After two flop ventures in cabs and ecommerce, Shailesh Kumar joined Flipkart as a delivery boy in 2017. Six years later, the village boy from Smastipur, Bihar has built a Rs150-crore logistics company
Samastipur, Bihar. The math teacher was about to introduce two new concepts. “You can change the orders, but it won’t alter the sum or the result,” contended the tutor, explaining the commutative property of addition in algebra. If you add four to two, he shared an example with a bunch of attentive students in a state-run municipal school, you will have the same result as when you reverse the order. Similarly, a change in the order of a group of numbers doesn’t change the sum. “This is an associative property of addition,” he underscored. A few students looked perplexed.
One of the lads at the back, though, had a smirk on his face. “I completed the chapter much ahead of the others,” recalls Shailesh Kumar, revealing his natural advantage. His teacher happened to be his father who made him fall in love with math and physics. “He used to teach us at home as well,” says Kumar, who had a knack for numbers and calculations, and was blessed with a poignant sense of observation.
The perceptive quality helped the lad during his formative years in Samastipur, his hometown in Bihar. Over three-and-a-half decades back, Samastipur was a quintessential small town in an overwhelming agrarian set-up of Bihar. Life would move at a leisurely pace, the aspirations of the students would either be to become a doctor, an engineer or at best join a state government service, and the happiness quotient would always top the chart on the ‘things-to-seek list’. “Life was calculated, and so was the ‘risk and reward’ ratio,” he says.
Growing up in a one-room house with five occupants—Kumar had three siblings—the young lad clearly understood that education was the only key to upgrade his quality of life. With a modest monthly income of ₹1,400, his father did his best to take care of the family. “We were always strapped for resources,” he says. Born in 1986, Kumar grew up listening to the underdog story of the Kapil Dev-led Indian cricket team which lifted the World Cup in 1983. “He took the risk of thinking of making a career in cricket, and he got amply rewarded,” he says.
Meanwhile, in Kota, Rajasthan, Kumar was crystal clear about the risk and reward. After finishing his secondary schooling, Kumar dashed to the coaching hub to prepare for IIT. The risk was losing a year or so if he couldn’t make it in the first attempt, and the reward was a rewarding future. Well, the aspirant couldn’t make it, came back to Bihar, and prepared for other engineering examinations. That too didn’t work. His father forced him to take admission in Punjab Technical University, and Kumar completed his BTech in 2011. The next challenge was to clear the Graduate Aptitude Test in Engineering (GATE), which he did, but the gates to a golden future remained shut. Poor marks and low ranks meant one thing: He had to start from scratch.
(This story appears in the 15 December, 2023 issue of Forbes India. To visit our Archives, click here.)