The park bench. Where every great story begins — not with a plan, but with a boy who refused to stop.
He was 18 years old, and he had work to do. Mahendra picked up his books and went outside.
He was a young man in New Delhi in the late 1950s, studying Mechanical Engineering at the University of Delhi. The house was warm — no air conditioning in those days — and when it came time for serious study, the best students did what serious students did: they went outside. Tal Katora Garden was where Mahendra went. He would find a bench, open his books, and work — in the open air, with space to think, away from the noise and the heat of the house. Other students did the same. Sometimes they would study out loud, reciting and memorizing, which felt strange indoors but perfectly natural in a park.
Sometimes his parents would bring his dinner to him there. He was not going to stop to come home for a meal when he had eight hours of studying ahead of him. And so, his family came to him — dinner on a park bench in Tal Katora Garden — so he could keep going.
That image — a young man studying by lamplight in a public garden while his family brought dinner to him so he wouldn't have to stop — tells you everything you need to know about Mahendra Nath. Not what he built. Not what he earned. What he was made of.
Mahendra was born in Lahore in 1940 and grew up in New Delhi. He earned his bachelor's degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Delhi in 1961 and his master's in industrial engineering from the University of Minnesota in 1965. He came to America at 24 years old with $800 in his pocket and no connections.
"I made all my contacts right from scratch," he has said. "I did not know anybody." What he had was discipline, ambition, and the habit he had built on that bench in Tal Katora Garden: when there is work to be done, you find a way to do it.
He went to work at Sperry Corporation. He married Asha. He spent 20 years as an engineer and executive, building expertise, building savings, building the plan. And in 1985, he left to pursue the goals he had written down — because he believes, and has always believed, that writing down your goals is the first step to achieving them.
What followed is the story of Nath Companies — 50 years of it. And we are going to tell it, one week at a time, for the next 49 weeks.
Write down your dream and then write the plan to reach it.Revise as you need to, and don't stop until you reach it.It sounds like a simplistic thing, but it worked for me, and it will work for you.
— Mahendra Nath
This year, Nath Companies turns 50. To mark that milestone, we are sending one communication per week for 50 weeks — one week for every year in business. We will move through the decades together: the founding years, the growth years, the peak scale years, the pivot, and the chapter we are writing right now.
Each week we will introduce you to the people, the decisions, the setbacks, and the breakthroughs that made this company what it is. Whether you have been part of this story for 30 years or you are hearing it for the first time, it belongs to you.
It starts on a park bench in New Delhi. It continues next week.