The Weight of It
When Su-Kam fell — under NCLT proceedings, under the accumulated weight of a hostile investor, panicked banks, and a liquidity crisis engineered in a boardroom — the public record captured only the financial facts. The asset valuations. The debt figures. The legal timelines.
What the public record did not capture was what it felt like to be Kunwer Sachdev in the months that followed.
He had built Su-Kam from a broken inverter he had disassembled out of frustration in 1998. From a cable TV business that had started a decade before that, in 1988, with shared antenna systems for apartment buildings. From dormitory rooms at Hong Kong trade shows, where he had walked between exhibition halls because taxis were an expense he had eliminated, filling his hands with catalogues and his mind with what the world’s manufacturers were building.
From all of that, across nearly three decades, he had built a company that employed thousands, had been valued in the thousands of crores, had shipped products to seventy countries, had won awards, had named an industry, had been documented by Discovery Channel and written about by India’s best business journalists.
And then it was gone.
“The devastating bankruptcy of Su-Kam hit me like a physical blow,” he would write later. “In that dark time, a profound depression settled over me. I felt utterly worthless, the weight of failure crushing the memories of everything I had ever built. The noise of my internal critics was deafening.”
The Anchor
What lifted him was not a business plan. It was not an investor. It was not advice from a mentor or a conversation with a lawyer.
It was a list.
One day, in a desperate attempt to find something to hold on to, he asked himself a single question: What have I truly done? And he made himself answer it honestly and completely, without qualification, without the noise of the failure drowning out the facts.
He had developed India’s first MOSFET inverter. India’s first sinewave inverter. The Home UPS — a product category he had named and the entire industry had adopted. The Chic plastic inverter that India Today had called a decade’s innovation. Two LED display systems that had become industry standards. Over a hundred patents. Twenty-plus years of continuous R&D. A manufacturing operation that had taken SMD technology mainstream in India’s power electronics sector. Solar installations at IFFCO, SBI, Chennai Metro, the Assam Rifles, remote villages in UP, a coastal hybrid wind-solar project that worked well enough to replicate at his own farmhouse.
An inverter on a car battery in Lagos, which had become a distribution network spanning five continents.
As he wrote it down, something changed. “An unexpected surge of pride and recognition came flooding back. I wasn’t worthless. I had worked. I had created.”
He started collecting the evidence. Old photographs. Dusty brochures from the early years. Scanned press clippings. Memories from colleagues and partners. The product images from the Su-Kam archives. Piece by piece, he assembled the record of what had actually happened — not the legal record, not the financial record, but the making record. What had been invented, built, shipped, installed, copied, awarded.
What the Documents Became
That collection — the photographs, the brochures, the memories — became the document from which this chronicle was drawn.
Every story in these pages exists because Kunwer Sachdev, in the dark of a depression, chose to write down what he had done rather than accept what the bankruptcy proceedings said about it. The inverter he had disassembled in 1998. The customs officer in Hong Kong who had impounded the spectrum analyser. The car battery in Lagos. The locomotive-shaped FairyQueen that looked perfect and shipped damaged. The Army officials standing around the deployed solar trolley.
He wrote it because he needed to. He published it because others needed to know.
Not as a defence. Not as a rebuttal to the NCLT proceedings or to Reliance’s narrative. As a record of what Indian manufacturing can produce when one person refuses to accept that it cannot be done.
The Builder Returns
Su-Vastika was registered. New patents were filed. The technical knowledge that decades of inverter and solar work had deposited — in Kunwer’s mind, in the engineers who had worked alongside him, in the documented R&D that survived the liquidation — did not disappear when Su-Kam did.
What the investor had taken was a company. What they could not take was a practitioner.
He began building again. Slowly at first. Then with the same compulsive focus that had driven every phase of his career since 1988. The new company addressed the segment of the market where his deepest technical interest now lay: Battery Energy Storage Systems, next-generation solar inverters, the integration of lithium technology into the power backup space that lead-acid had dominated for thirty years.
The world Kunwer was returning to in the late 2010s was a world where the market had finally caught up with the direction he had been travelling since the early 2000s. Solar was mainstream. Lithium was arriving. IoT-connected inverters were no longer ahead of their time. The things he had been building before anyone asked for them were now things everyone wanted.
This chronicle ends here — not because the story ends, but because the chapters that come next are still being written.
The inverter man of India is still building.