Chapter 11: Building in the Storm
The early winter of 1982 had arrived, and with it, the persistent fog that clung to the old rooftops of Lucknow like the city's own sleepy blanket. But there was no sleep at the Nirmaan Technologies campus—Ajay Singh's company was wide awake, bustling, growing… and struggling.
Ajay stood near the delivery dock of their small industrial shed-turned-lab, arms crossed, jaw clenched. A large wooden crate sat unopened in front of him, marked "DELHI AIRPORT CUSTOMS – HOLD RELEASE". It had taken almost six weeks to arrive. Inside were fragile IC chips and color display drivers ordered from Singapore, now desperately needed for their next batch of experimental Indian-made color TVs.
Behind him, the building hummed—less from power and more from people. The air was alive with the sound of soldering irons, the clack of typewriters, a hammer somewhere in the workshop. On the second floor, Vikram was leading a team discussion about graphics modules. In the other room, Anil Kapoor was laying out plans for a Hindi-based document editor.
Ajay took a slow sip of lukewarm tea from a steel cup and muttered, "We have the minds… if only we had the means."
Riding the High – and Facing the Heat
After the success of the BhashaCode programming system and their prototype color television, Ajay's company had become a name in Lucknow's small tech circuit. Newspapers like The Pioneer called them "India's garage visionaries." They received modest government support, some positive attention from education boards, and even a minor tax relief from the state.
But success brought its own set of battles.
The demand for color TVs was growing, especially since Delhi Doordarshan had started trial colour broadcasts. But scaling production wasn't easy. Import licenses for electronic components were limited and delayed. Custom duties were high. And worst of all—government paperwork moved at the pace of a bullock cart.
Ajay's small but ambitious company couldn't depend on foreign parts forever.
Splitting the House – Team by Team
It was in a packed team meeting one afternoon that Ajay made his next big move.
"We need to stop waiting," he said, standing before a chalkboard. "From now on, we divide Nirmaan into task forces. We don't wait for help. We build our own ladder."
The company was split into five specialized units:
Electra Unit – Hardware design and testing. Responsible for building display panels, motherboards, and integrating video chips.
Antariksha Team – Software and GUI design, now expanding into early vector graphics and primitive animation tools.
Tarang Division – Dedicated to communications tech—exploring video signals, waveform transmission, and simple telecom interfaces.
Vidya Core – Focused on schools, curriculum, and teacher training, working with BhashaCode and the Hindi OS.
Sankalp Office – Legal, licensing, patent filing, and grant writing. Managed by a former law student from Banaras, now their in-house warrior.
They set up a small factory floor in an old textile warehouse Ajay's family once owned. Raghav, his brother, helped convert the space—negotiating materials, hiring carpenters, and even lending staff from the textile side.
Professor Joshi and the IIT Network
Ajay hadn't forgotten his roots. He reached back to IIT Kanpur. With help from Professor Rajendra Joshi and others, he invited top students from the electrical and computer science departments to Lucknow every semester. They called it the "Tech Sewa Internship". In exchange for training, students would work on live projects. Some stayed. Some returned with ideas.
One of them, a shy boy from Kerala named Mohan, designed a low-power CRT stabilizer that saved over ₹200 on every TV set. Another girl, Deepika from Madurai, helped improve the Hindi font rendering engine by adapting Sanskrit diacritics to Devanagari.
Ajay paid them modest stipends—but gave them credit in every report, every press note.
Bharat—Watching from the Shadows
Meanwhile, young Bharat, barely seven, had become a quiet fixture at the company. He would walk into the labs after school, schoolbag in one hand, a geometry box in the other. He rarely interrupted, but always observed.
Sometimes, he would watch Vikram draw pixel layouts and whisper, "What if the picture moved?" Or he would tap the screen gently and ask, "Can this talk back to us someday?"
The adults often laughed off his questions. But Ajay didn't. He had begun to see that Bharat wasn't just curious—he was thinking ahead. One day, as Bharat watched a colour signal test, he muttered to himself, "They'll call it streaming, one day." Ajay overheard—and paused.
That night, he wrote in his diary: "This child sees far. Perhaps farther than we can even guess."
The Reality of 1982 – India vs the World
Outside the bubble of Nirmaan, the world was racing. In America, Apple was preparing the Lisa. IBM had just entered the personal computer market. Japan was building VHS dominance and investing heavily in robotics. Europe had launched teletext. Even Russia, though behind, was developing computer labs in schools.
And India? India had a handful of public-sector companies like ECIL and BEL, trying to match the pace with barely enough funding or freedom.
Ajay knew he wasn't competing with the West. But he didn't want India to always follow.
He told his team once:
"We're not copying the West. We are reclaiming what should've been ours. If we could dream of flying in our myths, why must we wait for planes from Boeing?"
It wasn't ego. It was belief.
The Business of Building Dreams
By late 1982, Nirmaan had more than 100 employees. They had filed four patent applications—one for the Hindi font rendering algorithm, another for their low-cost color TV tuning circuit. They had a licensing deal in progress with two state-run schools and were negotiating with Doordarshan to test educational broadcasts.
Their revenue grew from ₹1.2 lakh in 1980 to ₹12 lakhs in 1982. Not enormous—but it funded research, salaries, and expansion.
Ajay and his leadership team began visiting smaller cities—Kanpur, Patna, Allahabad—to set up micro training labs. Each one had a dual goal:
Train 20 students every 3 months.
Test Hindi OS and color TV setups in real rural conditions.
In one visit to Ballia, a schoolteacher wept as she watched her students learn to code in their mother tongue.
The Fire Within
Yet not every day was glorious. Ajay sometimes returned home past midnight, his shirt stained with ink or solder, his eyes hollowed with fatigue.
On one such evening, Bharat tiptoed to him and offered a folded sheet—his own drawing of a computer.
"This is for your next one, Pitaji," he said. "With wings, like Pushpak."
Ajay laughed softly. "Wings, huh?"
Bharat nodded. "So even poor children can fly in it."
Ajay knelt and hugged his son. Somewhere deep inside, he felt this wasn't just play. Bharat saw something the world hadn't yet seen.