# Receiving the Bharat Shiromani Award from Dr. Balram Jakhar: A Moment That Shaped a Lifetime
There are evenings that fold themselves quietly into your memory and refuse to fade. For me, one such evening took place at the **Subroto Park Air Force Auditorium** in Delhi Cantonment, in the years when Su-Kam was still climbing — when I was conferred the **Bharat Shiromani Award** by none other than **Dr. Balram Jakhar**, the longest-serving Speaker of the Lok Sabha and one of the most respected statesmen of independent India.
This is the story of that evening, and what it taught me about the quiet power of being seen.
## The Award
The **Bharat Shiromani Award**, instituted by the Shiromani Institute of Chandigarh, has over the decades been conferred on a remarkable cross-section of Indians and friends of India — Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, and a long list of statesmen, social reformers, and builders of the nation. It is given for outstanding contribution to one’s field, to society, and to the larger project of nation-building.
To be counted, even briefly, in that lineage is a kind of weight you don’t anticipate until you feel the engraved plaque pressed into your hands.
## The Man Who Presented It
Dr. Balram Jakhar (1923–2016) was not just any dignitary. He served as **Speaker of the Lok Sabha for nine years and 329 days — the longest tenure in Indian parliamentary history**. He was Union Minister of Agriculture under Prime Minister P. V. Narasimha Rao, and later Governor of Madhya Pradesh. A lifelong farmer, parliamentarian, and Sanskrit scholar, he carried in his presence the weight of a generation that had built India’s institutions from the ground up.
When a man of that stature places an award in your hands, you don’t just receive a plaque. You receive a kind of contract — a quiet expectation that the work you do from that day forward will be worthy of the lineage you have just been welcomed into.
## What I Remember About That Evening
There is something distinct about an event held inside the **Subroto Park Air Force Auditorium**. The venue itself carries history — named after Air Marshal Subroto Mukerjee, the first Indian Chief of the Air Staff, it sits inside the disciplined precincts of Delhi Cantonment, the institutional heart of the Indian Air Force. To receive a national civilian honour inside an Air Force auditorium was to feel the recognition twice: once from the institution presenting the award, and once from the silent, ordered grandeur of the room itself.
The dais reflected that gravity. Dr. Balram Jakhar in his white kurta. A senior Air Force officer in full uniform standing alongside. Community elders and industry leaders flanking the stage. The “Bharat Shiromani” backdrop in gold and crimson glowing under the auditorium lights. The audience — Air Force personnel, dignitaries, family members of awardees — had come dressed for an occasion that mattered.
When the citation was read out and Dr. Jakhar handed me the plaque, something shifted internally. I had been working for years — through the cable TV days, through the early Su-Kam years, through the nights of figuring out how a non-engineer was going to build India’s first organised inverter company — and most of that work had been invisible. To suddenly be visible, on a national stage, in a venue named for one of India’s foremost institution-builders, in front of a man who had presided over the Indian Parliament itself, was humbling in a way I am still trying to articulate.
That, I think, is the real function of an award given mid-journey. It is not a verdict on the past. It is a contract with the future. When someone of standing places a plaque in your hands and says, “We see something in you,” you walk off that stage owing the world the version of yourself they just glimpsed.
I have thought about that contract many times in the years since.
## What Recognition Does to an Entrepreneur
For a first-generation entrepreneur from a middle-class home in Punjabi Bagh — the son of a Railways section officer, with no industry pedigree, no family capital, and no English-medium polish — recognition like this did three things that I now see clearly only in hindsight:
**It validated risk.** Entrepreneurship in India in those years was not the obvious path. Awards like this gave my family an answer, and gave me the conviction to keep building when the road got harder.
**It expanded the circle.** Rooms I would not otherwise have walked into began to open. Conversations I would not otherwise have had became possible. The plaque was less important than the people the plaque introduced me to.
**It set a standard for what I was building toward.** When you are publicly recognised for excellence, you spend the rest of your career trying to deserve it.
## Looking Back Now
Since that evening, the journey has continued — the building, the breaking, the rebuilding. Su-Kam grew into a multinational with a presence in over seventy countries. We filed dozens of patents in India and abroad — the most in India’s power backup industry. I earned the labels “Inverter Man of India” and “Solar Man of India.” I went through the gut-punch of seeing the company I built taken into insolvency in 2018, and the slow, deliberate work of starting again — this time as mentor to **Su-vastika**, founded by my wife Khushboo, focused on lithium energy storage, EV chargers, lift backup systems, and the next generation of clean power solutions.
Through all of it — the building, the breaking, the rebuilding — that plaque from Dr. Jakhar has sat as a quiet witness. It reminds me that I was bet on by someone whose own life was a lesson in service. And so my responsibility, now, is to bet on others the same way: the young founders in Delhi Angels, the engineers at Su-vastika, the next generation of Indian entrepreneurs trying to solve real problems for real people.
If you are mid-journey and someone hands you recognition, take it seriously. Not as proof of arrival — but as a contract with the person you are still becoming.
That contract, more than anything else in my career, is what I have spent my life trying to honour.
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*Kunwer Sachdev is the founder of Su-Kam Power Systems and mentor to Su-vastika Systems. He is a member of the Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority (GMDA) and an active mentor with Delhi Angels.*