Some men build companies. Kunwer Sachdev built a category. Walk into a small-town Indian electronics shop in the early 2000s and ask for an inverter — the shopkeeper would not have asked which brand, he would have asked which model of Su-Kam. That kind of categorical leadership does not happen by accident, and it does not happen quietly. It happened around him, every day, for two decades, and most of it has never been written down.
This column begins with a small confession. The chronicler has known Kunwer long enough to have a strong opinion of him, and that opinion will be kept off the page. What will not be kept off the page are the moments themselves — the marketing campaigns nobody else would dare run, the patent files no one bothered to read, the dealers who were converted by demonstrations rather than discounts, the international markets that opened because customers were given numbers they could verify with their own eyes. A man's story should be told in scenes, not slogans, and that is the project here, week by week.
What the column will cover
Roughly five strands, all written in the same observational voice. The first is The Story — a long-form chronicle of his journey, organised by era, from the railway colony in Kishanganj where he was born to the Su-Vastika lithium pivot of the present. The second is The Column itself — the weekly piece, anecdotes and character sketches and lessons, the things only someone who was actually in the room would know. The third is News and updates on Kunwer as they happen — speeches, partnerships, awards, patents filed, milestones reached. The fourth is The industry, through his eyes, where the chronicler refracts current inverter, UPS, BESS, solar, and lithium news through his perspective and history. The fifth is Archive and media — the photographs, the press clippings, the campaigns that became folklore.
What the column will not be
It will not be a product site. It will not be a press-release feed. It will not name specific adversaries, however tempting that occasionally is, because litigation by column is poor literary form. It will not invent quotations. It will not paint Kunwer as a saint, and it will not paint his rivals as villains; the truth, as is usually the case with men of his scale, is much more interesting than either.
The first proper piece
Next Monday brings the Electroscopy story — how a piece of testing equipment, built reluctantly by an R&D team that pushed back hard on the brief, became the most underrated marketing weapon in the inverter business. From there the chronicle will move outward and inward — to the cable TV days that preceded Su-Kam, to the dhaba signboards and the Kashmir shikaras, to the patents and the people, to the NCLT chapter and what came after. Where the events are sensitive the column will be careful. Where they are interesting the column will be patient.
This is the first page of what is meant to be a long chronicle. The other pages will arrive in their own time, every Monday, until there is no more to write. There is, at present, much more to write than the chronicler will manage in any reasonable lifetime.
By a former associate of Kunwer Sachdev