How does a boy from the back of beyond in pre-Independence India become one of the fifty richest people in New Jersey? How does someone without any formal school education till the age of thirteen become the founder, chairman, and CEO of a billion-plus-dollar global chemical and pharmaceutical company? What does it take to overcome the adversities of life and emerge triumphant?

Paritosh M. Chakrabarti’s rich-in-detail autobiography, The Bright Side of Adversity, provides some of the answers. Unlike the dime-a-dozen biographies of the rich and the famous that tell us how to become a “well-rounded successful man”, Dr Chakrabarti’s life story, like the man himself, takes the road less travelled.