I have never really left the shop
I didn’t learn business in any classroom. I learned it as a small boy, standing on my toes behind my father’s counter.
He ran a little kirana store in Shivaji Park, Punjabi Bagh. On some evenings he would let me sit in his place — a child pretending to be the shopkeeper, weighing out dal, dropping coins into a steel box, trying to remember who still owed a few rupees and who would pay next week. I didn’t understand it then, but that small shop was quietly teaching me everything I would ever need to know: that a customer is a relationship, not a transaction — and that in a neighbourhood store, trust is the only currency that truly matters.
Money was tight at home. So when my elder brother began selling pens, I went with him. The two of us walked shop to shop, door to door, asking strangers to buy just one more pen. Some days people smiled and bought. Many days they waved us away without looking up. You learn a great deal about people — and about yourself — selling pens on the street as a boy. Most of all, you learn how to be told “no,” and to knock on the very next door anyway.
In 1988 I started out with a small cable‑TV business in the lanes of Delhi. Ten years later, in 1998, I turned it into Su‑Kam Power Systems — and built it, from a garage, into one of the largest power companies this country had ever seen, reaching homes in more than 70 countries. In 2006, Temasek of Singapore and Reliance backed us with a 20% stake. The industry gave me a name I never asked for — the “Inverter Man of India” — and later, as I helped lead the country’s shift to rooftop solar, it began calling me the “Solar Man of India” too. I found myself on the covers of Forbes India, India Today and The Economic Times.
I have stood at the very top, and I have watched a company I built with my own two hands slip through my fingers. That fall broke something in me. It also, in time, taught me more than any of my successes ever did — because it carried me right back to the beginning. Back to a little boy behind a counter, counting coins into a steel box. I never really left that shop. I don’t think I ever will.
Building again — this time with AI
And now, in a chapter I never saw coming, I am building once more. I have started kunwwer.ai to create a new kind of software — flexible, intelligent and human — made to replace the rigid old systems that never once bent to the people using them. And the most astonishing part, for a man my age: AI has let me build these tools myself — to code without ever having learned how to code. ContoDesk is the very first of them.
Why I built ContoDesk
Everywhere I travel in this country, I still see him — the shopkeeper my father was. Running a busy store on scraps of paper and pure memory. Smiling at customers while quietly worrying about the udhaar written in a dog‑eared notebook. Watching the big showrooms get shiny billing machines he could never justify buying for himself. Those machines were made for supermarkets and malls. No one ever built anything for the kirana on the corner — the very backbone of every Indian street. So I decided to.
Just your phone
No costly machine, no computer, no setup fee.
Bills on WhatsApp
A printer only if you want one — most customers prefer WhatsApp or email.
Cash & udhaar
Both — because that’s how a real shop actually breathes.
Simple Hinglish
Start billing in minutes, even if you’ve never touched software.
This one is personal. It is the tool I wish my father had had, on all those evenings behind his counter. If it helps even the smallest shopkeeper keep a clean hisaab and get paid what he is owed, then the boy who once sold pens door to door has finally come home.
Billing built for the corner shop
No hardware. Cash & udhaar. Bills on WhatsApp. In Hinglish.
Explore ContoDesk