I was racing a 2:30 am deadline to submit my Wharton MBA application in Round 1. Post midnight, in the frantic rush, as I was giving the final touches to my application, the Microsoft Word document crashed. When I tried recovering the changes, I messed up and lost all...

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...

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 give his course...

On a hillock in the jungles of Tripura, we were assigned small huts for our stay in the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force) camp. This was during the IPS training when we were attached to our paramilitary forces for first-hand exposure to counter-insurgency...