Cyclones

July 14, 2024

Our aunt, Bharti Masi, passed away last month, almost by choice.

My darling sister, a little rattled by all of it, texted me:

 “Taking the decision to die because it’s better for you, I cannot imagine what Masi must’ve been going through.”

*****

Bharti Masi, one of my mother’s many little sisters, was born into a house mainly full of women and girls. Her mother, my grandma, was best described a little whack, but her grandma – Baa – was the stalwart of the house. A woman of strength and wisdom, unafraid and unabashed, loved and trusted. Universally respected.

Growing up, it almost seemed like Bharti Masi contested with her sisters on who was the prettiest of them all. The Katbamna girls were the talk of the town, a bunch of beauties to behold. My father and his brothers had hit a little jackpot, living in a tiny, rented space in the same building below these beauties.

And just as if intelligent design was real, the Bollywood script of the girl next door came to life. Bharti Masi’s elder sister became my father’s wife in a love story for the ages, still going strong.

Bharti Masi, on the other hand, would never get married.

Amidst all the beauty, what set Bharti Masi apart was her razor-sharp mind – unafraid and unabashed.

But at the age of 20, she was diagnosed with lupus, an auto-immune disease that can rampage through your body like a cyclone but still be “managed” with modern medicine.

The disease is death, but this ability to “manage” it seems like absolute psychological hell – unnecessary yet necessary. It’s as if the Devil is right around the corner, don’t tempt him to come around, but try as you may, he might just come along anyway and take it all away.

This constant fear of impending doom must be crippling, with the hope of survival serving only as salt on a wound that will never really heal.

When her body first attacked her at the age of 20, the entire clan – her family and her future family – came together to save her, quite literally. Her sisters and her brothers, and my father and his cousins all gave her blood, pumping life into her, in what now seems like a ceremony of kinship strengthened by tragedy.

She pulled through that first wave but was shaken.

She had lost her hair because of all the steroids but she gained a strong desire to conquer survival.

She tried everything to keep the Devil away, even engaging in Urine Therapy. She drank her urine every morning and saved some to massage her skin at night before falling asleep. The stench didn’t seem to matter – not to her, nor to the ones that loved her.

When people made fun of her baldness, she stripped off the scarf that covered her scalp in a rebellion that would be symbolic for years to come.

And then she fled.

She left for a land with seemingly greener pastures booking a one-way ticket to the United States of immigrants. She felt modern medicine might serve her better there. She went on to get her PhD in Audiology and became a tenured professor in a quaint little town in Michigan.

When I was 11, we all went on a family trip to Australia. She had come along as the ninth wheel with two families of four.

And boy, I hated her guts.

My rebellious eleven-year-oldness collided with her fearless reprimand. She always seemed to kill the buzz, snapping if the volume was too loud, pointing out all the dangers of a simple canoe and cutting through me with her stern scolding when I squeezed a ketchup sachet too hard.

I didn’t get it back then. And many others didn’t either.

She pushed away more people than she pulled in.

Our evolution doesn’t allow us to understand the depth of a person just by looking at them. Survival mechanisms are often masked by negativity and there’s no time to empathize with the rude, however broken, brave and beautiful they are underneath.

When I moved to the US for my undergrad, my mother forced me to reconnect with Bharti Masi. With my prefrontal cortex still figuring things out, I took it on as an errand to please my Mum, with an eyeroll or two that was still cool back then.

But the offshoot was a pleasant relationship. How can someone I used to fight with all the time ship me home-baked cookies across the land? And ever since, she followed my journey. Our relationship was punctuated with sporadic conversations and emails about plastics and photos and pain.

The more I learnt about life, the more I admired my Masi’s courage and the love that lay underneath.

It all started to make sense to me: she had been cursed with a deck of cards that had very few trumps, but she was a fighter. It was almost like all the trump cards she should have had, had slipped into the decks of people like me, and the Joker cards were replaced by the Devil. And yet, she kept playing.

While I made sense of all that unfairness, she battled with the senselessness of the condition she was a slave to.

In the years to come, the Devil kept showing his face – poking at her, and then going away and giving her hope, only to sneak back up again.

She would have some years of goodness, and then something would go wrong. Sometimes it was the disease and sometimes it was just sheer bad luck – like the time she slipped on ice outside her house and fell, breaking her arm that took ages to heal.

Then, a few good years later, she had a stroke which left her vision severely hampered, recovering slowly.

But she did recover from that, improved her already-great diet, retired from teaching and started embracing still photography while writing a cookbook. She seemed in high spirits and the final stretch seemed like a happy ending worthy of a Pulitzer.

Amidst all this rejuvenation, one day she found her arm had swelled a little. She delayed treatment because of the innocuousness of the swelling until it swelled more.

4 months later she was fighting for her life in the ICU. A couple of weeks after that, she died.

She died because that was the better option.

Almost all her main organs had failed but her brain and her heart were still churning. If she wanted to live, she would have had to be bedridden on a ventilator all her life, coupled with regular dialyses. Who wants that life?

“I don’t want to be a burden,”  she said.

My mother could barely see her in that state. It’s too much pain, Anish, it’s too much.

Bharti Masi wasn’t alone when she passed away. Her partner, her best friend and some of her family were with her. No children though, nor any of the clan that had once given her their blood all those years ago. And that was that.

My mother says that she had many good years, but all I see is the unjust, uncontrollable tragedy of her circumstances, and her relentless courage to struggle through it right till death, with hope showing its worst face.

Maybe I’m being too negative about this. Or maybe, my mother’s love for her sister wants her to believe it was all worth it.

Who knows, my mother says. Who knows.

All I am certain of is that I cannot be certain about anything. And that as hard as I might try, I might not be able to make sense of everything.

I am not much of a quotes guy, but these days, this quote from the mighty Mr Chesterton keeps coming up:

The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is.

*****

As my mother and father mourned through this loss, I have been caught up in the cyclone that is social entrepreneurship. Just when I thought it couldn’t get more intense, it has picked up a notch.

The thing about cyclones is that people run away from them, even though that’s not what cyclones manifest for.

Entrepreneurship is pushing everyone you love away from you for "something bigger", “something bigger” that wise people don’t really understand.

Social entrepreneurship is pushing everyone you love away from you for something bigger, but the difference is that the wise people who love you fully understand this "something bigger", and that's almost worse. Because they won't stop you. Because it just might be worth it.

The ferocity of this cyclone has made me claustrophobic, running amidst different intensities of chaos while getting trapped in my own wind, without any space.

So much so that I felt it was time to move out from my parents’ home, in search of the eye of the storm.

With a little help from my sister, I told Mum and Dad that it was time to move out. Despite the grandiose gesture of “moving in with the ‘rents” a couple of years ago that garnered plaudits from the mothers of all my friends, my parents were as supportive as ever of this senseless retraction.

So much so that I wished that there was more drama. That they were angrier. So, I’d feel less spoilt. But that’s the irony of the support system I have, it’s almost senseless how supportive it is.

Even in the tough sport that is entrepreneurship, I feel spoilt. As a Shark mentioned on TV not too long ago: Anish, you’ve not gotten enough “dhakkas” (punches) in your journey.

While I make sense of this entrepreneurial cyclone that I’ve created for myself, my aunt, Bharti Masi, was born into a cyclone full of dhakkas. A cyclone she could barely make sense of. A cyclone devoid of any trump cards. Her last words were, “Modern medicine has failed me. Now go enjoy my money.”

But both these cyclones have one thing in common. They both seem to push people away. One has found its peace. The other is still searching for the eye, hoping that when it’s found, he has not pushed everyone away.

The Darker Side of Social Entrepreneuring

July 15, 2023

Last month, I was on my way back from a work trip in Stockholm. I was flying back via Dubai, where I grew up. Where my sister currently lives, with two darling little kids who I barely get to spend time with.

She said, stop by and say hi?

And I dismissed it rather quickly. It was stressing me out.

With work exploding, it feels like I’m constantly behind. A couple of extra days off after a week-long work trip would only push me deeper into the ocean of undone things that I was already drowning in.

I am really close with my sister, so it wasn’t an awkward conversation – she gets it and isn’t imposing in any way.

Which makes it worse. The ones that love you the most get it, and so you allow yourself to push them away just a bit more. Because they get it.

They get that you’re trying to do something different, something arguably important. But their unwavering support sprays a shade of entitlement onto your psyche. An entitlement that justifies compromise, sometimes unreasonably, creeping slowly into a weird sense of subtle, subverted narcissism.

The reason I gave my sister was that even if I came, I would be so distracted and distraught with all the undone things that I would end up feeling worse than not visiting.

Okay, she said. And that was that.

These days, I come home to proud parents. Proud, retired parents whose goal now more than ever is to support their child in his seemingly good work. Work that’s not some run-in-the-mill 9-to-5, but something that’s trying to make things better, something that allows pride to be contagious.

I come home late, exhausted and hungry. Mum has already texted asking me, when do you leave? so she can prepare ahead. A plate is already on the table and the food is already hot – twenty minutes later, my dinner is done. Dad doesn’t even allow me to take my plate to the sink.

In those twenty minutes at the dining table, I am generally grumpy, uninterested in updating them or anyone about anything, thinking about the hundred things that happened that day and the next hundred that need to happen the next day.

My father gets the major updates on my work by listening in on update calls with others – two birds, right? My mother is happy with a daily hug, which I sometimes forget.

There lies the irony.

For once, I have my darling parents so close to me and I still seem to be keeping them on the fringes – finding myself distracted in the name of the “greater good” while riding their pride, murmuring to myself I’ll fix it later.

And they never complain. Because they get it.

It really isn’t as simple as you’d imagine. The work we are trying to do is important. It is hard and grueling with unknowns that seem to grow at the rate of knowns but with the potential to result in deep, long-lasting systemic change. At what cost, though?

Then there's the investor world, sucking your soul, putting you through the wringer, and then ghosting you. I find it especially overwhelming when impact “patient” investors define impact and patience differently, often seeming more impatient than impactful while copy-pasting sharky term sheets from traditional investors.

Maybe, I’m being unfair or biased because these aren’t bad people – they’re good people with good intentions just doing things like they are.

The irony is that they first ask: what’s your unique selling point (USP)? and once they’re convinced of our uniqueness, they treat us like a homogeneous crew of social entrepreneurs.

A convenient flip of tone, a magical sleight of hand made easier by the classic power dynamic between the money-giver and the money-taker, exacerbated here in India by our deep-rooted paternalism and our “sir” culture.

I feel like I need to just snap out of it, but it’s not that straightforward. The work we are doing is hard and against the tide. It requires extraordinary effort to create the impact we want, and money plays an important role. But at what cost?

Amidst all this noise, I feel like I have to constantly remind myself of the true reasons I'm doing what I do.

This week, a former waste-picker who briefly worked with us committed suicide. He had been wrestling with alcoholism while his community seemed to both shun and support him. That’s how it is out there sometimes – ridicule for bad behaviour but always room for some support and second chances.

One of these second chances was working with us. He joined us at the beginning of the year and worked for a couple of months. He seemed to be doing well until he started coming to the lab intoxicated. After a slew of second chances and multiple stretches of unexplained absences, we had to let him go.

I remember asking him if there was a reason for his alcoholism, suspecting deeper psychological issues. We didn’t get much out of him, but he did once mention that he thought his wife was having an affair.

We don’t know anything for sure, but this week, on that fateful morning, he was drunk. He fought with his wife, physically abused her, and then hung himself, leaving behind two children – 10 and 5. And two widows – his wife and his mother-in-law.

Poverty is more complex than just income, jobs, health, and education. There is an entire obscure layer of psychological health that is rarely addressed.

The poor go through a lot more than you and me. They are probably more resilient than us because they have to be. But that doesn’t mean they are immune to psychological issues. In fact, often times these issues are masked by their poverty.

Last month, I gave a well-deserved raise to a top-performing colleague. And he broke down into tears. He has only studied till 10^th grade and comes from a low-income background. While he has worked hard all his life, he just doesn’t seem to have gotten a break. Wiping his tears, he said this is the first time someone has truly valued his work.

And then I wept, multiple times, thinking how something as basic as valuing someone fairly for their work can mean so much – how low is this bar that we have set for ourselves?

These are hard problems we are working on. Does that justify me pushing my loved ones away a little? Does it make it okay to sell my soul to investors a little?

There isn’t a clear answer, but I generally find clarity in reflection.

What I know is that this is a long-term affair, and if I burn out too quickly, no one’s really better off. So maybe I can slow down a little, find the right investors partners without selling my soul and focus on building for the long run – all the while maintaining my sanity.

For which I need my loved ones.

And I probably need to get a tattoo somewhere that says: it’ll never be perfect.

Wardha, The Other World

December 18, 2022

Moving Back In With The ‘Rents

April 30, 2022

I remember when I was eighteen, I couldn’t wait to get out of my Mum and Dad’s house and be free, be independent, and “become a man”.

And I did, I flew.

I flew out to the United States of immigrants for my undergrad and thought I would never look back – here’s to never living with Mum and Dad again. I was excited to live by myself, at my own beck and call, without the loving heckling of my parents.

The “loving” part here is key. There was no trouble at home.

My parents were and are awesome.

They found the right balance between letting me be and making sure I didn’t veer off the “right” path. They were strict but fair, putting me up on a pedestal only when I deserved it. And when I didn’t, encouraging the punishment I deserved, without ever making me doubt their love. I was a naughty kid.

They were protective but reasonable. I remember in tenth grade I bullied them into sending me to the UK for a football training camp for ten whole days. The important part was that I wanted to go alone. I had to go alone, and I wouldn’t have it any other way. Fine, said the father, but do some research first, and make sure you’re getting a good deal.

My parents were always ahead of their time. They saw the value in looking at education from a more global perspective, encouraging me to switch to IB even before I thought it was cool. But Dad, I want to be Headboy in this school. Okay they said, and no, I didn’t become Headboy.

It also helped that Dad was a sexologist on the side. When I was about 14, I remember him asking me to make a PowerPoint about testicular cancer. He said, Anish, should I call it “Know Your Testicles” or “Know Your Balls.”

And I looked at him a little bewildered, thinking I rather not know anything about this.

But you know what, later, when we had “the talk”, it went from awkward to comfortable at lightning speed.

There was no official Sex Education in Dubai, where I grew up. To solve for that, I only recently found out that they used to intentionally leave Sex Ed books lying around in “convenient” locations so that I could happen upon them when they weren’t around. And yes, I did happen upon them, and so did my friends. Friggin’ geniuses.

Both my parents are doctors and have served people all their lives. Despite that (and them being Indian and all) they let me go to the US to study Sports Management. Yes, they were okay spending their hard-earned money on Sports Management.

They have always believed in me. And believed that I should pursue what I believe in. I look back at it now and wonder if they hadn’t let me study Sports Management (my “passion” back then), I would have always carried a level of resentment with me. Three months into the program, I realized it was a waste of money, and swiftly enrolled into the Business School.

When I left for the US, my mother got a rash on her back. When she went to the doctor to get it checked out, he said it was probably because her son had just left home. I never learnt about this until much later. And I remember right then, during my first winter vacation in the US, I chose not to go home to see my parents, because hey, I spent the last eighteen years with them, that’s enough.

I saw them only once or maybe twice a year while I was abroad. And I always made it seem like it was a big deal. Maa, I’m busy, work’s crazy, I don’t have the time.

I have only recently realized that I will never have enough time with Mum and Dad.

At my rock bottom, when I was working in New York, they visited. I was lost and depressed, unsure about who I was and what I wanted to do.

