A power device still running with no body around it. To my customers, that was toughness. To me, it was danger — and a window into how a gifted adult mind actually works.
I built the world's first plastic-body inverter. We called it Chic. India Today named it an Innovation of the Decade. And about ten years after launch, I shut it down — against the wishes of my dealers, my sales team, and customers who loved it.
This is the story of why. But it is really a story about a kind of mind — one I did not have a name for until I was 47.
People kept their inverters inside the almirah, where the heat had nowhere to escape. It built up, day after day, year after year. And one day we found something strange: the plastic body had been slowly consumed — thinned, weakened, eaten away by its own trapped heat — until, in some cases, it was practically gone. The electronics inside kept running. The device still worked.
To the customer, this was a miracle of durability: "Ten years and still going, even without a cover!" They were delighted. To me, it was a cold flash of fear. A live electrical product, running with no enclosure, is not resilience. It is a hazard quietly waiting to happen.
Here is the part that still surprises me. The plastic was PC-ABS, supplied with the blessing of GE's own plastic engineers. They did not know this would happen. The datasheet told them how the material behaved in standard, ventilated, short-term tests. What it could not tell them was how it would behave in the real Indian field: a device generating its own heat, sealed inside a cupboard with no ventilation, running continuously, for years.
I had not run any experiment. I had simply stacked those four things in my head — self-heating, no ventilation, continuous duty, and time — and seen where they led. The polymer, under sustained accumulated heat, would slowly break down and embrittle until the structure failed. I started calling it the osteoporosis of the inverter — like bone quietly thinning until the skeleton can no longer hold, while the person is still walking around.
The material's own specialists were thinking material. I was thinking material × usage × environment × time. That is the difference, and I did not yet understand that the difference had a name.
Once I could see the future, I could not un-see it. And that is the trap of this kind of mind: once you know what is coming, doing nothing becomes unbearable — not just as a business risk, but as a matter of conscience. I could not keep selling something I now knew would turn unsafe, even while my customers were perfectly happy with it.
So, slowly, I brought in metal. And one day, against everyone's wishes, I closed the plastic product. My dealers were furious — it was an easy sell, a name they had built their reputation on. My sales team did not understand. And honestly, by their logic, they were right. They were protecting a real, present success. I was acting on a danger nobody else could even perceive yet.
Looking back, every part of that story was a gifted-adult trait I had no language for at the time. Here they are — and maybe you'll recognise some in your own life.
With my R&D team, what I said yesterday would change today, because by morning I'd thought three steps further. To me it was progress; to them the ground kept moving. They were impressed by the speed and frustrated they couldn't match it — and conflict was born.
My way of explaining never matched the "normal" way, and in India there's a deep taboo against saying "I didn't understand" — especially to a senior. So people nodded instead of asking. I assumed I was understood; I wasn't. I lost confidence in people, and was marked arrogant — for being intense, not superior.
I expected others to see what I saw, at the speed I saw it, and I lost patience when they didn't. The day I realised I am different, the frustration dissolved — because the problem was never that they were slow. They were simply running a normal, valid mind that wasn't mine.
A balanced person juggles ten priorities. When something grips me, it collapses into one — it becomes my entire mission until I've mastered it, and then I'm bored and onto the next. I never stopped creating new products; my dealers wanted to keep selling the proven one. Both of us made sense — by our own wiring.
"Once I know the future is this, I can't stop taking decisions where the normal brain thinks that's okay." That isn't stubbornness. They genuinely can't see the failure, so "it's fine" is honest for them. But I can't un-know it — so I act, alone, carrying a responsibility no one else can feel.
The same engine that builds solutions, turned inward, builds problems — over-thinking a worry into a mountain. Pointed at the inverter, it innovated. The horsepower is the same; only the direction changes. The Polish psychiatrist Kazimierz Dabrowski called this overexcitability.
For most of my life I read all of this as personality — that I was "difficult," "too much," "self-made," a man nobody could quite explain. Then, at 47, I read a book called Gifted Grownups, and for the first time I was seen. The boredom, the speed, the intensity, the foresight, the loneliness of deciding alone — these were not flaws. They were a wired brain.
I was never arrogant. I was never restless for its own sake. I was a gifted adult, unnamed for decades, in a country that had no word, no test, and no room for him. Naming it changed everything — it reorganised my past and forgave it.
That is why Gifted Grownups exists.
From a jungle of wires on his living-room floor, Kunwer built Su-Kam into one of India's best-known inverter brands and created the world's first plastic-body inverter, the Chic. After losing it all, he is building again with Kunwwer.ai. He discovered he was a gifted adult at 47 — the experience that led him to found Gifted Grownups and GiftedKids.in.
A note on Su-Kam: Su-Kam Power Systems is referenced here for historical and biographical context. Kunwer Sachdev founded and led Su-Kam until 2018 and is no longer associated with the company, which subsequently underwent insolvency proceedings. Gifted Grownups is an independent platform and is not affiliated with, or endorsed by, Su-Kam Power Systems.
Honest writing on gifted adulthood — from inside the experience, for the Indian reality.
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