The Man Always Lost in His Thoughts — My Story with Narender Singh Negi

He Came as Part of a Package

When I decided to hire Jagdeep Chauhan to build India’s first DSP sine wave inverter, Jagdeep said something that changed the course of what we built together at Su-Kam. He said — I know someone you must also meet. His name is Narender Singh Negi. We worked together at S K Dynamic in Roorkee. He is brilliant. You need both of us.

I met Negi. And I understood immediately what Jagdeep meant. Negi was a different kind of engineer — quieter, deeper, always somewhere else in his mind even when he was sitting right in front of you. He was, in the best possible sense, a man permanently lost in his thoughts.

I hired them both in 2001. They came together, they worked together, and between them they helped shape the technological foundation of Su-Kam’s R&D for the next decade.

More Than Ten Years of Ideas

Narender Singh Negi stayed at Su-Kam for more than ten years. In the world of fast-moving companies and restless talent, that kind of tenure means something. It means the work was real, the challenge was deep enough, and the person was genuinely invested in what they were building.]

And Negi was always building — mentally, if not always visibly. He was a man of ideas. The kind of person who would go quiet in a meeting and you would wonder if he had lost interest, only to discover he was already three steps ahead of everyone else in the room, turning a problem over in his mind from an angle nobody else had considered.

He was also, unfailingly, one of the most polite and well-mannered people I have ever worked with. In an industry full of strong personalities and high-pressure moments, Negi never raised his voice, never became difficult, never let ego get in the way of the work. That kind of temperament is rarer than technical brilliance.

The Technologies We Built Together

The period of Negi’s time at Su-Kam was also the period when we made our most significant technological leaps — particularly in solar. India’s solar industry was still in its infancy, and we were among the very few companies trying to build serious power electronics for solar applications from the ground up.

These were not simple products. Each one required original engineering — writing firmware, designing control loops, solving stability problems that no textbook had an answer for because nobody in India had built these things before. Negi thrived in that environment. The harder and more open-ended the problem, the more animated he became.

The Arguments on Timelines

I will be honest — we had our arguments. Negi and I did not always see eye to eye, and most of those disagreements were about timelines.

I was running a company at full speed. Every product had a market window, a competitor watching, a distributor waiting. For me, a deadline was a commitment. For Negi, a deadline was a suggestion — not from laziness, but because his mind was still refining, still improving, still asking whether the design could be better before it went out the door.

That tension between the perfectionist engineer and the impatient founder is one of the oldest stories in technology. In our case, it produced genuinely good outcomes — because the pressure forced decisions, and Negi’s instinct for quality meant those decisions were usually right. But the friction was real, and I would not pretend otherwise.

Where He Went After

When Negi left Su-Kam, he did not slow down. He went to Luminous Power Technologies — one of India’s largest inverter and battery companies — as Vice President of Research and Development. From there, he moved to V-Guard Industries, one of India’s most respected electrical companies, where he serves today as Head of R&D for Electronics and Power Products and as a Director on the board.

At V-Guard, Negi also sits on the jury for their annual Big Idea contest — a national innovation competition for engineers and designers. The man who was always lost in his own ideas is now the one who evaluates other people’s big ideas and decides which ones deserve to go forward. There is something deeply fitting about that.

What His Journey Means to Me

I was always hungry for technology. I was always looking for the right talent. Negi was exactly the kind of person I was looking for — not someone who just executed instructions, but someone who genuinely thought, genuinely questioned, and genuinely cared about getting the engineering right.

He gave Su-Kam more than a decade of his best years. He helped us build technologies that put Indian power electronics on a different level. And he went on to lead R&D at two of India’s most significant electrical companies.

I gave him his first chance in this industry. I am glad I did. And I am glad he argued with me on every timeline — because it meant the work mattered to him as much as it mattered to me.

Also in this series: Jagdeep Chauhan — The Man Who Invented India’s Sine Wave Inverter  |  Venkat Rajaraman — The Man Who Left Nvidia for a Dream