Life Story of Jaspreet Batra

There is a particular kind of courage that doesn't announce itself. It doesn't wait for permission, doesn't calculate the odds, doesn't pause to ask if it knows how to swim. It simply moves. Jaspreet has lived his whole life this way, leaping first, figuring out the rest on the way down.

He was born and raised in Chandigarh, in a household that, on paper, pointed him towards a very different life. Both his parents worked government jobs, steady, secure, predictable. But it was his mother's side of the family, most of them entrepreneurs, that captured his imagination. "I always wanted to do my own business," he says simply. He wasn't talking about someday. He started at sixteen years, he was in it for real, India's direct marketing industry was just being born, and he threw himself into it, moving to Chennai for a year and a half to learn the trade from the ground up.

What followed was not a straight line to success. It was fifteen years of trial, error, and honest failure. He returned to Chandigarh and started a business with two friends, expanding into neighbouring cities, until the partnership dissolved and each went their own way. He tried selling televisions, refrigerators, washing machines. He ran a confectionery shop. He sold electrical goods and audio cassettes, then took over a hardware and plumbing store when a neighbour vacated it. None of it stuck. "The way business is carried out in the North is totally different," he reflects. "You have to be very strict with the payments, and there is where I lagged." He doesn't dress it up. He simply names what didn't work.

By 2006, at thirty-one, he made the leap that would define the rest of his career: a move to Hyderabad to learn an unfamiliar new trade called corporate gifting. Six months later, he launched his own venture in Bangalore. That business, now known as Yash Gifts, has lasted twenty years, by far the longest of anything he's built. He watched the industry grow up around him, from the early, confused days when clients had never heard the term "corporate gifting," through the IT boom that turned project launches, employee onboardings, and office outings into occasions worth marking with a branded gift. He evolved with it too, shifting from a business-to-consumer model to business-to-business, from door-to-door pitching to fulfilling confirmed orders at scale.

But ask Jaspreet for the stories that matter most, and he doesn't talk about the business at all. He talks about a family trip to a waterfall some twenty-five years ago. Two families had gone together, enjoying the water from a safe distance, when his friend and his friend's wife slipped and were pulled toward the falls' deepest point, where the current struck hardest. Jaspreet didn't know how to swim. He jumped in anyway. The water dragged him down with the others, but somehow he got hold of his friend, who was still holding his wife close, unwilling to let go of her even as they were both pulled under, and together, carried by the same current that had nearly taken them, they came back up. Later, his friends told him that in the moment they believed they weren't going to make it, their only comfort was that their daughter hadn't been in the water with them. She had been standing safely beside Jaspreet the whole time.

It wasn't the only time his instinct to act outran his fear. As a teenager, living in a government housing block, he watched a neighbour’s gas cylinder catch fire from a loose connection while the building's parents were all away at work. While the other children scattered in panic, Jaspreet grabbed a cloth, ran toward the flame, and smothered it out.

That same reflex, to show up for people without being asked, has quietly shaped how he leads. He speaks with real pride about the employees who have passed through Yash Gifts over the years, many of whom have gone on to start similar businesses of their own. Most entrepreneurs, he notes, fear that their employees will one day become their competitors. Jaspreet has chosen the opposite instinct: he tries to develop people into independent thinkers, even knowing it might mean they eventually build something that rivals his own. At least ten have gone on to do exactly that, and he counts it as one of his proudest legacies, not a threat to it.

One story stays with him more than any other. In his late teens, a young man from a village in Punjab reached out to him, years later, over Facebook, remembering that Jaspreet once owned a book on positive thinking, he'd been unable to find anywhere else. Jaspreet tracked it down and sent it to him. That young man is now the founder of a media promotions company that works with Bollywood films. Jaspreet is careful not to overstate his part in it. "I'll not say my role is there," he says, "but yeah, of course, one thing I could do... I am very proud to see the achievements he has reached in his life."

Now past fifty, Jaspreet still starts most mornings by seven-thirty, drops his daughter off, and is at his desk by ten-thirty, filming a daily Instagram reel to promote his business. He recently took up bike riding, joining a group once a month, one of the few things he's claimed purely for himself after a working life that left little room for hobbies. He has no real plans to retire. Neither does a friend of his at Marzi, he notes with a laugh, they've agreed they'll simply "go with our boots on," because the work still gives them a kick.

Asked to describe life in his own words, he doesn't reach for anything poetic. "Challenging," he says, "is the first thing that comes to mind. Whatever we do, whatever we think, whatever we plan, every time we face challenges, and we have to find solutions." It is, in the end, exactly the sentence that describes the man who said it, someone who has never waited for the water to be calm before jumping in.