Simply Fly

This is a story. The story of a boy who grew up in a remote village and went from riding a bullock cart to owning an airline, one that would become India's first and largest low-cost carrier.

When the young Gopinath quit the Indian Army in the late 1970s with a princely gratuity of 26,500, he returned to his family and his village in Karnataka. He then set about converting a piece of barren land into a farm for ecologically sustainable silkworm rearing, and ended up winning the Rolex Award for it. A series of business ventures followed, and his passion and steely determination saw him steer each one to success. His biggest business venture was Air Deccan. Through it, he made it possible for the common man to fly. Investors approved, and the market cap shot up to $1.1 billion in just four years, in the process rewriting aviation history in India.

Simply Fly is not just an entrepreneurial journey: it conveys the joy and richness of life in rural India, and shows the special bond of the guru-shishya relationship between a father and his son; recounts Captain Gopinath's experience of the brutal 1971 Indo-Pakistani war, and offers a window into the mind of a tireless innovator as he lives life in all its myriad colours. Above all, it is a story of triumph over adversity.