In my life, the only major career goal for which I had to truly struggle was getting into IIT. IIT made getting into Civil Services so much more doable -- most of my classmates who aimed for it also made it. Once in the IPS, the exposure and confidence made it...

In my last job as a private equity investor, I came across many Indian entrepreneurs whose parents set up the business from scratch. I remember one entrepreneur in the medical devices space, whose mother used to go wait outside doctors' offices for hours, with device...

The most valuable lesson I learned at McKinsey was NOT making presentations or structured thinking, as valuable as they were. The best lesson was the experience of being at the bottom of an organization. Before my MBA, I was running a 3,500 strong police force,...

I was once talking to a lawyer, who was a partner at a law firm in London. I asked him, 'How challenging is it to be a good lawyer?' He said, 'Anybody can write a contract or a legal document but writing a really good one is very hard. A good document is one where if...

During my MBA, McKinsey once visited our campus for a pre-placement talk. One of their consultants who addressed us was a South American with a very heavy Spanish accent. He joked saying, "Whenever people tell me that I don't have an American accent, I tell them that...

3 years ago, I experienced one of the happiest days of my life. And in case you are wondering what life-changing thing happened that day, the answer is -- nothing. All I was doing was teaching finance to a new class of investment bankers at Avendus, all sharp and...

During my stint with the Indian Police Service, I handled a ton of riots, violent mobs, and civil disturbances. When you keep doing that day-in and day-out, naturally, the whole routine becomes quite familiar. Despite that, I would try to never take anything for...

Is a 20 kg rucksack too heavy? Probably yes, but only if you carry it on your back. If you put it down, it has no weight at all. The same goes for our worries. We often carry way too much burden in our heads. Why not put them down? But this sounds too simplistic -- if...

Once, during my stint with McKinsey, an HR recruiter from the New York office once asked me if I could help shortlist a few resumes for interviews. The applicants were all from top B-Schools (Harvard, Columbia, MIT, Wharton, etc.) and every resume looked stellar. All...

Learning new skills is hard. Learning daily is hard. But you don't climb Mt. Everest by watching National Geographic. You get there by pushing yourself every day, for years. To do big things, we don't need one-day heroism -- we need to go through the daily grind, even...

As a kid, during our train travels, when we got close to the destination, I would be constantly pestering my parents, "When will the station arrive?" And in that process, I would totally miss out on the fun of the journey or the beautiful scenery outside the train....

There is no such thing as 'karma' - good deeds don't always generate tangible rewards. What goes around, need not come around. One might then ask: If good deeds don't create good karma, why should we do good things? Because they are 'good'; because we want to be...

When I first met my Inspector General of Police (IGP) after taking charge as Trivandrum Police Commissioner, he went on a rant. He said, "I don't know how the government posted you here and how you will handle such a tough assignment. This is really stupid. When I...

A few years ago, I was on a flight from Jaipur to Bangalore. As soon as the flight took off, the plane ran into the kind of turbulence I had never encountered before -- it was getting violently tossed up and down. Sometimes, it felt like the plane was in free fall for...

In the early 2000s, I got into the habit of regularly watching TV. Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong per se with that, but at some point, I started feeling anxious that I would miss out on some new episode or some upcoming movie. In those days, I had not heard...