New Delhi, July 12 -- Gunjan Kapadia was 30, married, and seven years into a stable career when he decided to quit his well-paying job. That trope's quite the familiar route to modern-day entrepreneurship. Except Kapadia had decided to take a long detour that had his close ones flummoxed. He wasn't starting up. Well, not yet.

Kapadia was returning to the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras from where he had acquired an MTech degree six years earlier. This time for a PhD in chemical engineering.

"I was making much more money. I was married at that point," Kapadia recalls. "My wife was very supportive. [But] my family was a bit sceptical. They kept asking, 'Why do you want to go for a PhD? You can get a job.'"

He wasn't pursuing a doc...