Persistence Pays

Once I was talking to a friend whose extended family had built a pharma business from scratch to worth tens of thousands of crores. Now, here is the most interesting thing — In 40 years, they become multi-billionaires. But in the first 30 years, by comparison,...

Beyond the Startup Drama

The startup world has today become a circus. Once, ‘startup’ meant innovation. Today it has become this drama of VC funding, valuation, unicorn, week-over-week growth, blitzscaling, and pursuit of the next billion/trillion/quadrillion. Now, there is NOTHING...

The Power of Daily Meditation

I have been working out regularly for more than a decade but it took years of struggle to make meditation a daily habit. Without guidance, it was really hard – every time, I would try but give up after a few days. But once I started reading some of the Buddhist...

Handling difficult life-situations

In 2003, I was facing a potentially career-ending crisis. A group of tribals from northern Kerala landed in Trivandrum and started agitating. As the City Police chief, I had to ensure that there was no violence or obstruction. Since these were impoverished tribals, we...