Between a People’s Man and a Technocrat — The Two Men Who Shaped Me

I have spent my life standing between two kinds of greatness. One was a man the whole town reached out to touch; the other is a man whose mind never stops reaching. My father was a people’s person — sought after across Kashipur and the towns around it, the man everyone wanted at their wedding, their dispute, their celebration. My husband is a technocrat — sought after too, but for a different reason: for what he knows, and for what he can build. Living between these two very different, very famous men has shaped me in ways I am only now learning to put into words.

My father — the man the town belonged to

To understand my father, the late Shri Mukesh Mehrotra, you had to watch a room change when he walked into it. As Chairman of the Kashipur Nagar Palika and later a Minister of State in Uttar Pradesh, he was a public man — but that title is too small for what he really was. He was a people’s person in the truest, oldest sense of the phrase.

People came to him with everything — a daughter’s marriage, a job lost, a quarrel between neighbours, a blocked drain, a broken heart. And he received all of it the same way: as if you were the only person in the world who mattered in that moment. He remembered names. He remembered the names of your children. He could sit with a labourer and a minister in the same hour and make both feel equally seen. That, I learned much later, is a rare and difficult art — to make people feel they belong to you, and you to them.

From him I inherited my heart. The instinct to look a person in the eye, to ask after their family, to feel responsible for people even when no one is keeping score. Everything warm in me, everything that knows how to hold a room and hold a hand, came from watching him.

My husband — the mind that never rests

And then there is the man I married. Kunwer Sachdev — the man India calls the Inverter Man, and now the Solar Man of India — is sought after too. But where my father drew people in with warmth, my husband draws them in with knowledge. He is a technocrat to his bones: always reading, always updating himself, always three questions deep into a problem the rest of us had not even noticed yet.

I have watched him sit at the dinner table, physically present, while his mind quietly takes apart a battery, a circuit, an idea, and rebuilds it better. He is happiest when he is learning. New technology does not intimidate him; it delights him. Where my father’s genius was for people, my husband’s is for ideas — and for the stubborn, relentless work of turning an idea into something real that powers an ordinary home.

From him I have learned a different kind of strength. Curiosity that does not quit. The discipline to keep learning long after everyone else has decided they know enough. The courage to build something the world has not asked for yet. If my father gave me my heart, my husband gave me my edge.

From power backup to the AI revolution

What astonishes me most about my husband is that he refuses to let the world move faster than his curiosity. The man who once obsessed over inverters and then over solar is, today, completely immersed in Artificial Intelligence. He is forever learning, forever experimenting with some new AI feature, and then turning to me — eyes lit up like a boy with a new toy — to show me how the world is quietly shifting under our feet.

I learn so much simply by watching him. He will pull me over to a screen and say, “Khushboo, look what this can do now,” and suddenly a thing that felt like science fiction last year feels ordinary. Three times in my life with him I have watched him stand exactly where the future was about to arrive — and each time, he was early.

That is the rhythm of being married to him: just when the rest of us settle into how things are, he is already three steps into how things are about to become. His newest venture, Kunwwer.ai, is simply this same restless curiosity given a new name. And I, standing beside him, get a front-row seat to the future — whether I asked for it or not.

Living between two worlds

It is a strange and beautiful thing, to grow up and grow into a woman between two such different poles. My father lived in the town square — among people, noise, festivals, faces. My husband lives in the workshop — among ideas, patents, quiet, and the hum of machines. One was all heart; the other is all mind. And somewhere in between the two of them, I was assembled.

For a long time I thought I had to choose — to be either a people’s person or a person of ideas. Life has taught me the opposite. The two are not enemies. The warmth without the rigour is sentimental; the rigour without the warmth is cold. What I carry from both men is the conviction that you can be deeply human and deeply serious about your work at the same time.

I see it now in my own life. When I lead at Su-vastika, I bring my husband’s respect for technology and my father’s respect for people into the same room. When I raise my twins, I want them to have his curiosity and his grandfather’s heart. When I write, like now, I am simply trying to honour both men by becoming a little more like each of them.

What I have come to understand

My father is no longer with us, and the ache of that does not leave. My husband is very much here, still building, still learning, still chasing the next idea. One I carry in memory; the other I walk beside. But both of them live in me every single day — in how I greet a stranger, in how I refuse to stop learning, in how I try to be both useful and kind.

People sometimes ask how a woman becomes herself. For me, the honest answer is this: I was shaped by a people’s man and a technocrat — two famous, sought-after men who could not have been more different — and I spent my life learning to hold both of them inside one heart. That, more than anything, is who I am.

Khushboo Sachdev

Entrepreneur and CEO of Su-vastika Systems, India’s next-generation energy-storage and power-backup company. Read more about Khushboo →