All this is not bad going for somebody who faced 399 rejections before getting a job at Fidelity Investments.

"I thought life would be easy after doing my Masters from Boston and an MBA (Master of Business Administration) from Northeastern University. But here I was in an alien country - married but without a job, and living off the $3,000 that my father had sent me," Arora says.

There were occasional moments of self-doubt, but the graduate from the Institute of Technology in Varanasi (now an IIT) knew he had it in him to succeed.

He had by then figured out that he "might be a little smarter than he had thought" when he beat 200000 people to get one of the 250 scholarships on offer for engineering students in India.

Besides, in his first job at Wipro, he managed the difficult job of selling computers to government officials ("It must be still a very difficult job") - an experience that must have come in handy in his meteoric rise in many companies, including his current one.

When he joined Google, he was the first vice-president to be appointed from outside the US.

Ask him about this and Arora admits he does pinch himself once in a while and attribute everything to his luck, perspiration and ability to adapt to any situation.

The last skill was honed during his childhood days when he had to keep on moving every couple of years, since his father was with the Indian Air Force.

Arora says he was planning to do something on his own when a friend asked him in 2004 to consider joining a company that could offer a start-up kind of an atmosphere.

He remembers how the two Google founders conducted the interview among the artefacts of the British Museum.

"We walked around. We looked at the exhibits and a lot of our conversation was about the Rosetta stone," says Arora, referring to an Egyptian artefact that dates to 196 BC and is inscribed in three languages.

The Greek wording enabled scholars to decipher the hieroglyphics and was a major breakthrough in Egyptology.

The three discussed how it was an amazing parallel to Google translating its services around the world.

Ten days later, Arora learnt he had the job.

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