Phaneesh Murthy has just returned from a family vacation to Hawaii. The high point of the holiday was a jump. “I jumped off a 35-foot cliff into the open ocean. I didn’t think I’d do it,” says the 47-year-old chief executive officer (CEO) of iGate, as he sits in his unfussy-looking cabin at the information technology company’s sprawling Bangalore office.

The soft-spoken CEO, with salt-and-pepper hair, doesn’t look the type who could leap off cliffs. But he’s done more than nosedive into the ocean. “Every year, I like to do something to provide extreme discomfort to myself. It helps me learn something new about my personality,” he says, chewing a mint candy as he talks. He has done sky-diving and driven a Formula One car on a race track.

He doesn’t just crave action in recreation. Even when it comes to work, Murthy likes diving into the deep end. Earlier this month, he set the business world abuzz when iGate acquired a 63 per cent stake in a company that was twice its size. To top it, the deal with Patni Computer Systems was a transaction that had eluded some of the most aggressive bidders, including Japanese IT giant NTT Corporation and private equity firms Advent and Carlyle.

The techie says he himself is still “digesting” the deal. “We had to raise $1.1 billion and had just $100 million on our balance sheet. We pulled the deal through because we had spoken to financial sponsors much in advance,” says Murthy, who is looking forward to being “richer by experience” once the two firms are integrated.

Not everyone, though, is predicting a smooth ride for the CEO. Industry experts say Murthy will have to struggle with high integration expenses and low margins. Some feel he’s paid a steep price for Patni, which like iGate, is an IT services company.

While Murthy knows that integration will be a tough job, he says he’s unfazed by the critics. “I have spent my whole life proving disbelievers wrong,” he claims. It reminds him of the time he joined Infosys as sales head, in charge of selling projects in the US, in 1992. “Everyone told me, ‘Boss, do staffing (that is, providing staff for other companies). It’s the best bet. A small Indian company can’t compete with IBM for projects’,” remembers Murthy.

Only time will tell if Murthy can prove the naysayers wrong. But for now, the Patni deal has catapulted him back into the big boys’ league after a gap of eight years.

When Murthy quit his post as the California-based global sales head of Infosys Technologies in 2002, it was like the fall of a high priest. At Infosys, Murthy was known as the man with the golden touch — under him the company’s revenues zoomed from $2 million in 1992 to $750 million a decade later. The flamboyant executive bagged prized customers such as GE and Nordstrom, got Infosys a Nasdaq-listing and earned a fancy eight-figure salary. In the company’s corridors, he was nicknamed the “other Murthy”, second only to top boss N.R. Narayana Murthy.

When Murthy reminisces of his Infosys days — how he was desperate to bag his first client at any price and how he served Indian snacks during presentations to give American clients a flavour of India — it is clear this stint was a high point of his life. “At that time, selling an Indian IT company to Americans was a missionary job. I was part of a company, an industry and a country in the making,” he says.

When you rise too high, a fall can cause a crash. In 2002, a sexual harassment case was filed against Murthy by his executive assistant Reka Maximovitch. He was dragged to the courts and stood accused of suppressing facts and misrepresenting them to the Infosys board of directors.

Murthy pleaded that he was innocent, a stand that he still maintains. The sales honcho, however, did not fight the case in court but agreed to a $3 million payout to Maximovitch. Murthy says he had his reasons for doing so. “Infosys wanted to settle the matter out of court. So the insurance agency said they wouldn’t finance me alone to fight the case,” he says. And since fighting court cases was an expensive affair in the US — and Murthy says he didn’t have that kind of money — he opted for an Infosys-funded out-of-court settlement.

The jury, however, is still out on this: Infosys maintains that it offered Murthy the right to stay in the legal battle, fight the case and clear his name. Subsequently, a second sexual harassment case was filed against Murthy by another Infosys employee. This too was settled out of court.

The court action was a disaster for the blue-eyed boy of the IT industry. The media went to town about it — since a sexual harassment lawsuit implicating such a senior executive had never been heard of in the Indian corporate world. In offices, the case became fodder for water cooler conversations.

Eight years down, Murthy’s voice is a monotone as he recalls the episode. “The whole incident was disappointing. We all reacted badly because none of us knew how to react to such a case,” he says, as he picks up another mint from a bowl kept on the conference room table and pops it into his mouth. Murthy adds that though he was emotionally down for a while, he moved on.

Murthy must not have anticipated that his innings at Infosys would end this way. In fact, his career was not even supposed to begin the way it did. “As a schoolboy, I wanted to become a doctor,” recalls the old boy of Bangalore’s Bishop Cotton School who now lives in California with wife Jaya and two teenage sons. But Murthy’s engineer father egged him on to go to the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras — where he studied mechanical engineering — and then the Indian Institute of Management (IIM), Ahmedabad.

The reluctant engineer from Karnataka spent his college days as a happy back bencher. At IIT, Murthy attended post-lunch classes only because the classrooms were air-conditioned. “We had a cool place to sleep in,” he remembers — although the afternoon siesta was not always uninterrupted. “My chemistry professor once told me I would get a crick in my neck sleeping the way I did,” he says.

When he graduated from IIM, the hottest jobs were in the fast moving consumer goods sector. But he says he did not find it intellectually stimulating to sell soaps. So Murthy opted to join a start-up firm — Sonata Software — in the sunrise IT industry. “I did not want to work in a regimented environment. At Sonata, my role was fluid — I did everything from sales to product management,” he recalls. His next job was to sell another IT start-up — Infosys Technologies — in the US market.

One of the first disbelievers Murthy proved wrong was Infosys founder Narayana Murthy. “NRN thought I wouldn’t last in a sales job because I didn’t drink, smoke or eat meat,” he recalls. But Murthy used the American paranoia of mixing drinking and driving to work around the issue. “At every client party, I said I had to drive back home,” he says. Murthy was promptly served lemonade.

For the sales executive, the real issue proved to be selling India as a software destination. “At client presentations, I first explained where and what India was — before coming to the company,” remembers Murthy. His slide shows began with details of India’s political structure, climate and food. “When the food slide was shown, a plate of samosas was circulated among the clients,” he laughs.

Comparing the recall India enjoyed then to now, Murthy adds, “Today, if you give your Bangalore office address to an American, he’ll tell you how far you are from the Leela Palace Hotel.”

After Infosys, Murthy’s career graph didn’t really go into a spin. He set up a consulting company in California, Primentor, and then an IT back-office firm, Quintant Services, which was acquired by iGate in 2004. Murthy became CEO.

By setting up two companies in two years and brokering a merger, Murthy earned himself the reputation of being a deft deal maker — who specialised in striking deals on the golf course — more than a business builder. Many also rated him as an over-ambitious, know-it-all man.

Murthy says he knows the gossip that goes on behind his back. “There are enough critics of everybody,” he says dismissively. But he agrees that one has to be “unreasonable” to create companies. “If someone tells me he can do a job in 45 days, I tell him to do it in 25,” he says. And one has to do business somewhere, he argues; he did his on the golf course.

Anyway, the IT man — who loves to read “gruesome murder mysteries” — is in business for just another eight years. “At 55, I plan to quit and study medicine,” he says. And probably prove some more disbelievers wrong.