This is a story about two gifted children who grew up in India long before anyone ever used that word for them.
One of those children was me. The other is my friend Shantanu Prakash. We were both the kind of child the Indian school system was never quite built for — curious, restless, always a few steps ahead inside our own heads, and often misread as difficult or distracted. Neither of us had a name for what we were. We simply grew up feeling a little out of place, and learned to make our own way.
Growing up gifted in India, decades ago, was a quiet kind of loneliness. There were no words like "gifted" in our classrooms — only the topper and the troublemaker. If you did not fit the mould, you were simply "too much." Both of us carried that, in our own ways, into adulthood.
How Two Gifted Minds Finally Met
We did not meet as children. Life brought us together as grown men, around 2005, at a CRISIL event — and there is a small piece of history in that meeting. CRISIL, then still a young organisation in India, had just launched the country's very first credit-rating service for small and medium enterprises. Both his company, Educomp Solutions, and mine, Su-Kam Power Systems, were among the first handful of firms in the entire country to be awarded CRISIL's highest 'SME 1' rating. (You can read the 2005 announcement here.)
Two founders, two completely different businesses — one in education, one in power — recognised on the same early list. We got talking, and something simply clicked. That is where our friendship began, and it has held strong ever since.
Built with Passion, Not Just Ambition
What we share is hard to capture in a single word. We are both gifted, and the two of us gel in a way that is rare — there is an ease between us, a shorthand. But more than that, we each poured ourselves into our work with the same passion and dedication.
We both built a brand from nothing. We created jobs for thousands of families. We tried things no one in our industries had tried before — and through that, each of us rose to the top of our field: I in power and inverters, Shantanu in education. None of it came from playing safe. It came from the way a gifted mind works — seeing what others miss, refusing to accept "this is how it has always been done," and chasing an idea until it becomes real.
Even now, some of my favourite hours are spent simply sitting with Shantanu, talking about entrepreneurship and ideas. I always walk away having learned something. That is what two gifted minds quietly do for each other.
The Belief That Brings Us Back Together
Here is the part that matters most. After all these years — the companies, the awards, the long road — the thing we keep returning to is the very thing we both lived as children: gifted kids in India are still being forgotten.
We were among the lucky ones. We found our way without anyone ever naming our gift, but it cost us years of confusion and self-doubt. Most gifted Indian children are not so lucky. In a system that still pushes every child towards the same marks, the same exams, the same narrow idea of success, the child who thinks differently keeps slipping through unseen — exactly as we once did.
Shantanu has written about this with real clarity, in a piece called "The Forgotten Specials: India's Gifted Children in the Age of Sameness." It is exactly the gap GiftedKids.in was built to close. When a mind like his writes about gifted children, it is worth your time.
Read Shantanu's article on LinkedIn →
If our story speaks to you, you may also find something of yourself in my own story, or in our piece on the gifted struggle to set priorities. And for serious, India-rooted work in this field, read about India's national gifted programme, NIAS-EGT.
Recommended reading: "The Forgotten Specials: India's Gifted Children in the Age of Sameness" by Shantanu Prakash (LinkedIn). Company milestones referenced from CRISIL's 2005 SME rating announcement.