Apple chief Executive Officer Tim Cook's visit to India, mixing plenty of leisure with work, has set off comparisons with other tech giants.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's trips to the country in 2014 and 2015 lasted for about two days. Microsoft chief Satya Nadella will come at the end of this month only for a day, the same as the duration of his previous official visit in November 2015.
Google's Sundar Pichai was in the country for two days last year. Bill Gates' first visit as the CEO of Microsoft in 1997 was short - barely two days.
Apart from limiting the number of days in an official visit to two or three, CEOs of large multinational corporations have mostly stuck to business on such trips - meeting business and political leaders, interacting with students on college campuses, and doing big-ticket launches.
Perhaps, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was a little out of the box as he went on a road show in a supply truck wearing a sherwani and waving a $2-billion note (that's the investment committed in the India market so far) in Bengaluru in September 2014. Bezos also spent almost a week in the country. But while onlookers may wonder how Cook had the time to experience even cricket and Bollywood, travelling thousands of kilometres within the country, those in the know pointed out it was more about business than just fun for the American tech giant executives.
If Apple is to stay in India, surely cricket and Bollywood cannot be ignored, seems to have been the thought behind Cook's just-concluded visit.
"He came to India with a very serious road map. Bollywood and cricket were surely on his mind for future business prospects," said film-maker Mukesh Bhatt, who was one of the people to interact with Cook when he was in Mumbai.
He said Cook spoke to everyone on the sets of Raaz Reboot, a film produced by brothers Mahesh Bhatt and Mukesh Bhatt, with humility and like an ordinary man. "He was moved to see that Apple devices were being used in the shoot."
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