Founder’s Note · Kunwer Sachdev
I Discovered I Was a Gifted Adult at 47 — So I Built GiftedKids.in
India’s first platform to identify and nurture gifted children — built by a gifted grown-up who was never identified as a child.
For thirty years the world has known me as the Inverter Man of India — the founder of Su-Kam, a ₹1,200 crore power-electronics company with 100+ patents and products in 90+ countries. What almost no one knew, including me, is the part of the story that came before all of that.
I was a government-school boy in Punjabi Bagh, Delhi. I failed Physics. I repeated my 12th standard. Not one teacher ever looked at me and said, “this boy thinks differently.” I carried that quiet confusion for decades. Then, at 47, I read a book called Gifted Grownups — and for the first time in my life, I cried, because I finally felt seen. The traits I had always treated as quirks were the signature of a brain wired differently. I had been a gifted grown-up my whole life, and nobody had a word for it.
The same instinct that built inverters
People ask why an inverter man would care about gifted education. To me it is the same instinct. My work was always about capacity that stays invisible until you build the right system around it. A battery holds enormous energy — but without the right inverter and design, that energy sits there untapped, and everyone assumes the battery is weak. A gifted child is exactly that. The potential is there, but without identification and the right challenge it is not just wasted — it is often punished. That boy in the third row, bored and marked as a behaviour problem, was me.
What GiftedKids.in is building
India has roughly one crore gifted children in its classrooms right now — and almost none have been identified. Western IQ tests were built for English-speaking, Western children; they cannot see the gifted child who thinks in Bhojpuri, studies in a Hindi-medium school, and shows genius through mechanical curiosity. So at GiftedKids.in we are building India’s first observational identification framework — based on how a child engages with the world, not a test score — alongside an advocacy toolkit for parents and a searchable map of scholarships and programmes.
I am not building it alone. My co-founders are Khushboo Sachdev, founder and CEO of Su-vastika and a Government of India patent holder in IoT energy management, and Dr. Inderbir Kaur Sandhu, who holds a PhD in gifted education from the University of Cambridge and has worked with high-ability children since 1996.
If your child finishes the chapter before the teacher does, questions every rule, or scores average yet clearly thinks deeply — read the honest, India-specific guide at GiftedKids.in, or read the full founding story. I spent forty-seven years without a word for who I was. No child in India should have to wait that long.
— Kunwer Sachdev · Founder of Su-Kam & Su-vastika · Co-founder of GiftedKids.in