Brush With Destiny Review: From Tihar Jail to Justice

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐ (4.2 out of 5)

I have been reading and reviewing books at Deified Publication for over fifteen years now, and every so often a manuscript lands on my desk that refuses to sit in the box I expected it to. Kuldeep Mansukhani’s “Brush With Destiny” is one of those books. Looking at the contents page, nineteen chapters, a preface, an epilogue, I assumed this would be another polished corporate success story. Instead it moves from a government hospital room in Delhi all the way to the overcrowded barracks of Tihar Jail, and I had to sit with that for a while before I could start writing this review.

This is a memoir about a man who walked away from a secure corporate career to try building something of his own, inspired by the leadership style of Narasimha Rao and Manmohan Singh. Mansukhani had spent years as a senior manager in some of northern India’s largest business houses before deciding to become a first generation promoter, in a system that was already stacked against newcomers like him. The book runs from a childhood spent moving between cities, through a corporate climb, into an entrepreneurial leap, a sudden fall, months inside Tihar Jail, and finally a second career as a lawyer.

What got me most were the early chapters, where the small domestic details are written with real care. In Ahmedabad’s Laal Darwaja neighbourhood, an area known at the time for communal tension, the author remembers his parents having low voiced arguments about money at night. The electricity bill due tomorrow, school fees, rent, small worries that a child could still sense even when the adults tried to keep them hidden. He also mentions that the financial stress of those years led his mother to develop hypertension at the age of twenty two. Reading that section made me think of so many households I have known where money was never discussed openly, only in half whispers over dinner.

Another moment that got to me is how the author writes his grandparents’ Partition story. His grandmother told it in short bursts, as if saying too much would open a door she preferred to keep closed. “We left before sunrise,” she would say, folding laundry, as though the memory were just another household chore. His grandfather’s version, on the other hand, was almost businesslike, the train was packed, people were on the roof, others hanging off the sides, and he kept his hand on the trunk the whole way. Placing these two accounts of the same event side by side, one clipped and guarded, the other practical and unemotional, shows a level of craft I did not expect from a book that is mostly about business and law.

Then there is the section that shows the author’s early promise. Winning thirty eight prizes out of seventy five at his college convocation in March 1978 is a genuinely impressive detail, but what struck me more was his mention of being called the “dark sheep” of the family, half affectionately, because his brother was considered fair and good looking while he was not. That kind of honest, slightly self deprecating admission is what keeps a memoir grounded instead of turning into a highlight reel.

The real weight of the book arrives once the story reaches Tihar Jail. The author describes a facility built for ten thousand inmates holding more than twenty thousand, and how sections of law like 420 of the IPC were routinely misapplied against business promoters awaiting trial. The story of Prabhu, a chartered accountant jailed without proper verification of the allegations against him, who was later acquitted and went on to become a general manager at a petroleum company, is one I kept coming back to while writing this review. Harjeet Singh’s case, where loans sanctioned beyond his authority cost him three months in custody, adds to a pattern the author lays out clearly, that the machinery meant to establish guilt often fails to distinguish between genuine fraud and ordinary business risk. It is this period, more than any boardroom triumph, that clearly shaped the author’s later decision to practice law for people who cannot afford to fight back on their own, including a vegetable vendor whose dignity he helped restore in a later chapter.

I do want to be honest about one thing. The epilogue, compared to the specificity of the earlier chapters, leans much more into broad, reflective statements about resilience and destiny rather than staying anchored in scene and detail. The Tihar chapters work because they show you a particular inmate, a particular case, a particular injustice. The epilogue tells you what it all means instead of showing you, and I think the book would have closed even stronger if it had trusted its own material the way the middle chapters do.

The emotional core of “Brush With Destiny” sits in that contrast between small domestic hardship and large institutional failure. By the time the author reaches his work with the Rotary Club of Delhi Ridge, supporting AIDS treatment programmes and helping set up a cancer ward at AIIMS, the book feels less like a rise and fall story and more like a rise, fall, and then a decision to spend the rest of one’s life helping others avoid the same fall. His wife Rajlaxmi, whom he also calls Sunita, scolding him for taking on ten to fifteen pro bono cases every month, and the gift of handmade files from a man named Aslam after his release from Tihar, are the kind of small human touches that make this feel like an actual life rather than a business case study.

If you are an aspiring entrepreneur, someone interested in how India’s legal system treats white collar cases, or a reader who enjoys memoirs built on real institutional detail rather than motivational language, this book is worth your time. Readers looking for a fast paced, dramatic read might find the opening chapters slower going, but anyone willing to sit with a real, occasionally uncomfortable account of failure and rebuilding will find it rewarding.

Taken as a whole, “Brush With Destiny” is strongest when it stays close to specific people and specific moments, the whispered arguments in Ahmedabad, the two different voices telling one Partition story, the individual inmates fighting cases inside Tihar. Kuldeep Mansukhani has written this with more honesty about his own failures than most business memoirs allow themselves, and that honesty is what makes the book land.

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FAQ

Is “Brush With Destiny” worth reading? Yes, particularly if you are drawn to real accounts of business failure, legal battles, or entrepreneurship in India rather than a polished success narrative.

Who should read “Brush With Destiny”? Aspiring entrepreneurs, business leaders, readers interested in India’s legal system, and anyone who enjoys a personal memoir grounded in specific detail.

Is this book only about business? No. It covers family history, Partition memory, failures in the justice system, and later chapters on social service work.

What is Kuldeep Mansukhani’s writing style like? Direct and honest for most of the book. It leans more reflective and general in the epilogue, but the earlier chapters move through scene and detail rather than statement.