"I ALWAYS FOLLOW MY DREAM And Believe In What I Do"

Hailing from a humble, middle-class family with a substantial academic background, leaving a secured high-paying job at Indian Oil to chase the entrepreneurial dream and finally establishing a 'Make in India' bootstrap startup with his provident fund savings thirty-five years back, an IIT alumnus and first-generation entrepreneur, Dr Mahesh Gupta, Founder Chairman of Kent RO Systems, continues his magnificent journey. In a conversation with Sudeshna Das, Consulting Editor at EFY, he shares the tale of his life

- Sudeshna Das

Born in New Delhi on 24 September 1954, Dr Mahesh Gupta comes from a well-knit, educated, middle-class family. His father, an insightful graduate with a strong focus on his children's education, was a government employee under the Ministry of Finance.

"All my siblings have had excellent education because of encouragement from my parents. While my elder brother, nine years older than me, passed out from IIT Kanpur, all my sisters went to Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi. My third sister also did her master's from IIT Delhi. I followed in their footsteps." Mahesh describes his mother as "a homemaker" and considers her to be "quite passionate and affectionate." Mahesh has five siblings, as he describes, "I have an elder brother and four sisters."

He continues, "My father strongly believed that unless you have a good education, you will not come up in your life. He felt that in the years after partition, education would have the most important role in one's career. Therefore, he was not building us to be entrepreneurs. He was building us to be bureaucrats or technocrats. He wanted to see us pursue a good professional service career."

Looking back to the early years, Mahesh spent his childhood days at Lodhi Road, an area surrounded by heritage monuments in New Delhi. While narrating memories of his childhood days, he recalls, "We, the middle-income group people, did not have financial strength. We had no vehicle of our own. My father used to commute to the office by riding a bicycle."

Mahesh describes his school experience at Diwan Chand Arya Public School as a humble but spiritual experience. He picked up some of the spiritual lessons at an early age from his school. In the later stage of life, he found a great spiritual mentor and continues his spiritual learning to date.