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Happiness fuels productivity
Once when I was returning home after a long trip, to surprise my daughter, I bought her a Nintendo game console (it used to be quite popular then). Also, I bought a bunch of other stuff. So when I reached home and showed her the Nintendo game, she...
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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...
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...
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...
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...
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Prioritization in life
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...
You vs You
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....
Knowledge keeps you relevant
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...
Prioritizing learning
At Wharton, in Prof Jeremey Siegel’s class, we had no place to sit for the first 10 minutes since people would crowd for his ‘daily market updates’. He was a rockstar professor but had one quirk -- to keep his teaching material exclusive, he would...