Failure vs a life of regret

Five years into my first job with the Indian Police Service, I was unsure what to do next — something had changed. In the beginning, everything was just so exciting — nothing like anything I had done earlier. After spending years doing crazy math in the...

Hard or easy is in our mind

Panwali was going to be our Waterloo, we were warned. This was a part of the 9-day trek during our Civil Services training that included a near-vertical climb of 2 km in the Panwali mountain range. In the words of our Physical Training Instructor, “Panwali ki chadhai,...

Change tomorrow’s story

In a semiconductor course tutorial at IIT Kanpur, Prof. Aloke Dutta pointed at me and said, “Please come and explain the functioning of an NPN transistor.” As I sprang to my feet and walked up to the blackboard, my friend Ashish Agrawal was gaping at me: The task was...