[mallipeddi]

There are two popular options for Indian CS students:

1) Write GRE, apply to some good American CS grad schools, finish the Masters degree and start working for your dream startup in Silicon Valley or any of the top software shops. This will also help you with getting a work visa (having American Masters is an advantage).

2) Alternatively if you would like to stay and work in India for a while, there are some great places to work within India. You can work for top-tier global companies like Intel, HP Labs, Google, Yahoo, Adobe, NetApp. I'm not too much into the Indian startup scene but there are some interesting early-stage internet startups like Flipkart. I used to work with the Hadoop team in Yahoo Bangalore (90% of the map-reduce team is in Bangalore). Usually these MNCs have the same kind of work culture (for the most part at least) in India as their American campuses. You don't have to engage in Visual Studio/Eclipse masturbation if you work in one of these places.

Re: certifications - if you want to work for the likes of Google, they don't care at all about certs. Since you're a first year student, I would instead recommend you try to get an internship at one of these places. Getting a job offer with the same company after an internship is pretty easy.

[r0h4n]

Do these companies hire people from tier 2 (!IIT or NIT) colleges? I cant do MS in USA (family reasons).

[mallipeddi]

I don't think they discriminate based on colleges but obviously it'll be harder for you (for instance they probably won't visit your campus for recruitment). You've to work extra hard to make a mark there. Also use innovative ways to get in touch with people at these companies (usually HR might not be able to tell you're a great hacker unless they see certain keywords like IIT in your resume). Go to BarCamps, DevCamps like others suggested. Yahoo! has Open Hack Days (this is a great way to meet some employees). I've a few other suggestions:

1) Start working on interesting opensource projects. Get your code up on GitHub.

2) Try Google Summer of Code (GSoC) - prepare well in advance for this, become friends with the project leads on IRC, ask them for interesting projects to propose, and show initiative.

[startupdude]

of course yes! I work for one among the top companies. I studied in a village from a low grade universities(it doesn't matter where you study, it all about how and what you study). Though I couldn't get into top companies right out of college, In 2 years I ended up in top companies. Most(not all there are some smart guys out there too) of the IIT and NIT i have seen are jerks or n00bs. You got the passion and attitude to learn? then you got the world out there. Forget what your relatives are doing its all about you and what you wanted to do. Contribute to Free Software become a rock star hacker. All the best :)