This entry represents a profile or interview of Rao in India Currents or a comparable South Asian diaspora publication — a biographical source that situates his intellectual work in the context of his background as an Indian immigrant intellectual working in the American technology culture. Such profiles, when they exist, provide context not typically available in the technology-culture or intellectual-general press.
What This Source Type Provides
South Asian diaspora profiles of Rao, if they exist, are valuable for the rao KB for several reasons. First, they may address biographical context — family background, educational formation in India before emigrating for graduate study, the experience of navigating American academic and corporate culture as an immigrant — that Rao does not typically foreground in his own writing. The academic-period at university-of-michigan and the subsequent xerox-corporate-period are periods where the immigrant-in-institution experience may have inflected the organizational analysis that became the gervais-principle.
Second, diaspora-press profiles often ask different questions than tech-culture profiles: about identity, about the relationship between intellectual work and cultural background, about what it means to be a public intellectual in a specific community context. These angles can reveal dimensions of Rao's self-understanding that his primary writing on ribbonfarm-blog does not address.
Research Notes
This entry is speculative: the existence and specific content of an India Currents or comparable profile should be verified. India Currents is a Bay Area-based South Asian diaspora publication that has covered Indian-American professionals and intellectuals; Rao's profile in the technology-culture and independent intellectual communities makes him a plausible subject. If a profile does not exist in India Currents specifically, similar profiles in Scroll.in, The Wire, or comparable publications serving the Indian diaspora would serve similar documentary purposes. The date and author fields here are placeholders pending identification of a specific source.