Stories

Letting go is an art, and I am a bad artist.

Rochet, our customised chocolate gifts business, ran from 2021 to 2025. I still miss it.

My first real software for JPPL was an HR system built inside a Google Sheet.

Every month it sent each employee an SMS with a link to their payslip. Yes, a spreadsheet could do that. I built it with Google Apps Script and a lot of Stack Overflow.

It was not pretty. But it worked, and our people got their payslips on their phones.

5S: sort, set in order, shine, standardise, sustain.

It sounds like a poster on a factory wall. It is actually the key to a healthy and happy factory. When every tool has its place, people stop searching and start working.

Always give your time to building processes, not just products.

A good product made once can be luck. A good process makes it good every day, on every shift, whoever is running the machine.

Vishwajeet, "Mama" to everyone on our shop floor, once told me: "If you love what you do, you never get tired."

Of all the management advice I have heard, his is the line I remember.

A blade worth one rupee can decide the fate of a whole lot of goods.

When it is sharp, nobody notices it. When it goes blunt, the cut goes rough, and a good product becomes a rejected one.

In a factory, the cheapest part is often the one that matters most.

"Chalta hai" works for many things in India. Business is not one of them.

If you want customers who stay with you for years, there is only one acceptable number: zero defects. One bad roll in a carton is a small percentage of your order. For the customer, it is 100% of their problem.

Our first export order went to Bangladesh: double-sided cloth tape.

It gave me back something I had been losing: the belief that I could actually do this.

It is a long story. One day I will tell it properly.