Before the inverters, there was cable
The dish-antenna years — a young man, a soldering bench, and a hunger he couldn’t explain.
People expect my story to begin with an inverter. It doesn’t. It begins in 1988, with a young man, a ladder, and a tangle of coaxial cable strung across the rooftops of Delhi. Su-Kam’s first life wasn’t power backup at all — it was cable television. I wired hotels and housing societies with common antennas and VCRs, sending one signal into hundreds of homes. I wasn’t chasing a market. I was chasing the thrill of making something work that hadn’t worked before.
Then came a revolution I didn’t start, but rode with everything I had. VCRs were a rich man’s luxury and cassettes were rented film by film — until cable let an entire neighbourhood watch the same movie for a few rupees a month. An industry was born overnight, and those cable men needed amplifiers, modulators, directional couplers. So I built them. My first taste of manufacturing was a small team, a soldering bench, and an unreasonable belief that we could make it as well as anyone in the world.
I carried that belief into rooms where India wasn’t welcome. At exhibitions in Hong Kong and Singapore in the early ’90s, there wasn’t a single stall from my country — we were seen as a poor nation, and I felt it in every glance. I couldn’t afford to check my luggage, so I carried armfuls of catalogues home myself, dreaming of the day India would have its own booth, standing tall. On the last day of one show in 1992, a man sold me a spectrum analyzer cheap — nobody wanted to lug equipment home. Customs held it three months at 200% duty; I paid more than I could afford to free it. Later I bought an Anritsu analyzer that cost over twenty lakh — the price of a house. I bought the machine instead of the house.
“I bought the machine instead of the house. My only religion was technology — technology, technology, technology.”
And I’ll be honest: not everything I touched turned to gold. My equipment went into real, named places — I wired the Doordarshan network out of Mandi House, put up dish antennas and full cable systems at the PM House and across Air Force and Army stations, and ran my own cable network in the Air Force colony at Subroto Park, collecting from subscribers with my own money, because I wanted to build a company, not just sell parts. When I couldn’t build the management to hold those networks, I sold them off after three years. I poured a sizeable sum into a Canadian startup to build a digital set-top box years ahead of its time, and watched them experiment my money away. But even my failures pointed the same direction: forward.
