Latest Post
Prioritizing Thoughtful Work
When I was serving as the Trivandrum Police Commissioner, I once skipped a useless meeting called by a senior government official. The next week, when my assistant shared my weekly timesheet, she showed an internal meeting that I had never...
Recent Posts
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...
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...
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...
More Articles
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...
Finding luxury in simplicity
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...
Building clarity through journaling
Three years ago, my startup was catastrophically burning cash. We only had cash to pay salaries for 3-4 months. To survive, we had to change the business model. But for that, we needed to survive. It was a catch-22, without a way out. Or at least,...