In a world of several success stories, many starry-eyed, entrepreneur aspirationals buy books and watch numerous videos on what formula will make their own start-up stick. It takes a real expert like author Dhruv Nath, to know that the real lessons come from a comparative study of what worked and what didn’t. Compiling the journeys of the ideas that saw the light and went beyond, as well as those which ended before they even began, The Dream Founder is a must-read on what happens after the lightbulb switches on.

You can get your copy now from the nearest bookstore or visit Amazon to order.

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One More Book on Start-Ups? Why?​
​Good question. There are several books on start-ups out there. Just get on to Amazon or Flipkart and you’ll see lots of them. So, why did I write one more?​

Well, for a start, most of the books in the market talk about American start-ups—the Facebooks, the WhatsApps, the Ubers and the Airbnbs of the world. But hang on—aren’t you planning to create a start-up in India? In which case, you would want to learn from Indian start-ups, wouldn’t you? Sure, you can learn from Airbnb and Uber and all the rest of them—and you should. But isn’t it far more important to learn from companies in the Indian context? All of us are aware that the Indian environment is very different from what exists in the western world. Most western countries, such as the US, are developed. We are a developing country, which clearly means that both the opportunities and constraints will be different. Small-town and rural India—often called Bharat—offers a huge, untapped market, with no parallels in the west. Language is a major issue, with the future perhaps belonging to start-ups that cater to vernacular languages. I can go on and on, but I’m sure you get the idea. While you should learn from start-ups in the US, it’s much more critical to learn from start-ups in India. And that’s why this book is all about Indian start-ups. One of the few in this category.​

Next, even if you were to look at the Indian books out there, all of them talk about huge success stories, such as Byju’s, Flipkart, Paytm and Ola Cabs. Whose founders are spoken about in hushed whispers, even at paan shops. And, of course, in bars, with alcohol warming the insides. I’m sure you would want to learn from these phenomenally successful guys. But let me ask you a frank question. Can you really identify with such start-ups? These aren’t start-ups any more. They are giants—in many cases, multinational giants. Who do you really identify with? The smaller guys, isn’t it? Those fledgeling start-ups which are just a few years old and are perhaps facing the same problems that you are. Wouldn’t you also want to listen to the founders of these young start-ups? Of course you would!​

So, which ones do we discuss in this book?​

Aha, that’s the best part. We discuss both. On the one hand, the book has stories about young start-ups which you can identify with. But it also has advice from the real giants in the business—the likes of Sanjeev Bikhchandani of Naukri.com, Deepinder Goyal of Zomato, Dr Annurag Batra of BW Businessworld and Meena Ganesh of Portea Medical. And then, we also have a highly successful investor—Sushanto Mitra of Lead Angels. They have all been happy to share their gyan, which I’ve promptly included in this book. So, you are in the happy position of learning from both the big guns and the smaller guys. And that makes this book truly unique.​

But it gets even more unique, so do read on. You see, you can get lots of write-ups about start-ups that succeeded. Stories about their founders are plastered all over the Internet, the TV, the papers and, in fact, on virtually all kinds of media except possibly posters on public toilets (thank god!). But what about those that failed? Shouldn’t you be learning from them as well? To take an analogy from the film industry, if you want to be an actor, it is good to learn from Amitabh Bachchan. But isn’t it even more important to learn from those who came from their villages to try their luck and are still pottering around as extras in Bollywood? Or worse, those who got fed up and went back to their villages?​

Agreed? So, how often have you read about failures? How often have you heard founders bragging, ‘You know, I’m really proud of the fact that my start-up was a failure, and I’d be delighted to have this come out in print’? Never happens, does it? Obviously, no one talks about failures. These things are never written about, which means you don’t learn from them.​

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is where this book gets really exciting. As I mentioned earlier, I have spent several years with young founders, investing in their start-ups as well as mentoring many of them. There have been some really successful founders, but there has also been a fair share of failures. And I decided, in all my wisdom, to write about both the successful guys as well as the failures. Founders who were simply not able to build and grow their start-ups. And whose stories have remained under wraps and, therefore, unavailable to mankind. Of course, in some cases, liberal doses of alcohol—duly funded by me—had to be supplied to get these founders to open up.​

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what makes this book really, really unique!​

When the Galwan Valley clash happened in June 2020, the Indo-China conflict became the centre of the world’s attention. As shown in this excerpt from India’s Most Fearlesss 3, journalists Shiv Aroor and Rahul Singh have succeeded in recalibrating the narrative from speculative headlines to the real axis of the stories: the Indian Army soldiers. Read the full story of these bravehearts as well as many others in this thought-provoking book on real-life military bravery.

