About Me

I derive my identity more from how I live and less from my clients list. I offer a curtain-raiser on how I live. Here, you will find out how my days unfold, and not where I graduated from. For that, there is Linkedin.

Some of us find the already paved path crowded, not because there is competition, but because preconditions are set and one has to adhere to some rules to get ahead. For those of us who play by our own rules, have a reliable inner compass, manufacture our own fairness & morality and are sometimes seen as unfashionable do-gooders, it has always been easier to get off the gravel and take the scenic route.

So, I’ve come to hold contradictions. I am ambitious but not only for myself. In the thriving of my people, my thriving makes sense. I physically hurt when I hear of a tree felling drive (for the sake of progress, which my head understands). For someone who prefers her own counsel and company, this collectivism is unexplainable and often, still a surprise.

I love beautiful, not necessarily luxurious things. Feeding that need takes wherewithal that I am not shy to go after. I don’t hanker for the safety of four walls to call my own, but I would so love a little forest where I can walk as I please.

I love birdsong, strolls among old trees, an unhurried bucolic pace. This need is odd, given that I don’t know life outside the urban one I was born, raised in and have chosen for my livelihood.

I love the gentle awareness of opposing forces of holding a Yoga asana. I also love the resilience-building rigour and pain of endurance sports.

I love working on multiple unrelated projects across my areas of competence. I also love to focus on one complex problem till it’s solved.

I love routines because they soothe. I also love a good “throw away the playbook and get all in” crisis that tests first principles and coded value systems.

I love puttering about in the labyrinths of the mind as much as I love recasting the mind every 7-10 years into an entirely new me with new operating systems. I am learning to love detachment from these systems.

I love the whimsy of flutes and harps in the background while working. I also love the silence needed for imagination.

I love meditating without counting minutes. I also love talking people through complex situations, as long as there is progress.

How did this happen, you ask?

My ingredients for peace are:

“Sit. Feast on your life” kind of openness: At age 16, I turned pro at Bharatanatyam. Amid that ostensible thriving and early accomplishment, I took another path, trusting that I’d find the authenticity I sought. To bid goodbye to dance at age 22 required openness. Since then, I have quit lucrative, necessary mainstream work choices. Love after love, or hard but necessary choices dot my emotional landscape. I am continually shaped by the ones I’ve committed to.

If winter comes, can spring be far behind: Professional colleges in the 90s were places infested with unkindness. Socially accepted “ragging” was code for bullying at the very least, and if you didn’t watch out, harassment. My spirit rebelled at the thought of four years in jail. In hindsight, I got myself a liberal arts education: an undergrad in Psychology, Political Science and English where I taught myself to think. Thanks to an uninspired and unchallenging curriculum, I recast my own. I studied Skinner and Jung, Aristotle and Vivekananda, Wollstonecraft, Kamala Das and Mary Shelley, the OG Calvin & Hobbes, Camus and Sartre, Judith Butler and Chomsky. Chased that down with a regrettable MBA. The lure of a more authentic life (ah, the innocence of youth) led to what was then truly a pensioners paradise.

Walking in the shadows of giants: I began work when tech was still reasonably intimate worldwide. Twitter was a new platform. I had access to stories and experiences that are now memoirs of industry captains. The awareness of how growth looks, to quote a beloved ex-boss, “boxed up in cartons”, and the unboxing experience of an entire industry, has been worth the price of admittance.

Off-work, I lived in a charming and inclusive neighbourhood with artists and dreamers who invited you into their homes for lemonade and an impromptu musical jam.

An equal temper, a heroic heart: At the turn of my 30th birthday, aided by endorphins, thanks to some morning long runs at Ulsoor lake – I took stock of life. The shift into working with smaller, more authentic teams has paid off. I have a preference for intentionally small companies that encode ways of being at work. The moneybags trade off has left me with fewer regrets than I’d imagined. Helping businesses grow their People & Culture is hard and gentle work. Understanding leaders and their realities. Staying a step behind them when mentoring or coaching. Helping them realise their vision. Facilitating change with frontline team members. Aligning the interests of people and the amorphous organisation. All akin to lifting a felled oak with feathers. With time, I have learnt to be poised just so, to deliver this kind of work with grace.

All occurrences, even the unpleasant ones, have served as material for winnowing lessons. Invaluable when I hung out my consulting shingle. I don’t have to cast my mind anymore to look for relatable examples. I mentally spread out my palms and an appropriate instance from my experience alights sprightly.

Through my journeys, books have been my closest friends. From pre-internet times, these has been no question unanswered thanks to my trusty tomes; I was extremely fortunate to grow up within walking distance of and unusual access to one of the largest libraries in the country. Arts, headlining with music, possibly, has been the other big supportive track in life.

All in all, I am very aware of the amount of luck holding together a very charmed life.