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Meditation is being fully present
While you ruminate about your past mistakes and worry about the troubles likely to befall you, the tea in front of you is getting cold. Drink that tea. And when you drink it, just drink tea -- don't do anything else. Savor it fully. Ultimately,...
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Overcoming language barriers
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...
The key to success lies in focus
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...
Finding meaning beyond luxury
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...
Start every day as a beginner
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,...
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Unseen side of human nature
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...
Acknowledging small wins on the journey to success
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...
Commitment is the key to learning
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...
You can’t run away from reality forever
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...