Mind your own business!
Rashmi Bansal works with entrepreneurs. After a successful book on IIM graduates she has now chosen a different kind of entrepreneur to write about. Those who do not have fancy degrees, VC funding, great ideas, or backups. The 20 people Rashmi talks about in her book Connect the Dots are average young people, who in the 80s and 90s redefined the rules in whichever business they entered and scripted massive successes.
Rashmi’s stories are freewheeling interviews. She sketches a brief on the entrepreneur and then goes on to detail the life of the person she is interviewing. I liked that in all cases she showed where someone came from, what was his or her family like, education, social and economic status. That gives life to the story she is telling.
The next part of her stories is the manner in which the entrepreneur educated himself and found his path. Take Kunwer Sachdev of Su-Kam inverters, who combined his knowledge of TV cables with power storage devices, or Sunitha Ramanathkar of Fem Care who chose not to sit at home after her second child and made the fairness bleach cream. Also, how when these entrepreneurs got an idea they all did/learnt everything to make it work. What drove them was the hunger for knowledge and success.
Connect the Dots is a story-based history of new business in the last two decades — the age of the New Economic Policy. If Satyajit Singh of Shakti Sudha Industries on one hand personifies the struggle in Bihar, Hanmant Gaikwad of BVG shows how to bridge the plurality of Indian states on the other.
Rashmi plays with English, many a times with a generous sprinkling of Hindi. She does that to give us a glimpse of the entrepreneurs’ thinking. The writing could have been better and she could have avoided clichés, but who cares. We are interested in the meat of the stories and there is enough of it. However, I did feel the stories were a bit too linear. Rashmi does bring up the setbacks in the lives of each entrepreneur but glosses over them. If she had dwelt on the human emotion and drama we could have a mini series like Made in Japan by Akio Morita.
Also, I am sure there are many more women in the Indian business who have done well. By talking only about two women in 20 stories, Rashmi let go of a huge section of the business community. But maybe that is her idea for a next book.
Amandeep Sandhu is the author of Sepia Leaves
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