Architects of the Future

By Sanjiv Goyal Featuring Ranbir (Ron) Gupta

In this article you will learn about:

• Tech Entrepreneurship
• The Futurist Mindset
• Critical thinking
• The IIT System

Humble Beginnings

Ranbir (Ron) Gupta is an architect turned futurist and entrepreneur. He is a distinguished alumnus of the Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur. Currently, he is serving as President of the IIT Kharagpur Foundation of USA and he was a Conference Chair for the PanIIT 2020 Global Virtual Summit.

His journey started in a village in Haryana India. The school there had two grades. His father completed both and his mother never went to school. Ron took classes under a tree. For high school he traveled to a neighboring town.

One day his father saw a newspaper announcement for IIT entrance exams. Despite having never heard of IIT, Ron passed all the rounds and made it to the interview portion in Delhi. The school representative told him, ‘Son, you only have one choice, to go to IIT Kharagpur for architecture.”

He didn’t know what architecture was, but he was eager to find out.

Architecture and Critical Thinking

Traditionally architecture is about physically building the environment around us, Gupta breaks architecture down to the elements of problem-solving.