Kunwer Sachdev

I built India's first inverter brand from a garage in 1998 with ₹10,000 and a soldering iron. I spent twenty-five years turning ideas the industry called impossible into products it later copied. And for forty-seven of those years, I had no idea why my mind worked the way it did.

I was a government school student in Punjabi Bagh, Delhi. I failed Physics. I repeated 12th standard. No teacher ever said: this boy thinks differently. I carried that confusion for decades — through business, through building Su-Kam from nothing, through years of not having a name for the way I am wired.

At 47, I read a book called Gifted Grownups by Marylou Kelly Streznewski. For the first time in my life, I cried — because I was finally seen. The gut feelings that always turned out right. The patterns I saw in numbers that others missed. The internal critic that never gave me a moment's peace. The hunger for knowledge that never stopped. Not personality quirks. A wired brain.

That boy in the third row of a government school — bored, punished for daydreaming — that was me. He is your child. He deserves better.

GiftedKids.in exists because nobody gave me the word when I needed it, and because millions of Indian children are still waiting for someone to give it to them.

Why a businessman is writing about giftedness

I am not a psychologist. That work on this platform belongs to my co-founder Dr Inderbir Kaur Sandhu, who has spent three decades in gifted education and holds a PhD from Cambridge in the field.

What I bring is the other half — what it actually feels like from inside. The boredom that gets read as laziness. The intensity that exhausts everyone around you. The perfectionism that looks like arrogance and is actually fear. The sensory world that nobody else seems to notice. I lived all of it without a vocabulary for any of it, and I have watched my own son grow up with the same wiring in a school system that still has no idea what it is looking at.

Between the two of us there is a clinical lens and a lived one. Indian parents need both, and they have almost never had access to either.

What I've written here

These essays are the gifted adult experience from the inside — written for parents trying to understand a child, and for adults who might recognise themselves.

Before this

I started Su-Kam as a brand in 1988 alongside a cable-TV business, and in 1998 launched Su-Kam Power Systems — the inverter business — with ₹10,000 and a soldering iron. Over the following two decades it became India's largest power backup brand: around 5,000 employees and operations in more than 90 countries.

Along the way we built India's first DSP sinewave inverter, the first plastic-body inverter — which India Today called the Innovation of the Decade — the first Solar Hybrid UPS and the first Solar Online UPS. We created the "Home UPS" category that the rest of the industry then adopted. There are 106 technology filings across my work: 77 at Su-Kam, 25 at Su-vastika, and four personal AI filings.

I exited Su-Kam in 2019. Today I mentor Su-vastika, run Kunwwer.ai, publish InverterIndia.com, and invest in founders working in AI, deep-tech and clean energy.

I mention all of this for one reason only. A boy who failed Physics and repeated a year went on to build an industry. Marks were never the measure — and they are still not the measure of the child sitting bored in your child's classroom today.

The team

GiftedKids.in is built by three people:

• Dr Inderbir Kaur Sandhu — Co-Founder & Gifted Education Specialist. PhD (Cambridge), around 30 years in gifted education and assessment.
• Khushboo Sachdev — Co-Founder. Founder & CEO of Su-vastika Systems, Government of India patent holder in IoT energy management.
• Kunwer Sachdev — Founder. This page.

Elsewhere

kunwersachdev.com → Wikipedia → LinkedIn → X → GiftedGrownups.com →

Write to me about gifted education: support@giftedkids.in · WhatsApp +91 99713 23238