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‘I Had Never Seen Such Fierce Fighting’
The Galwan Clash of June 2020

Even above the loud, steady roar of the Galwan River, he heard the thundering footfalls. The sound of over a thousand men reverberating through the darkness, amplified by the tunnel effect of a narrow valley flanked by steep rising mountains on both sides. Peering into the black void beyond Patrol Point 14, lit only a few metres forward by hand-held torches, the reality of those sounds dawned on Havildar Dharamvir Kumar Singh of the Indian Army’s 16 Bihar infantry battalion. He clenched his eyes briefly shut to soak in every vibration. When he opened them again, he knew that the huge horde of men advancing towards his position was not marching.

They weren’t even jogging.

They were sprinting.

‘There were less than 400 of us,’ says Havildar Dharamvir. ‘We would soon discover that the number of Chinese Army soldiers running towards us was maybe three times that. We had been fighting smaller numbers of Chinese for two hours before that. But this was their main force. The all-out assault that the Chinese side was launching against us.’

An all-out assault.

Unarmed, as stipulated by decades-old protocol between the two armies, Havildar Dharamvir quickly glanced around at the soldiers with him. Even in the darkness he could tell their expressions. A curious mix of determination and fearlessness, but tinged with an edge of foreboding.

As the soldiers steeled themselves, rallied by their commanding officer and a group of younger officers, Havildar Dharamvir knew what lay ahead would need every ounce of strength the smaller force could muster. But it also made one particular man in the team even more crucial.

A non-combatant with a white suitcase.

Wading through the group of soldiers with him, Havildar Dharamvir emerged on the banks of the gushing Galwan, right where he had last seen the man he was looking for now.

With a big, unmistakable red ‘plus’ sign painted on to his parka, Naik Deepak Singh wasn’t standing. On his knees, his suitcase open with bandages and bottles of tincture, he was crouched over what appeared to be a small group of injured men, all groaning in the darkness. Three were Indian soldiers being administered first aid.

The six other soldiers receiving emergency ministrations from the young Indian Army medic weren’t Indian soldiers. They were Chinese Army personnel. Two People’s Liberation Army (PLA) officers and four jawans.

‘They are badly injured. They need to rest,’ Naik Deepak said before Havildar Dharamvir could ask. An hour earlier, the injured Chinese soldiers had been left behind by their retreating force. Naik Deepak, the young nursing assistant, had been summoned to Patrol Point 14 by his commanding officer two hours earlier. Not he, not Havildar Dharamvir and not his commanding officer knew then how crucial his crouched figure would be in the events of that night.

‘Is that your blood?’ Havildar Dharamvir bent down over Naik Deepak, inspecting a gash just above the nursing assistant’s right eyebrow.

‘It’s nothing. A piece of rock hit me. It’s superficial. Main theek hoon [I am fine],’ said Naik Deepak as he finished bandaging one of the Chinese soldiers, a young man whose face was covered with streams of blood from a head injury.

A short distance behind, at a point where the north-flowing Galwan River abruptly bent westward, Colonel Bikkumalla Santosh Babu, commanding officer of the battalion, had been alerted to the sounds of the Chinese advance. As he began to summon reinforcements and rally his much smaller force to face the arrival of the much larger Chinese advance, one thing was certain to him. No matter what transpired next in that desolate, ravine-like valley at 13,000 feet in Ladakh’s Himalayan heights, history had already been made with blood and bone that day.

As word of the lethal Galwan Valley incident shocked the world at 12.21 p.m. the following day, most would see it as a spontaneous flare-up that had ended a healthy forty-five-year run of zero fatal casualties on the India–China frontier. But waiting in the darkness on the banks of the Galwan River the previous night, Naik Deepak and Havildar Dharamvir knew that nothing, including that advancing horde of Chinese soldiers, was unplanned.

