New Delhi, March 7 -- In 1909, a 25-year-old with a failed stationery shop and a cotton-ginning factory behind him arrived at his family's company. He had spent the intervening years working as a munim for a contractor in Rawalpindi. His uncle had co-founded Delhi Cloth & General Mills (DCM), now run by his father.

The business was small, with little room for the failed son, and, as the man's biography, Lala Shri Ram: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, by Sonu Bhasin notes, it took a contractor's unsolicited letters of praise before he was grudgingly admitted, without a role or a rupee in pay.

In the startup lexicon of 2026, that man, Shri Ram, would be written off as a failure who had taken refuge in a salaried job. The judgment would have been...