The rebuild, and the next frontier

When Su-Kam closed, one ordinary day turned into chaos for everyone — employees, dealers, suppliers. I was completely disoriented. There was no money, legal cases were all around me — from the banks, and from agencies like the CBI and the ED — and new ones kept arriving. For the first time in my life, I genuinely did not know what to do next.

And I had to carry something heavier than the cases. In Indian culture, failure is simply not acceptable. A founder who falls is not seen as someone who attempted something hard and lost — he is just a “failure,” and people remember you by your worst year. The rest is taken care of by the insolvency law, which methodically strips away whatever is left — the company, the home, the savings, the name you spent a lifetime building. I bore both at once: the quiet shame a society pins on you, and the machinery of a system designed to leave you with nothing.

“In our culture, failure is not acceptable — and whatever your dignity survives, the insolvency law is built to take the rest.”

It was Khushboo, my wife, who made the beginning. While the people who had depended on Su-Kam kept coming to our home for support, she quietly started Su-Vastika with the help of a few ex-employees. Later I joined her, helping develop a new product range — lithium battery energy-storage systems, solar hybrid power units, lift and elevator backups and EV chargers.

I will be honest about how hard the adjustment was. I had spent my life in a professional environment with a deep support structure — a large staff at my command, R&D engineers, testing equipment, trained teams. Now there was none of it. The equipment was gone, the R&D people were gone, my trained staff had scattered and settled elsewhere, and I was back to training raw freshers from scratch. The scale was completely different, and it was exhausting to adapt. But somehow I started — and slowly took this new ship to a real level.

Our focus was clear: lithium batteries and BESS — battery energy-storage systems installed at hotels and factories to replace the big diesel generators that India had run on for decades. No bank would back us; even a small ₹50 lakh loan was impossible, so once again I borrowed from friends. The relief finally came when Rotomag Enertec, led by Umesh Balani, invested and took a majority stake — I was genuinely happy that day. Su-Vastika runs on its own today under Khushboo, with a growing patent portfolio of its own — 25 filed, 11 already granted — and installations like Delhi’s first hotel running entirely on a lithium battery, all of it on the public record.

There were nights I lay awake asking myself a brutal question: could the man who once built an empire really begin again — older, poorer, from a rented corner with a handful of freshers who had never seen real R&D? The world had quietly written me off. Some who had once waited hours for a meeting with me now looked away. But slowly — one product, one customer, one small victory at a time — the old fire came back. The day I stood over a working prototype and felt the exact same thrill I’d felt decades earlier in that first Delhi garage, I knew. Somehow, against everything stacked against me, I had done it again.

And this time the win was quieter, and deeper. I no longer needed to prove anything to the market, to the banks, or to the people who had walked away. What I needed — what I finally got back — was the certainty within myself. Stripped of the company, the staff, the money and even the name I had built, I had rebuilt from zero and watched it stand. The empire could be taken. The builder could not. I had proved it to the only person whose verdict truly mattered: me.

“They took the company, the factories, the money and even the name. They could not take the one thing that built all of it — and somehow, from nothing, I did it again and proved to myself I can.”

Through all of it, my mind had already moved to its next obsession: AI. I had been reading and experimenting with it for a long time, and I could see it everywhere — in running organisations, and in the software needed for the products coming next, like lithium batteries and BESS. About six months ago I started kunwwer.ai to help companies, and especially MSMEs, actually adopt artificial intelligence: software that lifts productivity, training owners to use AI in their daily work, and tools for sales, marketing, HR and running a factory — so a company can grow without adding a single extra person. It is the Su-Kam playbook, rebuilt for a new age.

Writing, too, had quietly become my passion. I write about everything I care about — my own industry, but also subjects like gifted children and Ayurveda — and I built the platforms to publish it: liftinverter.com, lithiuminverter.in, solarmanofindia.com and inverterindia.com. In a way I had been waiting my whole life for tools like these. I’ve already published more than 300 articles on suvastika.com alone. I want to educate my industry — and to keep learning and building something new every single day.

I started with pens. Today I build with AI. The tools change every decade; the urge to build never does.

“I started with pens. Now I’m building with AI — and writing it all down, so the next builder doesn’t have to start from zero.”