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Never jump the gun
When Byju's acquired White Hat Jr for $300 million, folks on LinkedIn went crazy. "Good Lord -- how could someone create so much value in just 18 months?" Today, the company is losing more than Rs 1,000 crores a year. And I won't even get into the...
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Before joining the Indian Police Service, the most physically intense thing I had done in a few years was climbing the stairs of PK Kelkar Library...
Finding Satisfaction in Simple Things
The first time I did pistol shooting, in Mussoorie’s IAS training academy, our pistols all malfunctioned - or so it seemed. Five of us, barely 15 m...
Saving Childhoods
At a typical IITJEE coaching center in Andhra, a student wakes up at 6 am and studies till 10 pm. For 16 hours, 6 days a week, they slog, with a few...
Persistence Pays
Once I was talking to a friend whose extended family had built a pharma business from scratch to worth tens of thousands of crores. Now, here is the...
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Beyond the Startup Drama
The startup world has today become a circus. Once, ‘startup’ meant innovation. Today it has become this drama of VC funding, valuation, unicorn, week-over-week growth, blitzscaling, and pursuit of the next billion/trillion/quadrillion. Now, there...
The Power of Daily Meditation
I have been working out regularly for more than a decade but it took years of struggle to make meditation a daily habit. Without guidance, it was really hard - every time, I would try but give up after a few days. But once I started reading some of...
Handling difficult life-situations
In 2003, I was facing a potentially career-ending crisis. A group of tribals from northern Kerala landed in Trivandrum and started agitating. As the City Police chief, I had to ensure that there was no violence or obstruction. Since these were...
Happiness from Within
In investment banking and Wall Street jobs, the ‘bonus day’ is an interesting one -- everybody gets a cash windfall. Naturally, they should all be thrilled, right? Yet, NOT everyone is happy. Why? Did they not just get more money? Here are the two...