If you come to Bombay to meet me, I am going to ask you what it would cost me to have sex with your wife,” Rediff.com chief executive officer Ajit Balakrishnan said.

“I could hear his voice sputtering as I disconnected the call,” Balakrishnan writes in his recently published book.

An investment banker in Singapore had called the Rediff.com founder, told him that he was speaking on behalf of a South African media group and asked him what it would cost to buy Balakrishnan out. Balakrishnan then asked the banker whether he was married. “Yes, very happily,” the unsuspecting man replied. And then came Balakrishnan’s response.

“I almost deleted it from the book. I was expressing my anger,” he confesses ruefully.

Rediff’s 64-year-old CEO is plainly attached to the web company which he, along with partner Arun Nanda, founded in 1995 and listed on Nasdaq five years later, raising $55 million in the process.

We are seated in a conference room at the Rediff.com office at Mahim in Mumbai. Balakrishnan is casually dressed, in blue jeans and a black tee shirt. His grey hair is closely cropped. He is a tall man, but thinner now than when I last interviewed him more than a decade ago.

Balakrishnan has written his first book The Wave Rider — A Chronicle of the Information Age, aimed at informing policy makers and the general public that the information age has arrived. It’s a serious, thoughtful, well researched book, rather like his columns in Business Standard, the financial daily. The book is so named because, according to Sussex University academics, we are living through the fifth of five technology waves (the first was triggered by James Hargreaves’s spinning device; the second by the use of coal-fired steam engines to drive railways and manufacturing machines; the third by electric power; the fourth was mass production and the fifth by the microprocessor chip, which led to lower computing costs, and the birth of the personal computer and the worldwide web).

So what are the chief characteristics of the information age? Dramatic changes are underway in education, in healthcare, and the delivery of justice, he says. He cites the example of education. “If you think of IIM, Calcutta, you think of young students coming out after a two-year MBA course. But that is only 500 students a year; 5,000 students a year are coming on to the online programme. The demand for education, which is really for the first two or four years of your working life, has now become lifelong. I made a presentation to Kapil Sibal (then minister for human resource development) and fellow IIM directors in Lucknow saying it’s going to destroy education as we currently understand it, just as much as it is destroying the print media,” he explains.

Will the Internet hit the print media in India, as it has in the US? He replies, “The correct question is, is the newspaper printed on paper going to be the main source of news? The answer is almost certainly no. But will people look to journalistic views to interpret news, the answer is going to be yes.”

The book is the offshoot of a paper on the emergence of India’s information technology services industry which he presented at The New School for Social Research in New York some 18 months ago. This was subsequently published in the university’s journal, Social Research. Macmillan, the publishers, then invited him to write a book. He told the publishers that he’d write it in a “creative non-fiction style”, as a first person account. “Hemingway is my hero,” says Balakrishnan. “Hemingway went to a Spanish bull fight and then he wrote about it.”

Sitting at his office in Mumbai, Balakrishnan joined an online creative non-fiction course in the US. He wrote 1,500-2,000 words a day, which he then sent every week to his online peers for review. The course had 10 or 11 American women. “These women are fantastic, they are brutal and Americans don’t hold back their comments. They would say, ‘Why are you writing like a CEO? Talk about some of your failures’.” The Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, graduate and board chairman (his term has been extended for another five years) wrote the book in eight months, he says.

That, of course, requires discipline — and Balakrishnan is nothing if not disciplined. He sleeps at 9pm, wakes up at 3.30 or 4am, answers his email or writes till 6am, leaves his south Mumbai home (he lives in the same complex as Ratan Tata) at 8am and arrives in office by 8.45am, where he stays on till about 6pm.

He’s also a crorepati. In 2001, a financial newspaper placed his worth at over Rs 200 crore, based on his shareholding in his advertising agency Rediffusion and in Rediff.com, to name but two companies. Today, he’s perhaps worth less, share prices having depreciated. But he wears his wealth lightly. “Personal money has no meaning, though the absence of it is demeaning,” he says.

I remind him what he’d told me in an earlier interview — that he’d told a friend when he was in his twenties he’d retire after he made his first Rs 10 lakh and buy books. “Honestly that is what I thought and then I realised that it does not cost that much to buy books,” he laughs.

I also remind him of what he had told me before — that apart from his flat in south Mumbai, he owns a weekend house at Mandwa in Maharashtra’s Alibagh district, and a palatial house at Kannur in Kerala, which he bought in 1984 at his father’s request. “A Muslim ruler had gone bankrupt in Kannur. This was about 50 years ago. My dad said it was going for a song and I should buy it. They would have pulled it down and built highrises. So I bought it for about Rs 25 lakh and restored it,” he says. He unfailingly heads for it thrice a year, at Vishu (April), Onam (August/September) and on New Year’s Eve, from wherever he is in the world.

“Oh God, I hope you’re not going to list my houses,” he exclaims. But I tell him that the information is already available on the Internet, thanks to my earlier interview.

In the early 2000s, the dotcom bubble had burst. He’d then maintained that the dotcom revolutionaries had merely fled to the hills, they’d be back. So are they now back? “Absolutely. In some countries more than others. They’re not called dotcoms now, they’re web companies. The revolutionaries have come down from the hills. They have demolished the newspapers and magazines. At that time people thought, these guys are idiots and will never come back.”

Balakrishnan’s late father was a doctor at Kannur, as was his grandfather. Both Ajit and his brother Arun, who retired as chairman of the public sector Hindustan Petroleum Corporation, are IIM alumni — a sister lives in the US. The Rediff.com CEO worked for a few months at an advertising agency, before launching in 1972 ad agency Rediffusion with Nanda and Mohammed Khan, who went on to found Enterprise Nexus, the ad agency.

Why did he launch an ad agency? The options then, he says, were to work for a steel company, a metal box company or a tobacco company. So he opted for a creative business.

Along the way, he and Nanda bought equity shares in PSI Data Systems, which then was a struggling Bangalore-based company that built computers for government laboratories, and tried to produce small computers for domestic use, commuting to Bangalore every week. That flopped for a variety of reasons, but Balakrishnan today says that Rediff.com wouldn’t have been born without that plunge into computer manufacturing.

So what hobbies does a web company head pursue? He funds a football team at Kannur. And he reads — no surprise, this — books on data mining, plus the occasional fiction (his wife, he says, teaches creative writing at Mumbai’s St Xavier’s College and so keeps a lot of books around the house). The last work of fiction he’s read? Freedom by Jonathan Franzen, he replies, adding that it was very touching. He used to play golf but stopped — he’d rather invest the time elsewhere, he says.

I’m, of course, itching to ask questions about his portal. Rediff.com faces challenges (email and chat are no longer the dominant communication tools and are slowly being overtaken by Twitter and others). But he declines to answer any questions on Rediff.com, because as a Nasdaq-listed company he’d have to immediately file a statement to the US Securities and Exchange Commission.

What of the future? On his agenda is a book on education. Most people, he says, missed the crucial point of the book Five Point Someone by Chetan Bhagat, to whom he had introduced me earlier in his office — whether to study hard and spend all your time mugging or score in the top one third of your class, and otherwise not to bother too much. “All the people who choose to be mug pots and come to the top have not gone anywhere in life. Chetan made the point and issues of those kinds have not been debated enough in India,” he contends.

And what will he call the book? “Sometimes I think of calling it ‘Confessions of an IIM chairman’, which will send shivers down the spines of many people,” he guffaws.