NEW DELHI: At 11.30 on the night of December 31, 2012, when all around people were partying and waiting for the clock to strike midnight, there was loud banging on K Vaitheeswaran ’s door. His wife and son cautioned him. But when it went on, Vaitheeswaran picked up courage and opened the door.A group of drunk people stood outside. They abused him, his wife and son. Threatened them. Made a big ruckus. Several neighbours heard the commotion and came out.Vaitheeswaran’s e-commerce venture IndiaPlaza.com, which he had co-founded with several others, had run out of money. The company was unable to pay many of its vendors, could not pay employee salaries. Vendors were constantly calling, often in the middle of the night, and threatening him. One vendor once came into the office, pulled out a dagger and laid it on Vaitheeswaran’s table. Some would go to his house, and warn his wife. A former employee who had not been paid threatened to sexually assault his wife.Vaitheeswaran was only one of five directors in the company. And his was a minority stake. But he was the face of the company. So everybody’s ire was directed at him.On January 1, 2013, after the horror of the previous night, and even as he received Happy New Year greetings on his mobile phone, Vaitheeswaran contemplated taking his own life.“I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t see my wife and son dealing with this,” he recollects.He had done some research that told him that if a person dies, all his debts die with him. “I’m telling you this with an enormous sense of shame, but I thought about it. And this is a thought that crosses the minds of many entrepreneurs in India. Because it’s hard to do business here.”The debts were the company’s debts, not his personal debts. But people don’t understand the difference. Indian law-keepers do little to protect entrepreneurs when people target them, rather than the company. Vaitheeswaran was from a middle-class family, and even if he had to, he wouldn’t have been personally able to pay the vendors.He says suicide is invariably a moment of madness. “That day, my wife and son feared I would do something like that, so they didn’t leave my side. But for (VG) Siddhartha, when he stood alone on that bridge, with nobody holding his hand, he may have taken that sudden decision. He may have told himself, I have not been able to sleep for so many days, if I just jump, I can sleep in peace forever. I totally get it.”On that Jan 1st, Vaitheeswaran somehow pulled himself together, and resolved to get over his depression and fight. What has helped him most in this is telling his story, so that others can learn from it. He recollects the first time he did it, to a class of IIM-Bangalore. “After the class, it was like a dam breaking. I wept.”Read this story in Marathi