LinkedIn Posts

When I was writing my MBA application essays for US B-Schools, I found myself in a fix. Throughout school and college, I hadn’t written even one page of half-decent prose. How would I write these highly demanding essays? Fortunately, Vinod Thomas, my friend and IPS...

All you have is 30,000 hours. That’s it. Today, there is a new 'gold' in town -- no, it is not bitcoin. It is not oil. That is what Instagram, Facebook, and others are fighting for -- our time and attention. Only we have the gold they need. Only we can make them rich,...

One day during a finance class of Prof David Wessels at Wharton, suddenly, the classroom door flew open and a hefty guy entered with a cardboard box in his hand. The interrupted class sat in stunned silence -- we were all staring at that guy. But without missing a...

Two decades ago, I was sitting with a good friend and college senior who had recently relocated to Trivandrum after a PhD in the US. He was talking about how much he missed running and how moving back to India had disrupted that habit. I asked him, “Why not restart?...

I don’t need the motivation to run 10km — I need just enough to put on my running shoes. 90% of the battle is getting started. Yet, sometimes, even putting on the shoes feels hard. Here is my favorite hack, but before that, we need to know some neuroscience. Think of...

Growing up, when I was facing my life’s first major exam (IITJEE), I was virtually biting my nails. I would often ponder, “What if I don’t make it? Would I have any future?” We were not an affluent family. Nobody in our family had been to college -- my sister and I...

My de-facto co-founder at HabitStrong, Nisha Salim, is brilliant but often runs into a problem -- she does not have a degree from any tier-1 college. She has been way better than any pedigreed folks we have hired from IIT/IIM etc., but investors have often been...

When starting my MBA at Wharton, I kept telling myself, “Don’t ruin it again. This is the last chance.” Earlier, I had ruined my 4 years at IIT -- bunking classes, always falling behind, cramming before exams to barely get a passing grade. But this time, the stakes...

It was my most amazing project at McKinsey. And yet, just when things were looking great, they went downhill. Here is what happened. This was the kind of project consulting firms talk about in their advertisement brochures -- we were advising the CEO and the brilliant...

On the National Police Academy parade ground, our assistant drill instructor, head constable Ram Singh, would bark at us like he was General Patton. And even a millisecond delay in obeying his command would invite his rage, and the drill sequence would start all over...

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 name of...

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,...