By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev
The fall of Su-Kam was a public event. It played out under NCLT, in newspapers across India, with the particular relish the press reserves for the collapse of something that was once admired. The chronicler has written about how that ending felt from the inside, and will not repeat it here. This chapter is about the part the cameras did not stay for: what the man actually did once the noise died down.
Because here is the detail the coverage missed. The end of the company was not the end of the work. It was, if anything, the moment the work got interesting again.
The anchor that turned out to be a pen
In his own account of the darkest stretch — the depression, the sense of worthlessness, the deafening internal critics — Sachdev describes reaching for a single anchor almost by accident. What have I truly done? Let me just write it down. That simple act, the writing down of a professional life, became, in his words, his lifeline. As he began to chronicle the journey, an unexpected surge of pride came back: he had not been worthless. He had worked. He had created.
The chronicler notes, with some affection, that this entire site exists because of that sentence. The man who had spent a career building hardware rebuilt himself, first, with a pen. Everything that follows in this chapter is what happened once the pen had done its job and the engineer wanted his hands back.
The refusal to stop, examined
There is a line of his the chronicler keeps returning to, because it explains more than any business plan could: the refusal to stop is not a strategy. It is a character trait. He is careful, in saying it, not to dress it up as wisdom. He does not claim he had a clever plan for the comeback. He says, plainly, that he did not. He simply did not possess the ability to stop — and in the years after the collapse, that trait was, by his own admission, very nearly all he had.
Most comeback stories are told as triumphs. This one is more honest, and more useful: a man who kept building not because he was sure it would work, but because building was the only thing he knew how to do with his hands.
What he is actually building now
The second act is not nostalgia. It is engineering, and it runs on three tracks at once — which is exactly how the first act ran, too.
Su-vastika continues the work he knows best: power systems and energy storage, now built around the technologies the first company was just reaching for at the end — lithium, battery management systems, and IoT. The man who pioneered lead-acid battery equalisation back in 2005 is now filing battery-management patents for the lithium era. The instinct is unchanged; only the chemistry has moved on.
Kunwwer.ai is the genuinely new chapter — software, not hardware. Tools for actually running companies, built for everyone from small teams to large corporates. It is the first time in his career the product has no transformer in it, and he appears to be enjoying that enormously.
And the mentoring, which the chronicler suspects matters to him most of all. He meets founders constantly. What is striking — and entirely in character — is his first question. It is never about funding. It is about what they have actually built, down to the tiniest detail. Funding, he says, is the last thing he thinks about. Understanding the work is the first. The man who once judged a salesman by how he played a volleyball point now judges a founder the same way: by the evidence of the work, not the size of the claim.
The sentence he tells every room
There is one more thing the rebuilding produced, and it is not a product. Sachdev runs sessions inside mid-size companies — often without the founders in the room — and they begin, by his account, with a single line that reliably surprises people:
You are not working for your company. You are working for yourself.
From that moment, he says, the conversation changes. It is the distilled residue of everything that came before — the pens, the dormitories, the chess matches, the collapse, the writing-it-down. A man who lost the company he had called his everything arrived, on the other side, at the conviction that the only thing any of us truly builds is ourselves, and that the company is merely where that building happens for a while.
It is a strange and generous thing to believe after what he went through. It is also, the chronicler thinks, the most accurate one-sentence summary of the man that exists.
Why the chronicle ends here, for now
The magazines covered the rise because it was glamorous, and the fall because it was dramatic. They were not interested in the rebuilding, because the rebuilding is quiet, undramatic, and not yet finished. That is precisely why it belongs here, in the chronicle, rather than there, in the press.
The personal archive lives at kunwersachdev.com; the new power-systems work at Su-vastika; the AI second act at kunwwer.ai.
He built an industry, lost it, and started again. The first two facts made the headlines. The third one — the one still being written — is the only one he seems to care about.
More on Kunwer Sachdev across his work: the personal archive and full memoir at kunwersachdev.com · the solar chapter at solarmanofindia.com · the current power-systems company Su-vastika · the AI second act at kunwwer.ai · the lithium-inverter resource lithiuminverter.in · the older industry property inverterindia.com. For independent reads: Wikipedia and the Su-Kam Power Systems entry.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev