It's a tightrope walk ahead for 46-year-old Nandan Mohan Nilekani, scheduled to take over the reins of India's poster company in infotech on March 31. On the eve of taking guard as ceo of Infosys Technologies, he chose to gauge the trends in a market he's extremely familiar with—the United States (Nandan cut his teeth in markets there, where he was in charge of worldwide sales and marketing between 1981 and '86). Before setting off for the US, he spoke to B.R. Srikanth. Excerpts: