He asked me for One hundred rupees. And when I said, that I am a student, he said just give ten rupees.

Sit with that number for a second. Not ten lakh. Not ten thousand or even one thousand. Ten rupees.

I was nineteen years old. I told him I didn't have it, and I wasn't being principled or clever, I was telling him the plain truth. I had exactly enough money for the fare there and the fare back, because that is what we had at home. My family's income at that time was five thousand rupees a month.

A magistrate. A gazetted officer and responsible for entire District / Tehsil (I am unclear since was visiting Tehsil). A man whose whole job is to sit between the citizen and the state and be the one clean thing in the room. Asking a broke nineteen-year-old for ten rupees, because he could. Because the asking cost him nothing.

I have carried that ten rupees around for sixteen years. Not because of the money. Because of what it taught me in about four seconds flat, which is this:

you will pay at every counter, in some currency, forever, and nobody around you will find this remarkable.

I decided that day I would never work for the government. I thought corruption was a government disease. I was so young. I actually believed there was somewhere else to go.

The mice

There is an experiment I keep coming back to.

In 2013, two researchers at Emory University, Brian Dias and Kerry Ressler, took male mice and exposed them to a fruity smell called acetophenone while giving them a mild electric shock to the foot. Standard fear conditioning. The mice learned to be afraid of that smell.

Then those mice had sons. The sons were raised completely apart from the fathers. They had never smelled acetophenone in their lives. They had never been shocked. They had no way to learn anything from anyone.

And when that smell reached them, they flinched.

So did the grandsons.

The researchers looked at the sperm of the conditioned fathers and found an actual chemical change on the gene for that particular odour receptor. The fear had not been taught. It had been handed down.

I am not saying Indians are genetically corrupt. I want to be very clear about that, because that is exactly the wrong lesson and it is the lesson that lets everybody off the hook. If it were in the blood, nothing could be done, and I would have no reason to be writing this at four in the morning.

I am saying something else.

I am saying that a fear can outlive the shock that created it. That a response can be inherited by people who never experienced the thing that caused it. That you can flinch at a smell you have never smelled, because of something that happened to somebody who came before you, and you will not know why you are flinching. You will just think that is how the world smells.

That is us. That is what I think we are. A country of people flinching at a shock that stopped centuries ago, and calling it common sense

Where the shock came from

We did not always live like this. That part matters, because there is a version of this argument that ends in self-hatred and I refuse to write that version.

We had the Cholas. We had the Guptas. We built things, we sailed, we counted, we made temples that are still standing after a thousand years of everything trying to knock them down. The capacity is not the problem. The capacity was never the problem.

But look at what got rewarded, for a very long time, and by whom.

Under the Mughals, there was jizya, there was tribute, there was a system where the people who did best were, very often, the people who arranged themselves conveniently around power. Sometimes through conversion, sometimes through service, sometimes just through knowing which way to bow and when. And the wealth of this place, temple wealth, treasure, generations of accumulated craft, went out through the passes to Central Asia and never came back.

Then the British came and did the same thing with better paperwork. Our cotton. Our spices. Our tea gardens. A man in London drank the finest leaf that grew in Assam and Darjeeling, and here we drank the dust.

Literally the dust. The grade that was left over after the good tea had sailed. And we still drink it, and we have decided that this is what tea tastes like.

And underneath the economics, the thing that actually did the damage: they needed intermediaries. They needed Indians to collect from Indians. And so an entire class was created whose prosperity depended not on building anything, not on being good at anything, but on standing between the people and the power and taking a cut for the standing.

And what happened to the ones who tried it the other way? Bhagat Singh was twenty-three. Twenty-three. He gets a paragraph, a stamp, a road name, a movie every few years. Meanwhile the families who played it correctly, who supplied and collected and stayed useful, came out of the whole period with land and titles and standing that their great-grandchildren are still living off today.

What it looks like now

Here is the shape of it today, and I am going to keep this short, because the details of any one case are just gossip and the pattern is the actual argument.

Walk into any large enterprise in this country as a vendor and the first thing you will do is sign a document. In that document there will be a clause about kickbacks. Zero tolerance. Not permitted. Report immediately.

And then you will deal with the people inside that same building, and some meaningful number of them will have their hand out. Not dramatically. Nobody says the word. It arrives as a gift, a favour, a delay that resolves itself once the right conversation has happened somewhere else.

Both of those things are true at once and nobody in the building experiences it as a contradiction. That is the part that should frighten us. Not that people take money. People take money everywhere on earth. It is that here it does not register as an event. It is weather.

We have all agreed on a comfortable lie that corruption is a sarkari problem. When I was young I watched a relative in a PSU submit hotel bills for stays that never happened, an invoice bought for the price of the tax on it, plus ten percent for the man who supplied it. That is what made me swear off government work. I went to the private sector because I thought that is where merit lived.

The private sector is not clean. The private sector has the same hand out, just with better English and a lanyard.

And it changes what gets built. If the deal does not go to the best product, then being the best product stops being a strategy. There is a road here in Pune that people will point out to you. Built years ago, built properly, still in good condition, which in this country is close to a miracle. The company that built it, so the story goes, never got another project. A good road that lasts twenty years is a road nobody gets to rebuild, and nobody gets a cut of a road that isn't being rebuilt.

Do the work well and you remove yourself from the food chain. That is the actual incentive we have built.

The begging bowl

And then, having made it hard to build anything here, we go abroad and beg.

We take the plane, we take the delegation, we take the photographs. Please come. Please invest. Please set up here. We will give you the land, we will give you the power, we will give you the people. We will build your data centres for you.

Why the hell are we building *their* data centres? Why can't we build our own? Why can't we build our own model, on our own compute, on our own data, for our own market?

Because our engineers, trained here, on institutions paid for here, are the ones building those systems in the US and Europe. Small countries with a fraction of our population have figured out how to hire the best of us, and we call it a proud diaspora moment. Then we go and present India to them as a market. On a platter. As consumers, not as builders.

Somebody will read the history of this period in fifty years and struggle to believe it. That a country with this much engineering talent chose to be a customer.

And the same man who could not get a fair deal here gets on a plane, does brilliantly somewhere else, and spends the rest of his life telling anyone who will listen that this country is hopeless.

He is not wrong about what happened to him. He is just wrong about what it was.

We are not a spiritual country

We say it constantly. Spiritual country, ancient wisdom, land of dharma.

We are one of the most chaotic societies on earth, and I have come to believe it is because we have almost none of it left. We kept the rituals and threw away the content.

Look at any street. Our homes are immaculate. Spotless, scrubbed, shoes off at the door. And four feet outside the door, filth. Because the house is mine and the street is nobody's. There is no *we*. There is only mine, and outside-mine.

That is not a small thing. Almost everything else in this essay comes from that. The man with his hand out is not a villain. He simply does not experience you as part of anything he belongs to. There is his family, and there is everything else, and everything else is fair game.

When Krishna talks to Arjuna, the whole argument is about dharma, and the thing people miss is that it is not about being nice. Arjuna's dharma was to fight. Krishna's dharma in that moment was to counsel. Your dharma is the thing that is actually yours to do, done properly, done without negotiating with yourself about the outcome.

If you have a job, that is your dharma. There is no higher spiritual practice available to you than doing your own work honestly. That is the whole thing. And it is the one thing we do not do.

karmanye vadhikaraste ma phaleshu kadachana

You have a right to the work. Never to its fruits.

And the line I keep next to it, from the third chapter:

better your own dharma done imperfectly than another man's done perfectly, because another man's path is bhaya-avahah, fraught with fear.

Why I get to say all this

I am not writing this from a nice chair.

In 2012 I used to travel between Chandigarh and Delhi, and to save ten rupees on the fare from the bus stand to the railway station, I walked it. In formal shoes, the cheapest ones, which cut into my feet so badly that by the time I reached the platform I could hardly stand. Then a local train, thirty-two rupees, fourteen to sixteen hours for a journey that takes four by road. I did that route again and again.

