Four thousand five hundred employees from Enron Corp. in Houston were laid off in the golden energy company’s collapse. Some found new industry jobs, some turned to teaching to fill the public school shortage, many more are still on unemployment. Hundreds fill their days testifying to congressional committees and filing lawsuits against their former employer. A few creative types sell Enron memorabilia on E-bay, and a few others, like Sandeep Kohli, are using the Enron experience to create new companies of their own.

Kohli, who hails from Delhi, followed the path of many bright young people to the Indian Institutes of Technology. He then went on to Cornell University on a scholarship. But instead of engineering, he found a better fit with energy management — and then he found Enron.

“I was in (Washington) D.C. consulting, and I said, ‘Who is this crazy company that wants to put a power plant in India?’ But as I followed the project over the years, I was amazed Enron was able to do what they did. They did what I thought was impossible.” Kohli speaks with genuine affection toward Enron and the Dabhol Power Co., despite the demise of one and the fracturing of the other.

He is not bitter — although he can be cutting in his remarks — and he often slips into the “we” pronoun when referring to Enron. He speaks of his seven and a half years with the company as an idyll in a corporate Camelot; and, like Geneviere, he sees the folly that brought the downfall.

Kohli was everything Enron wanted: brilliant, international, well groomed and articulate. They hired him in 1994 and rotated him through the associate pool, where he learned international strategy and power marketing. He ended up in Enron Global Services, which oversaw the Dabhol Power Co., an ambitious energy plant on the western coast of Maharashtra that was to be the shining example of foreign investment in emerging markets.

For years he jetted back and forth from India to Houston, working on various aspects of restructuring Enron’s contracts with the Maharashtra State Electric Board. He served as vice-president of development of phase two and oversaw commercial operations.

But, like Enron itself, the promise turned out to be too good to be true. In January 2001 he came back to Houston for good. Phase two was never finished, and within a few months all parties involved in the project were threatening to close it down. “If it was a failure,” says Kohli, “it was because of a lack of focus by Enron and a lack of management experience by India.”

Kohli puts blame on both sides, as do most energy experts. But he adds that Enron failed to marry itself with its host country; instead, it tried to plop down a little bit of American corporate culture in Asia. In the end, he felt that the thing that drew him to Enron — its international focus — was cast aside in favor of energy trading. “It was a Houstonian company looking to be international, with a mind-set that never went beyond the U.S.”

So he returned for good to his home in Houston’s historic Heights area, with his wife and new baby daughter. Unfortunately, within months the Enron structure itself would come crumbling down.

“I lost all of my 401(k), and everything that was in stocks is zero,” he says. But Kohli misses more than that. “Absolutely I was making a lot of money, and the money was nice. But I really liked the job. It was the feeling of making a positive difference, and I miss that.”

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