LinkedIn Posts

On the top floor of my building, lived my friend and junior from IPS and IIT - Sunil Asnani. In the evenings, we would often hang out on the rooftop, talking about his plan to quit the IPS and do an MBA from a US business school. The plan sounded crazy -- nobody we...

For most of my life, I went to English-medium schools where nobody spoke English. However, from grades 1-4, I attended a government school in Bangalore where kids used English even for social conversations. That is the only real exposure I had to the language. Yet, it...

In the first semester at IIT Kanpur, I noticed this guy whose class notes would just be half a page of tiny scrawl, scribbled with a ball-point refill. In the hostel, he would usually be playing cricket or doing bull sessions with friends. Clearly, not a recipe for...

I realized the beauty as well as the futility of luxury during my job at a private equity fund. In that company, every few months, we had offsites at the most exclusive luxury resorts in India, some of which had suites costing a few lacs a night. Undeniably, luxury...

At an investors’ conference in Mumbai, I once asked a guy, “So, what do you do?” He was so stunned that for a few seconds he was speechless. Then, he turned to others and said, “You know, once, everyone knew me. Now I am asked what I do!” Realizing that I had...

On 31st Oct 2002, a bloody riot on the roads of Trivandrum showed me an unseen side of human nature. That morning, a protest march of 20,000 people was demanding the release of an extremist political leader, arrested in a bomb blast case. As the chief of the...

When I got into the Civil Services, my mind did not go ‘Wow, this is great news.’ It was more like -- ‘Ok, this is done. Now, what next?’ All my life, I have chased the next mountain to climb. As a result, I ended up trying a lot of different things, failing often and...

At the fag end of my MBA, having had enough of finance courses and the hyper-competitive MBA crowd, I wanted a short break from the rat race. So I signed up for ‘History of Western Classical Music’, a course outside Wharton, offered by the music department. The...

In 2009, when I first joined private equity investing, I found that we MBAs understood finance less than a typical Marwari businessman. Most investors talk only about growth and multiples (usually EV/EBITDA) but rarely does anyone ask: Is this firm REALLY creating...

It was so unfair -- we were all fit, thirty-something guys, pitched against a team that included senior people, including a 70-year old. This friendly football match during a company offsite, in my last job, was going to be a no-contest. And it was. We were crushed,...

I write almost every day, except on Sundays. Some days, the writing flows effortlessly, like water. Ideas just snap-fit into words. Other days, it is like you are dragging a dead body. And yet, the key is to accept both experiences with equanimity. If you are able to...

When I left the Civil Services to join an MBA program, I found people looking down on technical knowledge as something low-value, meant for the ‘junior guys.’ The senior folks were the ones supposedly creating real value because they could speed-dial an Ambani or a...