Reenita Malhotra Hora on Penning an Unwritten Chapter of India Inc.

“This book really is the memoirs of my late father,” she says, referring to RK Malhotra, who, to put it in her words, “hand-built, literally with his own two hands, India’s razor blade industry.” She is careful with the word industry. “I use it very specifically because it goes beyond factories or brands. He created an entire ecosystem—machines, steel processing, supply chains—everything, with one idea in mind: the highest quality blade at the lowest possible price, for every man in India.”

Growing up, this world was her everyday reality. “Our dinner table conversations were never about homework or algebra,” she recalls. “They were about steel, factories, shipments, markets.” Though she insists she was never a STEM child, the knowledge stayed with her. “It’s lived experience. It’s at the tip of my fingers.” Yet, like most children, she resisted it. “Razor blades were not my first love,” she laughs. “And honestly, even if they were, I come from a very traditional Punjabi family. Daughters didn’t enter the family business. That was never an option.”

What was an option, however, was storytelling. Over the years, as her own career unfolded across journalism, books, and screenwriting, one truth became clear. “Of all the stories I have written, fiction or nonfiction, this one kept pulling me back.” It wasn’t just because she knew it intimately. “Here was a man who shaped three generations of men,” she says. “A boy becomes a man when he shaves. That alone makes this story symbolic. It’s a coming-of-age story—not just for him, but for Indian FMCG, for shaving products, and for masculinity in post-Independence India.”

Still, the book didn’t happen easily. For years, she asked her father for permission. “I told him again and again, Papa, this needs to be a book. And he would say, ‘I am not ready. In my own time.’ That went on for more than a decade.” The turning point came unexpectedly. After a fall left him bedridden, he finally agreed to speak into a recorder. “It didn’t really work,” she admits. “And I realised two things—maybe he was finally ready, and I needed to be there in person.”

That moment arrived in October 2020, amid the uncertainty of COVID. Reenita flew from California to London after a long quarantine to spend time with her parents. “On the second day, my father just started talking. I recorded fourteen and a half hours.” She pauses. “I really felt like the stars were aligning. Like this was a message from somewhere beyond us.”

Writing the book, however, was emotionally complex. “Thank God I am an author,” she says candidly. “Because the material was all over the place. He would jump from A to Z to F. And my parents had no sympathy. They just said, ‘You are the journalist, you figure it out.’” Her experience helped her do exactly that—shape chaos into coherence. But there was another challenge: distance. “I had to separate him as my father from him as a character,” she explains. “To understand him as an ambitious man, not just the parent I had conflict with.”

That distance revealed uncomfortable truths. “His first love in life was the double-edged blade,” she says plainly. “Not family, not relationships. Everything came at the cost of that blade.” She doesn’t judge it outright. Instead, she reflects. “Was it blind ambition? Yes. Was it a self-imposed conflict? Often. But was it a life worth remembering? Absolutely.”

One of the most striking examples of that ambition appears in the story of Topaz and Supermax. Reenita recounts how her father foresaw being edged out of a family-owned brand and quietly built recognition for his own company name—Vidyut—before launching Supermax. “By the time he was forced to stop manufacturing Topaz, the market already trusted him. Supermax didn’t rise overnight—it was prepared for.”

This ability to anticipate, adapt, and survive is something RK Malhotra himself described through a concept he called jungle law. “He believed there are three kinds of law,” Reenita explains. “Statutory law, corporate law, and jungle law—survival of the fittest. If you don’t understand that, you don’t build anything.”

Writing the book changed her understanding of ambition altogether. “I wrote most of it the year after he died. I remember walking on the sands of Southern California, watching my footprints disappear with the waves. And I thought, that’s the difference. My father’s soul print will never leave me, but time will forget him if this story isn’t told.”

That realisation reframed everything. “When I look at leaders like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk, I see the same thing—brilliance, contention, difficult relationships. Was it easy for the people around them? No. Was it worth it? Almost everyone says yes.” For Reenita, ‘Ace of Blades’ is not just biography—it is reckoning, healing, and preservation. “This was a man whose work happened before the internet, before documentation. There was nothing out there. And this is a very important piece of Indian history.”

She smiles gently as the conversation winds down. “More than reviews,” she says, “I want to know how the book touched people. That’s what matters.”

"A boy becomes a man when he shaves. That alone makes this story symbolic. It’s a coming-of-age story—not just for him, but for Indian FMCG, for shaving products, and for masculinity in post-Independence India," says Reenita Malhotra Hora about chronicling her father RK Malhotra’s business story in ‘Ace of Blades’. Watch the video to know more about the story behind the book ‘Ace of Blades’ in DC Conversations.