THE INDOFILES

Among many of us, there has been a notion that there is a glass ceiling that exists at the highest levels of American society for Indian Americans. The feeling arises from the belief that we are a model minority, with one of the highest educated and paid segments of the U.S. population. It is also evidenced by theoversized ratio of Indian engineers, bankers, and doctors in the white collar business community. Yet, there sometimes seems to be a lack of CEOs and other executives at many of the best known firms. 

This being said, we would like to give a shout to two men that have shattered this so-called glass ceiling. The AP recently ranked Sanjay Jha and Vikram Pandit as two of the top 10 best paid CEOs in 2008.

Sanjay Jha, the CEO of Motorola, placed a stunning #2 on last year’s list, and is estimated to have made $104M last year. This was a whopping $103.3M raise over the relatively paltry salary of $726K he made in 2007. Previously he was the COO of Qualcomm where he was a rare engineer to rise rapidly to the executive ranks (read this rare interview with Om Malik for more on his time there). At only 45 years old, Sanjay was born in Bihar and studied in Scotland. 

Vikram Pandit, perhaps a little better known among the South Asian community, finished #6 on the highest paid list, and will have to make do with only $38MM (keep in mind, this comes in one of the worst years in U.S. banking ever). As the CEO of Citigroup, Vikram’s ascent from his days in Nagpur to Columbia to investment banking executive has been well-documented. The complexity of the man is probably best capture in this non sequitur found in his Wikipedia entry: “Pandit lives in an $18m apartment on the Upper West Side. Pandit is a pious Hindu and a devotee of Gajanan Maharaj.”

We’d like to congratulate both Sanjay and Vik on this amazing achievement!