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"I grew up in a household with very little means. As a product of charities in India, my motivation was to give back,” said Farrokh Billimoria, managing partner and co-founder of Green Leaf Capital in California. Beginning this year Billimoria has instituted a scholarship in India for seven students applying to engineering, medicine, law or pharmacy colleges. The four-year scholarship that will cover a tuition fee of Rs 40,000 each year will be awarded to Parsi students who have secured admission in a college in India and whose annual family income is less than four lakh rupees.
The Naju and Keki Billimoria Scholarship will be managed by the Bangalore based Foundation for Excellence (FFE) "which has awarded over 70,000 scholarships over the last two decades and has a proven process for screening and selecting candidates,” added Farrokh. Prospective candidates should apply on their website, www.ffe.org, between September 1 to December 31, 2021. This needs to be followed up with an email to scholarships@ffe.org specifying they have applied for the Billimoria Scholarship and providing their full name with email and mobile details. A follow-up call on +91 8861501155/08025201925 indicating that the scholarship application has been submitted is further recommended to ensure that the form has been correctly filled in.
"Are there any needy Parsis?” was the initial reaction from the FFE team, revealed Farrokh who hopes to see a demand for the scholarships from deserving Parsis, particularly those who have completed schooling from orphanages in India. In the event of there being insufficient candidates, his scholarships will devolve on female candidates of all faiths, he announced.
The Scholarship is in memory of 66-year-old Farrokh’s parents, neither of whom had studied beyond the ninth standard but had impressed on their son that education would be his ticket to a better life. A graduate from the College of Engineering in Poona, Farrokh had made his maiden trip to the US in 1976. He earned his master’s in computer science from the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey. This was followed by the executive management program at Stanford University. For several years he was on Stanford University’s Fulbright Screening Committee and additionally served on the advisory council for the Stanford Business School and the School of Engineering, according to his profile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

"I have this fear of being complacent. You have to constantly reincarnate yourself,” Farrokh was quoted in an Economic Times article in 1998 that he shared with Parsiana. After spending 18 years in various management positions at organizations like Bankers Trust, Merck and Company, Timeplex and Graphic Scanning Corp developing software engineering design, he joined Unterberg Harris, an investment banking firm. As a Wall Street analyst at Hambrecht and Quist (now JP Morgan/H&Q) where he was actively involved in the corporate finance and venture capital initiatives, he was ranked an "all-star analyst” for a number of years. A general partner at the Sprout Group, he later co-founded Artiman Ventures, and subsequently Mynt Capital, a fund investing in residential real estate. His current role at Green Leaf Capital includes overseeing the strategy and evaluation of properties being purchased and valuation of assets being disposed.
On the advisory council of the Clinton Initiative/American India Foundation Fellowship program, always willing to mentor Parsi youth, Farrokh believes, "Engineering teaches you how to think.” Keen to see other aspirants reap benefits from lucrative careers, he decided that his scholarships should be in fields with assured "earning power so that perhaps someday the recipients could help others.”                   P. M. G.