Subhash Chandra, the promoter of Zee TV, Essel Packaging and Esselworld, is an unlikely mogul. Hailing from a small town in Haryana, where his family ran grain mills, Chandra has been a perennial outsider, repeatedly aiming high and breaking into businesses where he was considered an interloper. Starting work as a teen to pay off family debts, Chandra had to rely on bluff, bluster and gumption, and sheer hard labour, to turn things around. A little bit of luck and political patronage saw him make a fortune in rice exports to Russia. A risk-taker, he then had the vision of getting into broadcasting early, even as established media players failed to see its potential. Several new forays followed including failed attempts at launching a satellite and a cricket league but the man continues to reinvent himself: he is now also focusing on infrastructure and education. This is an unusually candid memoir of a truly desi self-made businessman who came to Delhi at age twenty with seventeen rupees in his pocket. Today, he has a net worth of $ 6.3 billion and his group revenues are nearly $ 3 billion.