In the early twentieth century, a Bohemian writer called Franz Kafka released a strange story. The absurd but existentialist tale of a man who transforms into a huge insect is the reason we now have the term ‘Kafkaesque’. More than a century later, Pakistani author Mohsin Hamid, who last published Exit West has adapted the trope to suit contemporary anxieties about race and identity. His protagonist, a white man named Anders, wakes up in a darker skin colour. Soon, the world around him descends into chaos as more such transformations take place.

The following excerpt is the first chapter of The Last White Man. Get your copy from bookstores or Amazon.

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One morning Anders, a white man, woke up to find he had turned a deep and undeniable brown. This dawned upon him gradually, and then suddenly, first as a sense as he reached for his phone that the early light was doing something strange to the color of his forearm, subsequently, and with a start, as a momentary conviction that there was somebody else in bed with him, male, darker, but this, terrifying though it was, was surely impossible, and he was reassured that the other moved as he moved, was in fact not a person, not a separate person, but was just him, Anders, causing a wave of relief, for if the idea that someone else was there was only imagined, then of course the notion that he had changed color was a trick too, an optical illusion, or a mental artifact, born in the slippery halfway place between dreams and wakefulness, except that by now he had his phone in his hands and he had reversed the camera, and he saw that the face looking back at him was not his at all.

Anders scrambled out of his bed and began to rush to his bathroom, but, calming himself, he forced his gait to slow, to become more deliberate, measured, and whether he did this to assert his control over the situation, to compel reality to return through sheer strength of mind, or because running would have frightened him more, made him forever into prey being pursued, he did not know.

The bathroom was shabbily but comfortingly familiar, the cracks in the tiles, the dirt in the grouting, the streak of dried toothpaste drip on the outside of the sink. The interior of the medicine cabinet was visible, the mirror door askew, and Anders raised his hand and swung his reflection into place before his eyes. It was not that of an Anders he recognized.

He was overtaken by emotion, not so much shock, or sorrow, though those things were there too, but above all the face replacing his filled him with anger, or rather, more than anger, an unexpected, murderous rage.

He wanted to kill the coloured man who confronted him here in his home, to extinguish the life animating this other’s body, to leave nothing standing but himself, as he was before, and he slammed the side of his fist into the face, cracking it slightly, and causing the whole fitting, cabinet, mirror, and all, to skew, like a painting after an earthquake has passed.

Anders stood, the pain in his hand muted by the intensity that had seized him, and he felt himself trembling, a vibration so faint as barely to be perceptible, but then stronger, like a dangerous winter chill, like freezing outdoors, unsheltered, and it drove him back to his bed, and under his sheets, and he lay there for a long while, hiding, willing this day, just begun, please, please, not to begin.

Anders waited for an undoing, an undoing that did not come, and the hours passed, and he realized that he had been robbed, that he was the victim of a crime, the horror of which only grew, a crime that had taken everything from him, that had taken him from him, for how could he say he was Anders now, be Anders now, with this other man staring him down, on his phone, in the mirror, and he tried not to keep checking, but every so often he would check again, and see the theft again, and when he was not checking there was no escaping the sight of his arms and his hands, dark, moreover frightening, for while they were under his control, there was no guarantee they would remain so, and he did not know if the idea of being throttled, which kept popping into his head like a bad memory, was something he feared or what he most wanted to do.

He attempted, with no appetite, to eat a sandwich, to be calmer, steadier, and he told himself that it would be all right, although he was unconvinced.

He wanted to believe that somehow he would change back, or be fixed, but already he doubted, and did not believe, and when he questioned whether it was entirely in his imagination, and tested this by taking a picture and placing it in a digital album, the algorithm that had, in the past, unfailingly suggested his name, so sure, so reliable, could not identify him.

Anders did not normally mind being alone, but as he was just then, it was as if he was not alone, was, rather, in tense and hostile company, trapped indoors because he did not dare to step outside, and he went from his computer to his refrigerator to his bed to his sofa, moving on in his small space when he could not stand to remain a minute longer where he was, but there was no escaping Anders, for Anders, that day.