New Delhi

ForKaran Adani, the past three years have been less about watching a business leader navigate a crisis and more about watching a father carry a burden.

In a deeply personal note, the managing director of Adani Ports reflected on what it was like to watch his father, billionaire Gautam Adani, navigate the turbulence that followed the Hindenburg Research report and subsequent US Department of Justice proceedings.

"Over the last three years, through the Hindenburg attack on the Adani Group and the US DOJ proceedings, I was asked one question more than any other: What is it like, as a son, to watch your father endure all of this?" Karan wrote in a post on LinkedIn.

Karan said he struggled to answer the question while the events were unfolding.

"Now that it is behind us, I can."

There were mornings when another headline, accusation or judgment greeted him, he said.

"I felt anger. I felt concerned. And, as a son, I often wondered, how much should one man have to absorb?"

But what stayed with him, he said, was not the noise.

It was watching his father go to work.

"My Father Kept Going to Work."

"It sounds like such an ordinary statement. It was anything but ordinary," Karan wrote.

He said resilience was often imagined as something dramatic - a speech, a show of defiance or a promise to prove critics wrong. What he saw instead was his father simply returning to the work in front of him every morning.

"Projects still had to be built. People still depended on us. Ports had to run. Power had to reach homes and businesses. Airports had to serve passengers. Investments whose results would be seen only decades later still had to be made."

"India had not paused because our family was living through a storm. And neither did he."

For Karan, the experience also changed his understanding of the man he had always known simply as "Papa".

"Papa always had an extraordinary ability to focus on the task in front of him," he wrote.

"Work speaks for itself" has always been his instinct, Karan said.

The experience, he added, made him understand more deeply why his father had devoted his life to infrastructure and what he describes as nation-building.

"For him, these were never slogans," he wrote.

Gautam Adani has built the group around infrastructure and energy businesses ranging from ports and airports to power and other sectors, with investments often requiring a long-term view.

His ports-to-energy group never slowed during the three years of turbulence. It invested more than Rs 2.08 lakh crore in the second half of FY25 and FY26, including record capital expenditure of Rs 1,52,967 crore in FY26 - the highest of any Indian corporate - while its market capitalisation recovered above pre-indictment levels.

Milestones during the period included the launch of Navi Mumbai International Airport, Adani Ports becoming India's first operator to handle over 500 million tonnes of cargo in a year, and Adani Green Energy crossing 20 gigawatts of renewable capacity. Investors, including BlackRock and Apollo Global Management, and banks like Deutsche Bank and MUFG, expanded their engagement with the Group through the proceedings.