I graduated in 2013 with about twelve lakh of loans on my head, home loan and education loan together, and five thousand rupees a month coming into the house.

In 2016 I started my own services company and cleared every rupee of loan by then. No funding, no family money, nothing. It became a genuinely good business, seventy percent PAT, and by 2019 I should have been satisfied. I was not. I could not get past the fact that we were building brilliant systems for American and European companies who then sold them back to us at ten times the price. I could not sit in that.

So I started a product company. It failed. I lost one crore sixty-five lakh. I did not restructure it or walk away from it. I took it on my chest and paid it and some of it still paying.

In 2022 I started again, this time on the thing I actually care about, which is sovereign technology for Indian retail. Our models, built here, owned here.

I am thirty-four. I have not had a house for three years, I live hotel to hotel, some weeks I take seven or eight flights. Everything that comes in goes back into the company.

And in all of it, across every deal, I have not paid one rupee in a bribe. Not one. I have lost business for it, repeatedly, and I know exactly what it has cost me.

On removing your own pressure points

Two choices I made deliberately, and I want to explain them properly, because both get misread.

I am not married. Not because I couldn't afford to be. I could have. I chose not to take on a wife and children, because I know what that responsibility does to a man's spine.

Watch how people actually fold. It is almost never greed. It is a man with a family who owes them a good life, and one day the compromise arrives dressed as duty. I have to think about my kids. And he is not even lying. That is the terrible part. He is choosing the smaller loyalty over the larger one and it feels like love while he does it.

I did not want anyone standing behind me whose prosperity depended on me bending. So there is nobody standing there.

Same logic with money. I have stayed bootstrapped far past the point where it was comfortable, because an investor is another set of eyes on a quarterly number, another voice asking why revenue is slow, and I know that eventually one of those conversations ends with somebody suggesting we just do what everyone else does.

I may be wrong about all of this. Maybe a family would have made me stronger. But my read is simple: every pressure point you don't have is a compromise you never have to argue yourself out of. So I removed mine.

The dust

Here is what it actually feels like, and this is the only part of this I really wanted to write.

It feels like being face down on the ground with somebody's hand pressed on the back of my head. Not hitting me. Just holding me there, casually, with no particular malice. And I am trying to breathe, and what comes into my nose is the dust off the floor.

Every time I try to do the correct thing, the hand comes back down.

I want to be precise about this, because it would be easy to read it as despair and it isn't. I am not dying. I am not depressed. I am down, and I am not out, and there is a real difference between those.

What I feel is not hopelessness about my own life, which is honestly the best it has ever been.

It is grief about this place, this nation. That we had all of this, and we keep selling it, in instalments, cheerfully, and calling it progress.

That is what gets me at four in the morning. Not the money. Never once the money.

And then the sun comes and I go back to work.

Anyway

The reason I told you about the mice is that the whole point of that experiment is that it is conditioning. Not destiny. Not blood. A learned flinch, passed forward.

Learned things can be unlearned. It takes generations, it is unbelievably slow, and it will almost certainly not finish in my lifetime. But it is not sealed. That distinction is the only ground I have to stand on and I am not giving it up.

So: I am not going to pay. I am not going to become a middleman on my own country. I am not going to hand this place over as a market and take my commission. I am going to build here. Badly if necessary, slowly if necessary, but here, and mine, and clean.

Whether that ends in a one crore company or a ten thousand crore company, I have no idea. I genuinely don't. That part was never mine, and pretending otherwise is exactly how people talk themselves into the first small compromise.

Vivekananda never met me. He has shaped how I live anyway, through books, through people who read him before me, through some chain of influence I cannot even trace. That is how this actually works. You do not get to see who you reached.

So if this reaches one person, one procurement manager who doesn't sit on an honest invoice, one founder who decides not to pay, one nineteen-year-old standing in front of a magistrate who is asking for ten rupees, then it was worth writing at four in the morning.

You have a right to the work. Never to its fruits.

I am not deviating.

Note : I spend a lot of time analysing charts and hence created a final list of 108 subgroups where I can share life lessons of these 108 different subgroups. Every-time, I see someone’s chart, I spend a lot of time in analysing and then explaining in text, audio messages and voice notes. Hence, I decided to sum up my last 11 years of data, create these subgroups and now I can redirect people to their subgroup post of lifelesson.

The fundamental lesson for you is this:

To create a beautiful life externally, you first have to discover, stabilize, and express the beauty that exists within you.

Your outer reality is deeply influenced by the quality of your inner perception. The way you experience the world, the way you interpret people, the way you respond to material things, the way you work, love, create, and make decisions—all of these are reflections of your internal state.

Therefore, the journey is not primarily about changing the external world. It is about refining the person who is perceiving that world.

1. First, create inner stability

Before trying to create beauty, success, wealth, relationships, or any other external expression, there needs to be a certain amount of calmness and stability within the mind.

A disturbed mind cannot perceive reality clearly.

When the mind is constantly seeking validation, reacting emotionally, comparing itself with others, chasing stimulation, or fighting against circumstances, perception becomes distorted. You don’t experience the world as it is; you experience it through your unresolved desires, fears, expectations, and insecurities.

So the first step is to create psychological stability.

This does not mean withdrawing from life. In fact, it means learning how to participate in life without constantly being disturbed by it.

That stability can come through accepting reality, accepting material existence, establishing healthy boundaries with family, creating harmonious but appropriately distant relationships where necessary, and developing coherence with coworkers and the people around you.

Distance does not necessarily mean disconnection.

Sometimes the healthiest relationship with family is one in which there is enough distance to preserve individuality while maintaining love and respect.

Similarly, professional relationships require coherence: knowing how to cooperate, communicate, contribute, and function with other people without losing your own centre.

The objective is to create an environment in which your mind is not constantly fighting something.

2. Accept materialism rather than rejecting it

There is also an important realization here: material life does not have to be rejected in order to live a spiritual life.

Money, beauty, comfort, possessions, sensual experiences, career, status, relationships, and physical surroundings are all part of human existence.

The problem is not materialism itself.

The problem is unconscious attachment to materialism.

When you completely reject the material world, you may create an internal conflict between what you actually experience and what you believe you are supposed to experience.

Instead, there can be harmony.

You can appreciate beauty without becoming possessed by it.

You can enjoy wealth without making wealth your identity.

You can appreciate sensuality without becoming controlled by your senses.

You can build a successful career without allowing success to determine your self-worth.

This is where acceptance becomes important. You don’t have to fight the material world. You have to understand your relationship with it.

3. From stability comes sensual brilliance

Once there is calmness and stability, something more subtle begins to emerge: sensual brilliance.

By sensual brilliance, I don’t simply mean physical attractiveness or sexuality.

I mean the refinement of your senses—the quality with which you see, hear, touch, taste, smell, experience beauty, and emotionally perceive the world.

Your senses are the interface between your inner world and the material world.

If your inner state is chaotic, your senses become instruments of craving.

If your inner state becomes calm and honest, your senses can become instruments of perception.

This is what I mean by “the character of the senses.”

Indriyon ka charitra is essentially the quality, integrity, and orientation of your sensory experience.

When the character of your senses becomes honest, your perception becomes more honest.

You begin to notice what is actually happening rather than merely noticing what your desires want you to see.

4. Sensory honesty creates better perception

This is perhaps the most important part of the entire philosophy:

Perception is everything.

You do not directly experience reality. You experience your perception of reality.

Two people can stand in exactly the same environment and experience completely different worlds because their internal states are different.

If your senses are driven primarily by insecurity, desire, fear, ego, or fantasy, your perception will reflect those things.

But when your sensory experience becomes honest, genuine, calm, and refined, your perception becomes increasingly accurate.

You begin to see people more clearly.

You begin to understand situations without immediately projecting your own expectations onto them.

You become more sensitive to beauty.

You notice subtleties that previously escaped you.

You understand what genuinely attracts you and what merely stimulates you.

You distinguish between what you actually want and what you have been conditioned to want.

And gradually, you begin to encounter something very important:

your own authentic self.

Because perhaps, at this stage, you don’t completely know who you really are.

You may know your preferences, ambitions, habits, roles, achievements, and identities—but those are not necessarily the same thing as knowing your inner nature.

5. Better perception creates a better reality

Once perception becomes more honest, your actions naturally begin to change.

Your choices become more aligned with who you actually are.

You choose different people.

You create different relationships.

You pursue different forms of success.

You respond differently to money and possessions.

You build environments that feel more coherent with your inner nature.

And therefore, your external reality gradually changes.

This is not magical thinking.

It is a feedback loop:

Inner state → sensory experience → perception → interpretation → decisions → actions → external reality.

If you change the quality of the first part of the chain, the later parts begin to change as well.

That is why perception is so powerful.

You are not merely trying to “manifest” a different reality. You are becoming a person capable of perceiving, choosing, and creating a different reality.

6. Material success becomes a consequence, not the destination

This is where the material dimension represented by Rahu and Venus, within the astrological framework you are using, becomes meaningful.

Rahu can represent intensified desire, worldly experience, expansion, ambition, and fascination with the material world, while Venus represents beauty, pleasure, sensuality, harmony, attraction, refinement, and appreciation of material and aesthetic experience.

But the deeper lesson is not simply “get more material things.”

Rather:

Refine your relationship with the material world until you can experience and create beauty consciously.

When sensual perception becomes refined, your appreciation of the material world changes.

You may become more sensitive to design, architecture, clothing, food, music, art, relationships, physical surroundings, human behaviour, and subtle forms of beauty.

And because your perception becomes sharper, you can potentially create greater material value.

You see opportunities that you previously could not see.

You understand people better.

You understand aesthetics better.

You understand what creates attraction, comfort, trust, and desire.

You become better at creating experiences.

In this sense, material success can emerge from refined perception.

But material success is not the final destination.

7. Sensual beauty is the bridge between the inner and outer worlds

Sensual beauty is therefore not merely about looking beautiful or experiencing pleasure.

It is the bridge between consciousness and material existence.

Your inner world expresses itself through your senses.

Your senses perceive the external world.

Your perception then feeds information back into your consciousness.

It becomes a two-way movement:

Inner world → senses → perception → external world

and simultaneously:

External world → senses → perception → inner understanding.

The more honest this exchange becomes, the more accurately the outer world reflects your inner nature.

This is why sensory honesty matters.

If your senses are dishonest, your perception becomes distorted.

If your perception is distorted, your decisions become distorted.

If your decisions are distorted, your external reality becomes increasingly disconnected from who you actually are.

But when the senses become honest, perception becomes clearer.

When perception becomes clearer, choices become more authentic.

When choices become authentic, life becomes more coherent.

8. But material beauty is not the final destination

There is an even deeper realization beyond all of this.

Material success, sensual beauty, relationships, wealth, career, comfort, and aesthetic refinement are still part of the external journey.

They are not the ultimate purpose of life.

Eventually, the question changes from:

“How beautiful can I make my external reality?”

to

“Who is the consciousness experiencing this reality?”

This is where happiness becomes something deeper than pleasure.

Pleasure belongs to experience.

Success belongs to the material world.

Beauty belongs to perception.

But deeper happiness comes from consciousness, truth, and alignment with what is real.

In this sense, Satya (truth) is not merely about speaking truthful words. It is about perceiving and living in accordance with what is genuinely true.

The ultimate goal is therefore to become capable of perceiving the truth of your own consciousness.

To understand what remains when you remove the roles, possessions, ambitions, relationships, desires, fears, and identities.

9. The journey is ultimately two-way

So the entire journey becomes a two-way movement.

One direction is inward:

Material experience → sensory refinement → honest perception → self-understanding → consciousness → Satya.

The other direction is outward:

Inner consciousness → authentic perception → refined senses → choices → creation → material reality.

The inward journey helps you discover who you are.

The outward journey allows you to express who you are.

Neither is complete without the other.

If you only go inward, you may understand yourself but never express that understanding in the world.

If you only go outward, you may accumulate success but remain disconnected from yourself.

The ideal is integration.

Know yourself inwardly, perceive the world honestly, and then express your inner beauty outwardly.

That is the deeper meaning of sensual brilliance.

It is not simply beauty of the senses.

It is the honesty of the senses, which creates the clarity of perception, which creates the possibility of authentic creation.

And through that creation, the material world gradually becomes more coherent with the beauty that exists within you.

Ultimately, however, even this beautiful external reality is only a stage.

The final movement is beyond material achievement:

from beauty, toward truth;
from perception, toward consciousness;
from experience, toward understanding;
and ultimately from the expression of the self toward the recognition of what the self truly is.

So the life lesson can be condensed into one sentence:

Refine your inner world until your senses become honest, your perception becomes clear, your actions become authentic, and your external life becomes a genuine expression of your inner beauty—while remembering that beyond all material beauty lies the deeper pursuit of consciousness, truth, and Satya.

-Anish

मेरा ट्रेन के गंदे टॉयलेट को अनदेखा न करने में,

और सही से साफ़ करके आने में,

चाहे मुझे कितना भी ख़राब क्यों ना मिला हो ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

लाइन में तरीक़े से खड़े रहने में,

और जो काटें उन पर ना चिल्लाने में,

चाहे कितना ही पीछे क्यों ना हो जाऊँ, इस ज़माने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

सड़क पे कूड़ा ना फैलाने में,

और जो हो अपना कचरा, उसे जेब में रख घर ले आने में,

चाहे पूरी सड़क ही भरी क्यों ना हो गंदगी के हर पैमाने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

लाल बत्ती पे रुक जाने में, फालतू हॉर्न ना बजाने में,

सीट बेल्ट लगाने में और संभल कर गाड़ी चलाने में

चाहे दुनिया लगी हो उन्ही नियमों की धज्जियाँ उड़ाने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

पब्लिक प्लेस में स्पीकर पे न्यूज़ और रील्स ना चलाने में,

या चिल्ला-चिल्ला के आपस में या फ़ोन पे ना बतियाने में,

चाहे लोग लगें हो इसी को सामाजिक ताना-बाना बताने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

अपना काम पूरी ईमानदारी से कर जाने में,

रिश्वत ना खिलाने में और घटिया जुगाड़ ना लगाने में,

चाहे लोग इस्तेमाल करें उसका, तुमसे आगे बढ़ जाने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

किसी को छोटा ना दिखाने में,

सबको अपने बराबर और अपने जैसा मानने में,

चाहे कुछ लोग नकार दे तुम्हें अपने साथ बिठाने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

ज़िन्दगी के सवालों में फँसे हुए को उठाने में,

भूखे को खिलाने में, मेहनती को टिप देकर आने में,

चाहे जितनी भी मेहनत लगी हो तुम्हें वो पैसा कमाने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

दुनिया के लिये नक़ली तस्वीरे ना लगाने में,

मतलब के लिए दोस्त और ज़रूरत के लिए रिश्ते ना बनाने में,

चाहे कितने ही अकेले क्यों ना लगो, तुम इस भीड़ भरे ज़माने में ।

.

क्या फ़र्क़ पड़ता है ?

ख़ुद को जानने और कुछ उसूलों को मानने में,

ख़ुद की कहानी ख़ुद से ही लिखने और सुनाने में,

चाहे दुनिया लगी हो, तुम्हें अपने हिसाब से कुछ और ही बनाने में ।

When I looked back at my journey so far, I didn’t feel the urge to celebrate or summarise. What I felt instead was a quiet assurance: I’ve come a long way. Not in the way success is usually measured, but in the way clarity settles.

At this point in life, I wanted to write down what I know about myself; not to explain who I am, but to acknowledge what I’ve learned and, more importantly, what I’ve let go of.

As time passes, wisdom doesn’t arrive as certainty. It arrives as calmness. As patience. As a reduced appetite for chaos. Slowly, peace begins to feel less like an aspiration and more like an end goal.

When I look back, life feels like a continuous pursuit of truth. What I believed to be “truth” kept changing with time. There were phases when I was seeking truth about God, then about myself.

Today, I can say with some confidence that I have a clearer sense of self, a more refined purpose, and a better understanding of what I truly want from life.

In a web series “Kota Factory” there was a line that stayed with me:

“If you don’t know what you want in life, at least start figuring out what you don’t want.”

That sentence describes my life more accurately than any grand philosophy. My journey hasn’t been about accumulation. It’s been about elimination.

Elimination of expectations, constructs, ambitions, and identities that didn’t belong to me.

Freedom Came Early

I was exposed to money early in life. At the age of nine, I started sitting at our shop. From that point onward, I never asked my parents for money not because I was exceptional, but because responsibility arrived early.

Despite growing up in a humble household, I never felt scarcity. Whatever I needed, I earned. That created something far more valuable than financial comfort: freedom.

Freedom from dependence.

Freedom from fear.

Freedom to choose.

This also built an independent spirit inside me.

During college, I did multiple internships, MLM marketing, and various jobs to support myself. That early independence quietly shaped how I think and live even today.

Equality as a Default State

The shop was my first real classroom.

People from every walk of life came there; teachers, officers, rich customers, transporters, and labourers from different states using the PCO to call home. Everyone spoke to me like an adult. Somewhere along the way, I began seeing myself as equal to them.

That equality worked both ways. I listened; sometimes for hours to stories of struggle, migration, and hardship. That taught me empathy without pity and confidence without arrogance. This kept my curiosity alive as I never shied away from anything.

This curiosity naturally drew me toward people, their stories, and the cultures they live in. I rarely take photographs when I travel. Instead, I explore food, conversations, and everyday life, trying to absorb a city rather than document it.

Once, during a trek, someone remarked, “So you travel purely for the joy of travelling—nothing else.”

That stayed with me. I realised it was true. I travel today for the same reason I once listened to people in a small shop; to understand lives, stories, and the worlds they come from.

That foundation carried into the business world as well.

I speak to everyone with the same confidence and respect, regardless of their wealth or knowledge. In my head, I sit across the table as an equal. If someone has wealth, I bring value. If someone has knowledge, I bring curiosity.

There is no inferiority or superiority; only exchange.

This mental neutrality removes self-doubt and ego at the same time. It keeps energy flowing and creates better outcomes.

Business Was Never Just Business

Long before I knew strategy frameworks or business jargon, I learned fundamentals instinctively.

I learned the value of relationships why the same customers returned to our shop even when alternatives existed. I learned that empathy turns customers into friends, and sales becomes a natural by-product of trust. I learned that market dynamics matter more than ego.

For instance, tea shops bought milk from us even though another vendor sold it cheaper because that vendor also sold tea and would hurt their business.

Years later, the same instinct guided one of my companies to sell only software and avoid any activity that could damage our customers’ outcomes.

Even today, we command a premium. Customers still choose us—not because we’re cheaper, but because we’re aligned.

I never fought price wars. I never poached customers. I learned early that if someone isn’t loyal to their current vendor, they won’t be loyal to you either. Every customer we gained came voluntarily even in niche markets.

Many of my strengths today are simply echoes of early lessons.

Curiosity, Learning, and Self-Reliance

I’ve always been curious. It began with reading newspapers at the shop initially as timepass. That curiosity expanded into geopolitics, local politics, storytelling, and opinions.

More importantly, I learned to be self-reliant early; to solve problems, take decisions, and move on without waiting for validation. That habit has stayed with me longer than any technical skill.

Many people describe my lack of need for validation as an advantage today.

When I reflect on it, it feels less like an advantage and more like a habit formed early in life;

when validation wasn’t readily available and self-reliance quietly became the default.

What I Didn’t Become

Life also teaches you what you are not.

I couldn’t play sports growing up, so group sports or team work feels unnatural to me. I gravitate toward individual pursuits; swimming, running, trekking alone.

I couldn’t spend time in festivities, fairs or celebratory events like birthdays or new years. Usually I spend these days like any other day now.

I couldn’t invest much time in friendships, so I don’t have many now.

I didn’t attend many parties or spend long vacations with relatives. Even when I did, there was always a quiet anxiety about responsibility and survival. I am happy, that I have stopped engaging in these events, parties or get-togethers in the pretence of social acceptance.

I’ve seen too many broken and pretentious relationships to romanticize social templates. I’ve tried fitting into them but it felt dishonest.

Pretence drains me. Solitude restores me.

I’ve learned to respect that truth about myself.

How I see work today…

I’ve been working for nearly twenty-five years now. Over time, work stopped feeling like effort and began to feel like practice. Even on holidays, if I don’t spend a few hours engaged—learning, reflecting, refining—the day feels unsettled. If I’m not at a desk, my mind is still quietly observing, connecting, resolving. What I call work today is really a form of sadhana. It has shaped my ethics, my character, and my sense of responsibility. Business isn’t something I step away from; it’s an expression of how I move through the world.

I remember something Jagjit Singh (ghazal singer) once said, which I heard on TV when I was very young. If he didn’t practice for a month, the audience would know. If he didn’t practice for a week, his spouse would know. And if he didn’t practice for a day, he himself would know that his voice was slipping. That awareness is why he practiced every single day.

I’ve come to see work and learning, in the same way. Not as pressure, but as upkeep. Not for applause, but for inner alignment.

When you live close to your nature, you can sense even the smallest drift. And once you know that difference, discipline no longer needs force you return to the practice on your own.

Spirituality, Business, and Travel

Three forces anchor my life.

Spirituality is my compass. It helps me make sense of life whether the waters are calm or turbulent.

Maps & directions take an individual to places known to mankind, but spiritual compass leads towards path not taken, without an iota of fear of unknown.

Business is my purpose. It gives my days direction and allows me to add value to people’s lives, even when those relationships aren’t personal in the usual sense.

When your why extends beyond self-interest and begins to serve something larger, work stops being something you do and becomes something you inhabit.

As Friedrich Nietzsche observed:

He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.

Travel is my joy. Not escape but reward. I don’t chase photographs or memories. I absorb places fully: new countries, familiar cities, industrial zones, factories, be it early mornings in Mahabalipuram or quiet nights in Chennai.

If you can experience life whenever you want, you don’t need to preserve it. Memories have no purpose if you can have freedom of experiences.

These are my only priorities in life and I’m glad to fulfil these in best way possible.

Control: The Road Ahead

This doesn’t mean life has been easy. I’ve had my share of challenges.

Which brings me back to a movie, All India Rank, and one line that stayed with me

All one needs in life is control.

As I step into the next phase of my life, I’m not chasing more; I’m refining less.

Control is the missing piece.

That is what will take me from a rookie startup founder to a seasoned businessman. From instinct to mastery. From motion to direction.

Control, for me, doesn’t mean rigidity. It means emotional steadiness, disciplined execution, and the ability to act without inner friction.

If earlier years were about learning and survival, the coming years ahead are about governance; of time, energy, attention, and intent.

I don’t know exactly where this road leads.

But I know how I want to walk it.

Slowly. Deliberately. On my own terms.

This isn’t a conclusion.

It’s simply the point where the noise has reduced enough for me to hear myself clearly.

And for now, that feels like enough.

When I was a boy in a small village, I didn’t have much, but I had rhythm.

My days were stitched together by the hum of a shop, the smell of dust, the laughter of people who came and went with the sun.

I studied in government schools, helped at the family stall in melas, sold prasad outside temples, and learned how to observe the world quietly; how to remember faces, voices, and gestures like photographs in the mind.

People often say it must have been a hard childhood, but I never saw it that way.

I saw men who worked with dignity, women who survived with grace, and strangers who spoke to me like an equal.

That simple and uncertain life taught me how to absorb, how to endure, and how to stay human.

It was not suffering. It was education.

By the time I finished college, I had already been working for more than half my life.

I did whatever kept me afloat and I did multi-level marketing, freelance web development, IOT projects, internships.

