By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
The building at Nangal Raya was new enough that the paint still smelled faintly of plaster when I climbed to the second floor for my first interview. Downstairs, through open doors, I could hear a factory — not a large one, but a real one: benches, assembly, the low hum of a company that made things. Upstairs was an office that had not yet learned to look like a corporate headquarters. Mr Sachdev had built this place himself, recently enough that I would remember the detail years later: his own building, factory on the ground floor, office above. It was 2000. Su-Kam was already the name on the 1999 brochure and the hand-painted dealer boards the brand-before-budget years would later describe in full — but the company I walked into was still half of two stories. The cable-TV business was still running and unmistakably dying; Mr Sachdev was hell-bent on closing it, and the coaxial chapter would not survive the year. The bench behind him was already power backup — the work that had begun when he opened his own failed inverter at the factory in 1998. I did not yet know any of that history. I had come for something else entirely.
I was a B.Tech fresh out of college, which in India at the turn of the century meant something specific and discouraging: there were hardly any private companies doing electronics manufacturing, and the openings that existed felt like exceptions rather than a career path. An uncle of mine, himself in a government job, knew Mr Sachdev — that was how the referral came. I treated the interview as timepass, something to do while I prepared for the government examinations that still seemed like the serious preparation. My parents were middle-class in the way that makes every career decision feel like a household vote, and the anxiety in that household was real. My father was a PWD engineer in state government; he wanted his son to be an engineer with a government job, because in India that was the only safe job — stability, respect, and the kind of biography that mattered for good marriage prospects. I had not yet told anyone at home that I might want to build things for a living, and I was not very clear about it myself.
The first interview I thought I had failed
Sir’s first questions were not about MOSFETs or circuit theory. He asked where I had gone to school, what my family did, who my role model was and why — and he seemed more interested in my family background than in whatever technical knowledge a new graduate might carry. As a fresh B.Tech, that did not matter much to me at the time; I was still learning what interviews in this country actually measured. Then Sir handed me to a technical person — not very polished, not performing for candidates, the kind of engineer who asks questions because he genuinely needs correct answers on Monday morning. The questions were practical and I answered badly. My knowledge was theoretical, college-textbook theoretical, untested against a bench or a customer’s wall, because college had never prepared us for real industry and straight from college my grasp of how things actually failed in the field was very limited. I left convinced I had failed, came back and told my uncle there was no chance, that I had lost the job before it began. At home the anxiety sharpened — another closed door, another month closer to the exams, another conversation with a father who had already decided what a good life looked like. Looking back, I understand that Sir was not looking for textbook answers in that room; he was looking for whether a person could be sent into the field and come back with truth instead of pride. But at twenty-two I only felt the humiliation of the technical round, and a quiet resentment that a founder who cared so much about family character would let a boy be dismantled in front of a bench he had never touched.
Chetna Sundaram calls
A week later the phone rang. Chetna Sundaram, Sir’s secretary, asked me to come again — and I was both puzzled and excited, because I had already written the first visit off as a rejection. I went before the appointed time. Mr Sachdev was present by nine in the morning though office time was 9:30; I sat on the ground floor where there were hardly any people, and tried not to read too much into the quiet of a building that was still finding its rhythm. At half past nine sharp I was called in, and Sir asked the question that would matter more than any circuit diagram: What do you want in life? I was taken aback. He kept asking about my future goal, and I kept giving answers that hid my real ambition — a government job, my father’s wish, the safe route — because that was what I was supposed to want and I was not very clear myself about anything else. Sir listened, and then he did what he did with people he was considering: he talked about the Su-Kam brand, about creating strong technology in India, about a struggle that was worth enjoying if you meant to stay. It was not a salary pitch. It was a worldview pitch, delivered by a man who had walked exhibition aisles on dormitory money and was now trying to manufacture power backup in a country that treated outages as weather — motivated speech about building something that would matter, even if the path was hard. I left that morning still not knowing whether I had a job. Sir had not said yes and had not said no. I understand now that silence was part of how he worked — he wanted to see what you did when the answer was withheld — but in the moment I was frightened and a little angry, the way you are when someone holds your future in his hand and will not tell you the weight of it.
The assignment, the wiring, and Communication Systems Ltd.
I still did not have a job confirmation when Mr Sachdev gave me my first challenge. Go to a house where an inverter had been installed, go with the field engineer, observe, and come back to tell him personally what the challenge at the site actually was — not the existing engineer’s complaint analysis, which Sir was already unhappy with. I had no guts to ask whether the job was confirmed or whether I was being tested; I simply went, because saying no would have felt like failing twice. The engineer on site was not happy that I had been sent to observe him work, and that unhappiness was not subtle — the tightened jaw, the answers shortened to what could not be refused, the sense that a boy who had flunked the technical interview was now being used to audit a man who had been in the trade for years. I felt ashamed on his behalf and embarrassed on mine, wedged between a founder who wanted ground truth and a field man who had every reason to feel exposed. What I understand now is that Sir cared more about the wall than about the engineer’s ego or my comfort; that was how the company learned, and it worked, but it left bruises in the room that nobody named. What was also visible, everywhere in the company, was that everyone called him Sir — not with the empty deference of hierarchy, but with the particular attention paid to a founder who would go to the site himself if he did not trust the report. That was my first impression of how the place worked. At the installation, the story the engineer had been carrying did not survive contact with the wall: the fault was not the inverter at all. It was the wiring — a weak neutral in the customer’s installation was enough to blow the MOSFET within twenty or thirty days, the same MOSFET architecture the bench was pushing toward shippable product after years of square-wave iteration. They made wiring changes, installed a new product, and I came back that evening and met Sir the next day.
I reported my observation the next morning and Sir was happy — not performatively, but in the focused way that meant what I had seen matched what he already suspected and had not been getting from the field. Only then did the hiring feel real. I met his secretary outside; the formalities followed with Chetna Sundaram handling the paperwork. The appointment letter, when it arrived, carried a legal name that did not match the brand on the brochure: Su-kam Communication Systems Ltd. Cable television was still in the articles of association even as Mr Sachdev was strangling the last of it on the factory floor. My first job was directly under Sir — not buried in a department, not filtered through layers that did not exist yet. That mismatch between legal name and market name would resolve itself in time, as inverter revenue overtook coaxial memory. What did not change was the hiring instinct on display in those two meetings: family character before formulae, field truth before org-chart complaint, and work assigned before the offer letter confirmed you were allowed to do it. I joined Mr Sachdev around 2000. This chapter is witness testimony — not the cable years retold second-hand, not the 1998 box at the factory heard from others, but the actual doorway: a new building in Nangal Raya, a father who wanted a government seal on his son’s future, and a founder who hired by sending a boy to a wall where the neutral was weak and the MOSFET was paying the price.
What I still carry from that week is not only gratitude. I carry the memory of sitting on the ground floor before nine-thirty, not knowing if I was an employee or an unpaid experiment. I carry the engineer’s face when Sir used me as his eyes. I carry the understanding — earned slowly, not in that first month — that Mr Sachdev’s kindness and his harshness were not opposites but the same instinct: he would spend an hour on your future and not give you a sentence of confirmation until you had passed a test he never named. That mixture made the company sharp. It also taught me, early, that working for Sir would mean admiration and cost in the same breath.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev