You will be in our hearts forever.

2. Who is Manoj Kumar Sharma?
Zafar Anjum | Jan. 17, 2014
- See more at: http://www.cio-asia.com/mgmt/legal/who-is-
manoj-kumar-sharma/#sthash.G18uAX3V.dpuf

3. A born entrepreneur, India's Manoj Kumar Sharma
started his business forays at a very young age.

4. In the summer of 1977, when still in high school,
he embarked on his first business idea. Hitting upon
the fact that a lot of government employees could not
avail the leave travel allowance (LTA) due to shortage
of funds, he ingeniously put together a programme
which allowed the traveler to undertake his entire trip
within the budget by travelling by a Bus. This later
came to be known as a LTC bus and till date is very
popular amongst holiday goers.

5. As part of his professional career, he joined a
computer company called PCL in 1984. It was here
he possibly brought in an innovative way of
transactions with the government agencies. He
convinced the then government superstore called
Kendriya Bhandar to stock his company's products.
What this allowed the government institutions to do
was to buy products from this superstore with going
the long and tedious tendering process which was
fraught with lacuna.

6. In 1990, he decided to turn into an entrepreneur and
joined the board of a company called CMS and
became its director of marketing. Here, along with
another co-worker, he laid out a plan to revamp the
entire road signaling system of India. A majority of
the traffic lights in the country are even today
upgraded and maintained by CMS.

7. In 1994, Sharma started his own company called
Lanbit along with a friend. This company started a
new distribution methodology where the sub-
distributors imported the products directly from the
factory, thereby inducing transparency and brining
down the cost of operations dramatically. He also
brought in a unique product called as CD-Serv for
library automations.

8. While Lanbit was doing well, he launched his next
venture Tulsient. He now launched a VOIP service
called Our Free Phone, an Internet based telephony
company.
Tulsient also became a premier software company in
the area of developing software for the direct
marketing industry and also used to maintain the
websites of clients across the world.
In 2009 he launched his largest project ever,
SpeakAsia Online, which is now facing a ban in India.

9. Zafar Anjum (Author) with Late Manoj Kumar Sharma
On December 24 last year, when most people in
Singapore carried on with their lives in a festive
mood, preparing to celebrate Christmas, I was
walking towards a hospital to meet a terminally-ill
patient.
The patient in question was Manoj Kumar Sharma,
53, the CEO of SpeakAsia. SpeakAsia, a Singapore-
registered e-commerce company, has been in the eye
of a scandalous storm in India since 2011.

10. Sharma had contacted me a year ago and we had met
at a café in Orchard Road. My nonfiction book, The
Resurgence of Satyam, had just been published in
India and Sharma wanted me to write a book on the
SpeakAsia story.

11. Sharma is a tall and lanky Mumbai-man who has an
oval face with a prominent moustache. Sharma's
contention was that while the government had hastily
moved in on his company and was in a hurry to
declare it an illegal outfit, he wanted to tell his story-
explain his business model and prove that it was not a
Ponzi scheme. India's people, and especially the 2.4
million of his company's panellists (consumers and
supporters), deserved to hear his side of the story as,
so far, Indian media had not given him a fair chance,
he said.

12. At that time, I had not heard of SpeakAsia at all.
What was his story exactly? And was it worth telling? I
was not so sure about it.

13. In our first meeting, Sharma tried to convince me
that his story deserved a telling and that more than
anything else, he wanted to restore his reputation. His
family, he said, did not deserve to live with the
ignominy of being related to a swindler.

14. His wife was in Mumbai and police had impounded
her passport. He could not travel to India for fear of
getting arrested. All his companies' bank accounts in
India had been frozen. And he did not have much
longer to live. He was in a limbo, a man on the run,
living on borrowed time. It had all the elements of a
compelling narrative.

15. I was hooked to the story. I wanted to hear more
about it. However, right after doing the Satyam book,
I was not keen to spend a few more months doing
another book on another scam in India. The timing
also did not seem to be right as the police were still
investigating the case.

16. After the police filed the provisional charge sheet
against SpeakAsia on 19 December, Sharma contacted
me again to provide an update.

17. That's when I met him again in a Singapore hospital.
When I entered his room, he lay supine on a bed,
reading a book. He welcomed me with a smile and sat
back. He seemed to have lost more hair and looked
thinner.

19. Source :
http://www.cio-asia.com/mgmt/legal/who-is-manoj-kumar-sharma/
http://www.computerworld.com.sg/tech/industries/the-speakasia-story-e-commerce

20. A
TRIBUTE
from
Aman Azad
{Excerpts from Zafar Anjum’s blog}