helped him come up with a parallel to make pesarattu, a traditional Hyderabad breakfast, relatable to Western readers in terms of the memories and feelings it evoked. The suggestion was pancakes and eggs, and after running the comparison by a few people to be sure, he went with it.

He hired human proofreaders, one in the U.S. and another in India, and worked with Greg Shaw, the editor of 8080 Books, who co-authored Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s “Hit Refresh.”

But the stories and the words are clearly Vedula’s from start to finish. 

“I was very adamant that my voice was preserved,” he confirmed.

The disclosure in the preface, and my reaction to it as a reader, raised a question worth considering as AI-assisted writing becomes more common: can a well-intentioned acknowledgment undermine the perception of the work more than the use of AI warrants?

The boys from the colony

During our conversation, Vedula pulled a photograph from his bag, taken more than 40 years ago in the colony, and pointed out the boys. One is now a high-ranking executive at Barry Callebaut chocolates, who was previously with Coca-Cola. Another is a vice president at Rivian. Another runs a company in India. Another is an accomplished anesthesiologist.

They’ve all been reading the book. In their WhatsApp group, they’ve been debating why Vedula left out certain stories, and why he acts like he was the only one with a crush on a certain Bollywood actress, just as they might have debated the batting order as kids on the pitch.

“In some sense, we grew up with nothing,” Vedula said. “But it really was everything.”

“Hyderabad Days: The code we lived by before we coded,” by Ravi Vedula, published by Microsoft’s 8080 Books, will be out March 31. It’s available for preorder now.