I worked morning to night and through weekends, and by twenty-five I had cleared the debts that once defined my limits.

I quit my job, made decent money and bought basic luxuries of life for myself and family. On paper, I had made it out.

But somewhere between the exhaustion and the applause, I realised I didn’t know where I was going anymore.

I had spent so many years running toward stability that I didn’t know how to stand still once I reached it.

The emptiness was new; quiet, clean, and terrifying.

That was the first time I met meaning not as a word, but as a wound.

I went on to study psychology, searching for sense — in people, in pain, in the invisible stories that make us who we are.

I learned to listen deeply. I helped others heal.

And through that, I began to understand that perhaps the only way to survive life is to serve it.

That realisation became the seed for dsrp & Co.

I wanted to build something larger than myself, something that could make the act of working itself sacred.

I poured everything I had into it, be it my savings, my mutual funds, my safety nets, my sleep. When that wasn’t enough, I borrowed.

I convinced people to believe in my vision even when I was barely surviving it myself.

And yet, despite all of this and despite doing what felt right, staying ethical in an industry where shortcuts are currency, despite showing up every single day; there are still mornings when I wake up wondering: why does the universe stay silent?

I don’t expect rewards. I don’t expect applause.

But sometimes, all you want is a sign that your intent counts for something, that the invisible good you do quietly is not forgotten in the noise.

You see others who take the easier path, who trade integrity for opportunity, and the world seems to open for them as if virtue was a burden they were wise enough to drop.

And you start asking questions you never thought you’d ask:

• Does it really matter who you are as a person?

• Does the universe truly notice the ones who choose the harder right over the easier wrong?

• Or is life just randomness dressed in poetry?

When a mother keeps caring, nobody notices until she stops.

When a father keeps providing, nobody thanks him until he can’t.

When a nurse keeps showing up the room feels ordinary, until one day it doesn’t.

That’s how the world measures goodness — by its absence.

And maybe that’s why people keep going, even when no one’s watching.

I don’t have a conclusion to this story. Maybe there isn’t one.

Maybe this is just how life tests those who are meant to build; by giving them silence instead of signs and questions instead of answers.

And if you’re reading this and something in these words feels like your own silence then that is the only answer I have at this moment.

If I told you that no matter what path you choose in life, you’ll receive an equal share of suffering; would that convince you to choose a path with a higher purpose ?

Below is my understanding of why we must go beyond comfort and chase a higher purpose if we want our lives to mean something.

The Early Scripts of Comfort

Since my major was Counseling during my Master’s in Psychology, I’ve spent years counseling people in different phases of life.

Across those conversations, I started noticing two recurring mental scripts that quietly trap people in cycles of comfort and stagnation.

Script One: The Stagnant Idealist

These are people who either inherited enough or over time earned enough to lose motivation. They tell themselves they’re “flowing with life,” when in reality, they’re stagnant like a puddle of still water breeding mosquitoes.

The irony is that, in their stagnancy, there’s still some movement; like mosquitoes buzzing above the water or pigs rolling in the mud. On the surface, there’s life and noise. They wear crisp shirts, drive shiny cars, go to offices, and return home every evening. From the outside, it all looks functional or even successful. But inside, nothing moves. They’ve mistaken motion for progress.

They play the role of their ideal self before others, but deep down they know they’ve stopped growing. They’ve become experts at rationalising & convincing themselves that peace is freedom, while it’s actually decay.

Script Two: The Escaping Achiever

The other script is more subtle. These are people who are skilled, passionate, and motivated, but the moment hardships appear, they imagine an easier future. They picture a safe space beyond struggle.

But that future never satisfies. It’s the classic illusion of the grass being greener on the other side. Once you reach that imagined comfort, the absence of hardship becomes the absence of meaning.

It’s a worse state than stagnation because at least stagnant water affects something; mosquitoes breed there, pigs roll in it. But this comfort turns a person into a rock —unmoving, unfeeling, lifeless over a long period of time.

Hardships are part of life, hence we shouldn’t resort to our happy safe space on the visibility of hardship. As Ratan Tata once said,

“Ups and downs in life are very important to keep us going, because a straight line even in an ECG means we are not alive.”

I was also living this script with my safe spaced version of “buffalo farm” & retirement in late 20s.

The Comfortable Dream I’m Glad I Lost

When I was 20, I had loans of around ₹5 lakhs; part education, part survival. I’d already done several internships, yet my dream then was simple: clear the loans, buy 20–30 buffaloes in my hometown in Himachal, hire a few people for upkeep, and live peacefully while chilling & smoking weed every now and then.

The land was already there, so were the fields for grazing, the shelter, even the marijuana plants. I’d mapped it all out - a small, self-sustained, comfortable life. Looking back now, I’m grateful that dream never came true.

The Relativity of Purpose

If I’d stayed in the village forever, running that buffalo farm might’ve been meaningful but to do it after evolving intellectually and emotionally would’ve been regression.

If Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam had settled for teaching in Rameshwaram after his early rejections, India might never have known the Missile Man who shaped our nuclear program. We might have missed a Bharat Ratna laureate, the only one to receive it even before becoming President.

Kalam faced repeated failures, returned home heartbroken, and could have easily chosen a simple, respectable life of teaching. But he didn’t. He kept searching for a doorway until he met Dr. Vikram Sarabhai, who saw his spark and gave him that opportunity. That single decision to persist through suffering instead of settling for safety altered not only his destiny but the destiny of India itself.

After Zip2, Elon Musk could have retired early. Instead, he built PayPal, then Tesla, pushing the world toward sustainable mobility and later SpaceX, taking on space exploration, a domain still barely open to private entities. His rockets exploded, his companies nearly collapsed, yet he never chose comfort. For him, hardship was the compass of purpose.

And sometimes purpose doesn’t just build rockets, it carries a hammer and chisel.

Dashrath Manjhi, the Mountain Man of Bihar, spent 22 years carving a 110 m road through a mountain after losing his wife. He did it alone, with bare hands and bleeding palms, so that no one else in his village would die waiting for help.

He didn’t do it for fame or money. He did it so that no one else would suffer as he did. Every strike of that chisel was an act of purpose born out of pain.

That is what choosing meaning over misery looks like; transforming pain into progress.

The Journey from Dukh to Kaivalya

When I first read सांख्य दर्शन / Sankhya Darshan (one of the nine philosophies of Vedic or sanatan dharma), one line stayed with me. It said that the path of life is to move from Samsara (Dukh) toward Kaivalya.

In simple terms, it means that life is a journey from suffering toward awareness beyond attachment — a higher state of being where we act without being enslaved by outcomes.

To me, this line has always been deeply spiritual, perhaps one of the most powerful truths I’ve come across. I’m loosely interpreting it here so that it fits the context of this piece.

The essence, however, remains the same.

The purpose of life is not to escape pain but to evolve through it; to use it as the bridge from Dukh to Kaivalya. Because pain will exist no matter which path you choose — Samsara itself, by its very definition, is suffering.

The Larger Path

Whether it’s Jamshedji Tata building industries, Martin Luther King Jr. fighting for equality, Ambedkar breaking caste barriers, Bhagat Singh offering his life at 21, or a nameless artist chiseling temple walls; each chose a path full of hardship and meaning.

Even our spiritual icons Jesus, Moses, Krishna, Buddha, Mahavir, and the Sikh Gurus always walked through fire, not around it.

My Learnings

I’m writing this on an ordinary working day, one where I could have easily chosen to focus on tasks, calls, and meetings.

But instead, I chose to write this because I felt an urge to explain why it’s so important to choose purpose and fulfillment over ease and comfort.

I don’t even know if the person who triggered this reflection will ever truly understand it; maybe not today, maybe not for years. Understanding comes only when one is ready.

But still, I wrote. Because choosing the harder, meaningful thing always creates a ripple somewhere. Maybe this will reach someone who needs to read it, someone on the verge of giving up, and it might push them to take their first plunge toward their true potential.

It took me around six hours to write this, and yet, it feels like the right choice.

Because choosing the hard and right thing, no matter how small, always aligns you with something larger than yourself.

So here are my learnings:

• Hardships and suffering give life meaning & anyways we can’t avoid them.

• Choose hardships that serve a higher purpose, beyond material gain.

• When you already have wealth or comfort, let purpose keep you awake.

• Avoid stagnancy as it breeds ego, indulgence, or decay.

• Life constantly changes, now whether it’s positive or a negative change; it depends on your actions and how you perceive a situation.

• and always ask: am I living at my full potential or hiding behind comfort?

In the end, we are all walking toward the same destination — death — through one form of hardship or another.

Since suffering is inevitable, choose the one that expands you.

Because when you strive toward something greater than yourself, the universe or God, or whatever sails your boat; that force begins to move through you.

Whenever a human being breaks away from the automated path and dares to live at their fullest potential, that divine energy chooses to experience the material world through them.

I used to say heartbreak hurts.

But that year, in March 2015 I coined a new word for myself: headbreak.

The Fall

In my head, it felt as if someone had reached into my chest, pulled out my soul with bare hands, and walked away. I was left watching my own body from a distance, waiting for last rites.

I kept vodka miniatures by the bed. They were easier than friends. Easier than talking. One sip and the noise dulled for a while. I stuffed myself with food just to slip into sleep from the heaviness. Some days I slept with the TV and lights on, pretending the room wasn’t empty.

Phone calls went unanswered. Flatmates turned strangers. My life shrank to a bed, a ceiling fan, and the racing of my mind.

The Dream

How did I land here?

I was a 2013 graduate from a tier-3 engineering college. But from my second year onwards, I hustled. nonstop internships, three years of real work alongside my degree. By graduation, I had experience, but on paper HR saw only “fresher.”

That mismatch haunted me. Again and again, I cleared technical rounds, only to be rejected in HR.

Finally, a break.

Some endings bury you, others plant you.

I learned the difference only in hindsight.

A major service-based MNC had been trying to hire for six months. They wanted a three-year veteran. I told the project manager the truth in final round about my journey, my rejections, my hunger. He believed me. Approved HR to let go of “on job experience” requirement and I got the job.

Eighteen months later, I found myself sitting across from Ivy-league engineers at the world’s #1 medical devices company. Nine interview rounds. My first flight. A 310% salary hike. A chance to work on dialysis technology that could save lives.

Walking through their R&D lab felt surreal, like a kid from a small town who had snuck into someone else’s future.

I resigned from my current job the same day. My mind was already planning the next decade.

And then I lost it all.

The Mistake

HR asked for a drug test. Panic. Delay. Dodge. Three days later, I confessed. The offer was revoked.

People said: It’s just a job. But to me, it felt like this:

The Numbness

For four months it consumed me. Morning to night, night to morning. There was no method, no healing ritual — just time dragging forward.

Slowly, the darkness thinned. A laugh. A lighter day. The sadness kept returning, but weaker each time, until one day I realized it no longer haunted me.

What feels like the end is often just life teaching you where to begin again.

The Path Forward

Looking back a decade later, I see how that collapse shaped me.

• In 2016, I quit to freelance on products I believed in.

• In November that year, I started my first proprietorship.

• By 2017, I had a private limited company.

• Over the years, I built multiple products, teams, and companies I never even dreamed of.

If I had joined that R&D team in Bangalore, I doubt I’d be here. Losing that job which was my worst nightmare at that time, turned out to be the first domino.

Looking Back

I don’t ask “why me?” anymore. When something bad happens, the answer isn’t visible in the moment. The pain narrows your vision until all you can see is loss.

But life has a longer view.

The reason we suffer isn’t always clear. But often, when you look back years later, you see how the detour was the path.

Some losses are redirections in disguise.

Today, when things go wrong, I don’t fight the universe with questions. I cry if I need to. I grieve. But I also keep faith that life knows something I don’t.

Now that I’ve lived through many losses that once convinced me that everything was over and I now know it was all the beginning to something bigger and context was always larger than what I could imagine at that time.

What I Learned

• Pain is temporary, even when it feels endless.

• Loss may look like destruction, but it can also be redirection.

• Don’t measure life by the moment of suffering but wait for the longer view.

I call it life’s curriculum: you don’t understand the class while you’re in it. The meaning only appears in the exam years later.

And that’s why I stopped asking why me.

“Ignorance is bliss.”

It meant nothing to me for the longest time.

Just another quote. Another cliché. Another thing wise people said.

But now, slightly older, perhaps a bit wiser, and definitely a thinker; I’ve begun to feel its weight. Not just its wisdom, but the darker shadow behind it.

Walking Down the Memory Lane

There was a time I lived life on autopilot.

I was that guy.

The one who said yes to drinks, smoking, to staying up all night, driving 150 KMph to doing stupid things without blinking.

The one who believed in the “right” belief, the “right” politics, and the “right” way of living; as passed down by elders, mentors, unquestioned traditions and unsaid rules of the Society.

I didn’t really care what I wanted. I didn’t ask questions. I didn’t know I could.

I was ignorant.

And back then, it wasn’t even a bad thing.

Then Something Shifted

Somewhere along the way, I don’t even know how; things began to change.

I started observing the world. Society. Religion. Human behavior.

I stumbled upon words like perspective, bias, identity, conditioning, conflict.

I started studying geopolitics. Philosophy. Culture. Psychology. Interfaith dialogue. Colonialism. War.

I met people from different countries, regions, beliefs, faiths and backgrounds.

Suddenly, the world wasn’t a script I was blindly performing in.

It was a layered, conflicting, confusing drama and I started seeing too much of it.

And how It All Came Crashing Down

For first 25 years of my life, I was a background character in my own story.

Life happened to me, and I let it.

But now, this new self; armed with information and introspection — couldn’t unsee what it had seen.

I started questioning my beliefs. My role. My very identity.

And the more I read, the more I thought… the more confused I became.

I wasn’t ignorant anymore.

But now, I also didn’t know what I actually wanted.

That’s the paradox, isn’t it?

An ignorant man may fight and die for a cause without flinching.

He’ll burn with certainty.

He won’t question, hesitate, or collapse.

Sometimes, I envy that.

Because when you start seeing all the sides of everything, your convictions start to blur.

And with that — so does your peace.

So… What Now?

If you came to this blog hoping for answers — a final piece of the life puzzle, then I’m sorry.

Because you’re not ignorant either.

You’re here. Reading. Thinking. Feeling.

Trying to understand something about yourself or the world.

Meanwhile, the truly ignorant are asleep; snoring peacefully after a long day of trolling strangers online, screaming into echo chambers, pushing their opinions and defending their inherited beliefs.

They don’t lie awake wondering about meaning.

They don’t ache for clarity.

We do.

Somewhere Between Emerson and Exhausion

Yes ! I think deeply about life now.

I think about purpose, values, vision, and legacy.

I want to impact humanity — like Ralph Waldo Emerson or JRD Tata; And like few others I admire.

I want to add value to others’ lives, as many have added to mine.

But there’s another side to this.

Sometimes, I feel mentally exhausted.

Emotionally spent.

Like my heart and head are both drained by these endless “bigger deeds” I chase in an insignificant world.

And in those moments when nothing makes sense and everything feels heavy —

I finally understand what that phrase means: “Ignorance is bliss.”

And maybe, just for a fleeting second… I wish I could go back. But I really don’t want to and honestly I can’t as well.

A Poetic Ending to this philosophical dilemma where “To be” is the only Choice.

I see the world now, messy and wide,

No longer shielded by the simpler side.

Yet some days I miss that peaceful abyss—

And truly understand… ignorance is bliss.

Hence, I conclude that

“The cost of knowing is the comfort of not needing to.”

Incident One: The Call Home

Me (on phone): I’ve decided to quit my job and do something on my own.

Dad: You shouldn’t quit a job, it gives you a stable income.

[He hands the phone to my mom.]

Mom: What happened? Why do you want to quit? Is everything okay?

Me: Yes, everything’s fine. I just don’t feel like working for anyone anymore.

Mom: That’s okay, but… you just cleared your education loan. We also need to finish construction work at home. Finally our worst days are ending. This job pays you well. I think you should think about family.

Long silence.

Mom (softly changing the subject): Anyway, what will you have for dinner?

Incident Two: The Relationship Question

GF (on phone): Are you really leaving your job altogether? How will you pay your expenses? How will you support your family?

Me: I don’t know yet, but I don’t see any other option.

GF: You already run out of money every month. Your credit cards are maxed. How will you manage without a salary?

Me: I’ll figure it out, but I want to do this.

GF: I don’t know… how are we supposed to grow our relationship amidst this chaos?

Why These Stories Matter ?

Looking back many years later, I realised something important: none of their responses were about my abilities or potential.

My parents and girlfriend weren’t judging me. They were speaking from their own experiences, fears, and responsibilities.

Reflection on Incident One

My father had quit his job in the 90s to start a shop. It failed, wiping out his savings and forcing him into a low-paying job role. He never recovered financially. My mother endured that hardship alongside him.

So when I talked about quitting, they weren’t doubting me; they were projecting their own scars. They were trying to protect me from repeating their pain.

Reflection on Incident Two

My girlfriend wasn’t dismissing my dream either. She knew my monthly struggles, the credit card debt, the late nights. Her fears weren’t about my capability, they were about our stability as a couple.

She was being protective in her own way, imagining a future together that felt increasingly uncertain.

What I Learned About Seeking Advice

When we ask loved ones for guidance on life-changing decisions, we rarely get objective counsel.

• They speak through the lens of their own experiences and regrets.

• They don’t always know our skills, resilience, or vision.

• Most times, their advice carries a bias, especially if the decision affects them directly or indirectly.

Their intentions are protective, not limiting. But if we confuse their protection for objective truth, we risk giving up our path before even trying.

My Decision Framework

When I chose to quit despite their concerns, it boiled down to three questions:

1. If I don’t do this now, will I regret it forever?

2. If I don’t do this, will I slowly blame them for my unhappiness?

3. What’s the worst that could happen? Even if I failed, I could always find another job.

With that clarity, I took the leap.

The Message

Loved ones are meant to advise, not decide.

Their guidance is valuable—but it must be filtered.

The real test is whether you can separate their beliefs from your own convictions.

Advice should inform you, not imprison you.

Because at the end of the day: only you know your true potential.

And when you choose for yourself, you also remove the possibility of lifelong regret or blame.

Why This Story Matters to Me

People often ask how entrepreneurship began in my life. For me, it started in this exact moment—the first time I believed in myself despite everyone I loved saying don’t do it.

For a long time, I wondered why my closest people didn’t see my vision. Now I understand: they weren’t doubting me. They were protecting me from pain they had already lived.

But some journeys can’t be protected. They have to be walked.

✨ Takeaway Quote:

Loved ones advise through their scars. Your future is built through your choices.

“Follow your passion” sounds great, until you realise that passion doesn’t pay the bills, teach you grit, or build a meaningful life.

This is a story of how I planted the seeds of a career, a company, and a life I love — without ever “finding” my passion.

The Problem with Passion

When life feels uncertain, the world offers a single word as a solution: passion.

We hear it everywhere; WhatsApp forwards, social media reels, influencer speeches: “Go find your passion!”

It’s become a universal prescription. In this narrative, passion means something glamorous like photography, travel, or content creation. And the “9-to-5” job? That’s painted as lifeless and dull.

But I’m here to tell you this: I never went looking for passion.

And I’m still incredibly fulfilled with how life turned out.

An Unremarkable Beginning (That Turned Out Remarkable)

I didn’t choose my school, my parents did. It was the only reputed one nearby. Every day involved a long commute on winding Himalayan roads and in morning prayers I was reciting Sanskrit shlokas. Later, I shifted to a government school close to home and it came with no rules, no teachers, and yes, poker during lunch breaks.

I didn’t care about studies. I appeared for engineering entrance exams without preparation and, unsurprisingly, scored poorly. I ended up in a tier-3 engineering college because there was nowhere else to go.

I didn’t choose my stream either. A cousin said “go for electronics,” and I did. I wasn’t driven by dreams or clarity. I was just moving forward, one step at a time.

The Accidental Spark

In my second year, I joined a training institute in Chandigarh along with my classmates. Around the same time, I went through a breakup with my then-girlfriend. To avoid awkwardness, I moved to Noida for another training program.

There, I wrote my first program, one that made an LED blink based on a switch press. It was a simple embedded systems task, but something clicked.

I wrote code. The hardware responded. I had control. I was building something real.

It felt like magic.

That moment was my first spark; not a grand passion, but a quiet ignition. I decided: This is what I want to do.

Driven, Not Passionate

From that day on, I did whatever it took to get better. I offered to cold-call for a company in exchange for training hours. I freelanced. I skipped semesters to work. I learned nonstop.

After college, I didn’t care about high-paying jobs or job security. My peers chased BPOs and public-sector jobs for higher pay. I chose a ₹5,000/month trainee job because it let me work on core IoT systems.

I didn’t chase money.

I chased mastery.

From Engineer to Entrepreneur

By 2016, I started freelancing full time. One hire led to another, and soon, I had a team. We worked out of a 4BHK apartment. My friend Vishal’s marriage was called off because his in-laws didn’t want their daughter marrying someone “working from a house.”

That hurt.

So I registered a company & we moved into an office. I learned how to lead. I made mistakes. I worked 14–16 hour days. I wrote code. I ran meetings. I met deadlines.

I didn’t sleep for two days at many times. But it didn’t matter. I was building.

When Your Passion Evolves

In 2017, I stepped away from coding and started scaling the company. One day, a prospect asked for a business presentation. We were a 20+ engineer team but had zero marketers. So, I did the presentation myself—on a 21-inch screen, in a tiny room.

I nailed it.

And I discovered a new version of myself—confident, articulate, persuasive.

Later in 2019, at a tech expo, I realised the people running booths weren’t superhuman. They were just like me. That gave me the courage to sell, pitch, and market.

And just like that, sales became my new spark.

The Real Truth About Passion

Here’s the truth no one tells you:

Passion is not a prerequisite to live a fulfilling life. Being driven is.

We treat passion like a destination; something to find, chase, and hold onto forever. But life doesn’t work that way. Passions evolve. Interests shift. New sparks emerge.

The problem is, every time we hit a roadblock, we start looking for a new “passion.” But that’s just a distraction from the hard work it takes to build something worthwhile.

Instead, if you focus on showing up, learning, creating value, and being open to evolution, you’ll discover you’re passionate about many things at different stages in life.

Why I Wrote This

People are often surprised when I tell them I never planned to start a company. Even today, I don’t have a detailed expansion roadmap. I just follow what feels right and keep showing up.

This post is a reminder that you don’t need a “north star passion” to make it.

Writing is my new spark. And yes, it’s hard. I face blocks and doubts. But I’m driven to share my story—and that drive matters more than momentary excitement.

Final Thought

Don’t chase passion. Stay driven.

Create. Build. Learn. Show up every day. That’s how you grow.

And when you look back, you’ll realize—you didn’t find passion.

You built a life worth being passionate about.

Remember: The grass always looks greener on the other side. But it grows where you water it.

With the lights off, I paced the room, lost in thought. That’s when something unexpected happened.

The Moment That Sparked It All

In the middle of my dark, absent-minded pacing, I suddenly bumped into something with my leg. Instinctively, I thought I’d knocked over a child. I bent down quickly; only to realise, with a jolt, that I was alone in the room. In fact, I was alone in the house.

It was just a chair.

The moment passed in under a second, but it unleashed a cascade of reflection that lingered long after.

Where Did That Thought Even Come From?

Why did my brain immediately jump to the idea that I’d hit a child?

As I probed my own reaction, a memory surfaced; one I hadn’t thought about in years. When I was around 13 or 14, I was visiting a temple. Distracted and deep in thought, I accidentally bumped into a small child. The child hit my knee, fell, and began crying.

That forgotten moment, stored somewhere deep in my subconscious, had been instantly retrieved and replayed in this new, unrelated situation; simply because the physical sensation was similar.

What amazed me was not just the memory itself, but the speed at which my brain pulled it up. It took me minutes to write this down, but the realisation unfolded in under a couple of seconds.

But Why Didn’t My Brain Know Better?

As I marvelled at this, a new question hit me: if my brain is so brilliant, why didn’t it also remember that I am alone, and that no one has been around me?

I recalled something from a Stanford lecture by Prof. Robert Sapolsky, Introduction to Human Behavioural Biology. He explains that our brain deals with massive amounts of information every day by creating categories and shortcuts AND it’s a survival feature, not a flaw.

As an engineer and former coder, this resonated deeply. In large databases, filters and categories are key to speeding up searches. For example, if you’re looking up one person’s academic record in a country of 1.45 billion, you don’t search every record. You narrow by gender, age, location etc; each filter shrinking the pool and making the search faster.

Our brain does something similar. It categorizes.

The Brain: The Ultimate Memory System

Old computers, with terabytes of storage, can take seconds or even minutes to run large searches. But my brain? It matched a physical input (bumping my knee) to a 13-year-old memory, inferred the context, and even suggested a behavioural response (“look down - is there a child?”) — all in under a second.

That’s the astonishing power of categorization. But here’s the catch: fast doesn’t always mean accurate.

The Deeper Lesson

This experience reminded me that the brain’s snap judgments aren’t always right. Acting on instinct can sometimes be helpful, but sometimes, it can lead us astray, especially when the categories we rely on no longer fit the present reality.

The key is awareness. If we can pause, examine the current situation, and ask: Is this reaction truly helpful here? - we can avoid falling into the trap of automatic, biased thinking.

A Wake-Up Call From the Hiring Room

I saw the same pattern show up when I was hiring for my company a couple of years back.

Before interviews, I realized I was already forming unconscious categories about candidates. If someone fit into my mental “good” category, I’d overlook mistakes. If someone made a small slip, I sometimes unfairly derailed the interview.

The moment I became aware of this bias, I knew I needed to step back and reassess how I was making decisions.

Why I’m Sharing This

This post is a message to myself, and maybe to you, too.

Our brains are incredible, but they’re not infallible. They take shortcuts, generalize, and create categories to help us navigate a complex world. But those shortcuts can also create biases, misjudgments, and missed opportunities.

If we want to become more thoughtful & open-minded people as leaders, colleagues, friends, or simply as humans; we need to challenge our own instant reactions.

Next time you’re faced with a decision, pause.

Ask yourself;

Am I acting on the situation in front of me, or on a category my brain pulled from the past?

That small moment of reflection might just help us all become better, kinder, and more self-aware.

But does this mean that in relationships, opposites should always attract? Should we avoid seeking common ground, convinced that difference is what makes us whole?

It’s an intriguing thought, but one that requires deeper examination.

The Pull of the Opposite

In the realm of relationships, many are drawn to qualities that are diametrically opposed to their own. If you’re an introvert, you may find yourself enchanted by an extroverted, outgoing partner, someone who seems to live effortlessly in the spotlight. You marvel at how they navigate social situations with ease, while you shy away from the limelight. In this, there is a sense of “completeness” that emerges—a filling of the gaps you perceive in yourself.

Another metaphor I often use involves shoes. If your shoes are worn and dirty, you may find yourself noticing others who seem to have it all together—shoes polished, perfect, pristine. They’re the ones who seem to have their lives in order, and there’s a subtle admiration that grows.

But here, we encounter two divergent ideas that shape the fabric of human connection: the idea of completeness versus the idea of individualism.

Let’s explore both.

The Believers: Seeking Completion

The first group—let’s call them the “Believers”—are often drawn to people who offer what they lack. They feel an inherent desire for another person to fill the spaces within them, to create a partnership where two incomplete beings become whole through their union. For these individuals, relationships are grounded in a mutual journey through life, facing challenges together, validating each other’s existence.

This kind of connection isn’t always about exploration or self-growth. Rather, it’s about companionship—two people coming together, forging a life, and building a sense of shared purpose. Outside of the romantic sphere, these individuals often thrive in communities, finding strength in numbers and working together to solve collective problems.

Thus, in relationships, these “Believers” seek partners who complement them, balancing out what they feel they lack. They are driven by a sense of mutual dependence, a bond forged in shared experience, and an unspoken promise to face life’s struggles hand in hand.

The Seekers: Embracing Individualism

On the other side, we have the “Seekers”—those who are committed to personal exploration and self-actualization. These individuals value their independence and don’t rely on a partner to complete them. They are already whole, content in their own journey, and often prefer to walk through life as individuals.

This doesn’t mean that they’re not open to love, but rather that they seek someone who shares their spirit of growth, discovery, and adventure. For them, relationships are about companionship and shared exploration, not about filling voids or fixing weaknesses.

Consider this: If I’m reading a book on psychology, and you’re reading one on philosophy, we may seem to be on separate journeys. But when we come together to read a fictional book, we share something profound—a deeper, richer exploration of a single work of fiction, applying our different lenses to its characters. Even after finishing the book, we continue to engage in thoughtful dialogue, exploring every nuance and depth.

In this way, Seekers don’t just exist beside one another; they grow and evolve together, not by completing each other, but by adding to each other’s understanding of the world. They don’t need a partner to make them whole—they seek someone who understands the value of individuality and is equally invested in their own personal development.

The Path to Depth

And so, the tension between these two ways of being—the Believers and the Seekers—often leads to the question: Can opposites really attract, or do we need something deeper, something more substantial to build lasting love?

The answer lies in the depth.

In early years, the idea of opposites attracting might seem romantic, even alluring. An introvert might be drawn to an extrovert’s energy, or a homebody to the thrill of a partner’s adventures. But as we mature and understand ourselves more deeply, we come to realize that true connection goes beyond mere attraction. Over time, you may find yourself longing not for someone who fills a gap, but for someone who resonates with the depths of your being—someone who shares a core understanding of life and existence, even if they differ in other ways.

As we journey into deeper waters, we confront the excruciating process of self-discovery. We shed layers, discard old versions of ourselves, and slowly uncover the truths that define us. These truths, these essential parts of who we are, are the qualities we should look for in others. In this way, we explore not only our own depths but also the depths of another.

When we find someone who shares a similar core, a shared understanding of self and world; the relationship becomes a dialogue, not just a monologue. It becomes a space where both partners can speak, listen, and grow. Without this shared ground, there’s little room for meaningful exchange. It’s like trying to have a conversation with someone who speaks a different language—without common understanding, communication falters.

The Magnetism of Common Ground

This is why relationships that are built on a shared core—a common ground of values, principles, or beliefs—are often the most enduring. As with magnets, opposites can certainly attract, but they must eventually find balance. A magnet needs both north and south poles to function, but it is the core essence of the magnet itself that defines its strength.

In relationships, too, the core identity of each person must remain intact. The relationship itself must be grounded in mutual understanding and respect for each individual’s essence. Only then can both partners begin to explore the opposites—different perspectives, varying interests, opposing viewpoints—which serve to deepen and strengthen the connection.

Conclusion: Going Vertical and then expanding Horizontal

I like to think of this process as going vertical in a relationship first—establishing a solid foundation on common values and core beliefs. From there, the relationship can expand horizontally, exploring all the diverse experiences, opinions, and adventures that each partner brings to the table. But this only works if both individuals are clear about who they are—secure in their identities—so that they can explore the unknown together while remaining rooted in their essence.

In the end, whether we are Seekers or Believers, the relationship that truly thrives is one that honors the depth of both individuals. It’s a relationship that goes beyond surface attraction, one that fosters growth, exploration, and the beauty of shared journeys. And in this way, opposites can attract—but only when they are grounded in a deeper connection that transcends difference and seeks understanding.