LinkedIn Posts

A few years ago, at the Gold’s gym in Bandra, Mumbai, a few of us were waiting for the lift -- and yes, I do see the irony of using an elevator to go to a gym 🙂 As time passed, one guy got restless and kept pressing the ‘up’ button again and again. And since the lift...

Last year, when I was talking to a youngster after one of our bootcamp sessions, he asked me, “I have taken up a government job, which I really hate but my family is asking me to stick to it for job security. What should I do?” I don’t give career advice but,...

In Jan 2006, while most of my MBA classmates had secured their summer internships, I was waiting, empty-handed. Many firms didn’t even interview me -- who wants to hire an ex-cop, with no prior business experience? In the midst of a festive mood in the US, with the...

In the past, I have often gotten this question: “Why don’t you use your civil service connections to get business from government?” As an entrepreneur, this is the thing I would hate doing the most. So much so that whenever I have had discussions with investors in the...

During my days as a private equity investor, I saw people making two kinds of mistakes: Type 1 mistake: You make a bad investment, but when you realize it, you accept it and move on. You secretly curse yourself and try not to repeat it. Type 2 mistake: You invest in a...

When I walked into a shopping mall, they gave me 10 plastic tokens. And they said, “Each token buys one item -- anything you want, whether a 10 rupee pen, a 1,000 rupee T-shirt, or a 1 lac rupee laptop. It is your choice.” What would you say if I bought 10 pens?...

A few months after I moved out of the US, just near my erstwhile apartment building, a plane landed in the Hudson River, near New York City. The US Airways flight had a complete engine failure due to a bird-hit and had no power left. Yet, Captain Sullenberger, a...

In 1995, during my final year B.Tech placement season, everybody was obsessed with salaries -- companies like Cadence, offering Rs 10,000 per month or a bit more, were rockstars, while anyone offering even Rs 1,000 less became an ‘undesirable.’ Yet, looking back,...

Quitting the Indian Police Service allowed me to restart my journey, like a fresh intern trying to make sense of the world. I totally loved the first 5-6 years in the Civil Services -- every day was a new learning. But gradually, it became more of the same, again and...

When I quit my job to become an entrepreneur, it felt a bit weird, but not for the first time. Years earlier, to do my GMAT and MBA prep, when I took a transfer from the post of Trivandrum Police Commissioner to a low-key role in Kerala police, I had the same feeling....

During my days working in private equity, I once met an entrepreneur who manufactured orthopedic implants (typically used in surgery for fracture victims). His company was worth about Rs 100 crores, and he had built it single-handedly from scratch, over 15 odd years....

Starting in 2018, I have been writing nearly every day, for almost 1,000 days (on Linkedin, Quora, HabitStrong blog). Writing per se was not the hard part. The challenge was to keep writing DESPITE the ups and downs, and the thousand different moods one goes through....