I will never forget that conversation we had in Fort Greene Park. I had a good job, was making great money, my company had applied for my Green Card, but all I wanted to do was quit. And do something “better”. But was it worth giving up this life I had that almost everyone dreams of?

I remember explaining this to them – distraught, confused, lost, looking to them for some sort of approval, some sort of a push while trying to mask my shame.

What I got back from them was clarity. It’s time, they said, to quit and do something better.

My parents, who don’t come from much money, who have worked their butts off to make money so that my sister and I could have a more comfortable life, were telling me it’s okay to just give this continued, guaranteed “success” up to pursue something “better”? No drama? No confusion? No apprehension? Anish, what’s the worst that can happen, we are here na.

It has been the most pivotal decision I have made – quitting. And it has been the best thing that has happened to me so far. Ever since, I have found contentment in purpose, and in work that I feel really matters.

All the while, my parents have cheered me on, from afar but still somehow always right there next to me, especially when it matters most.

Besides literally creating me, I can’t stress how important they have been in shaping me, and in empowering me to be the best version of myself, without expecting anything in return, besides maybe a phone call. I will forever be grateful.

They’re almost 70 now, about to retire. They want to remain forever young, but no amount of hair dye can hide that they are getting older, a little tired.

Retirement was always going to be in India. For twenty-five years, Dubai has been great to them, but never home. Home was going to be Aurangabad, until I moved to Pune. Ma, Dad why would you move to Aurangabad if I am in Pune?

They said, Anish, you never asked.

And there’s the irony of it all. My parents have raised their children to never ask anyone to do anything they don’t want to. To be independent. To serve. So how could I ask my parents to move to Pune just for me? Turns out they were thinking the same.

This infinite loop of misunderstood love is the most drama there has been, at least so far. And I hope it stays that way.

Fifteen years after I left my Mum and Dad’s house, I have now realized that home is where the whole is. And as they retire into their last chapter, I rather be nowhere besides right next to them, back at home.

*****

Entrepreneuring

September 25, 2021

The toughest days so far have not been the longest ones. They have been the ones filled with anxiety. Where control seems like an illusion. Where uncertainty paralyzes progress, and all you can do is wait, while anxiety engulfs the depths of your cranium.

Our biggest investment — the magic machine — is more than a month late. It’s been four months since we placed the order, trying our best to plan ahead, hoping foresight would hedge hindrance.

But there’s only that much you can anticipate. Only that much you can control. Which doesn’t mean nothing is controllable, just that all you can do is direct the sailboat in the right direction, and hope it catches wind.

In the larger scheme of things, it’s really not the end of the world. And that zoomed-out perspective is important, because day-to-day, everything seems important.

Everything about my enterprise seems important. Everything outside of it seems irrelevant.

I feel like my life has now become supremely one-dimensional. There’s no time for new friends, or new adventures, or travel logs, or a new TV show. The idea of dating seriously seems like a nightmare of commitment that I know I’m going to fumble. The idea of keeping plants in my house feels like pressure I don’t need — I don’t want them to die. My weekly work wardrobe is now monotonous and comfortable, so I have one less irrelevant thing to worry about. I am balding, mainly because of my genes, so, much to the shock of my darling parents, I’m trimming it away, which saves me from doing one more thing after my morning shower. I have given up meat because of the hypocrisy it reeks in relation to the work I do. Comfort seems like a trap.

I know this sounds like a prison of sorts, but the irony is that its self-designed and intentional. I crave rhythm so that my conscious deliberation can be focused on the tough, complex problems I have chosen to solve, while minimizing inconsistencies along the way that foster self-loathe.

And I am friggin’ loving it.

I am finally reaping the contentment of delayed gratification.

Ever since I quit the corporate rat-race to pursue purpose, I have been building up to this. And it all seemed dreamy in the beginning, but the work has been put in, and some four years later, the seeds are bearing fruit.

But there’s still a long way to go. I barely even consider myself an entrepreneur. Yes, we have built and we are building, but we haven’t really changed anyone’s life yet, or even sold anything for that matter.

The unfair advantage of having risk-free capital has made the journey so far infinitely simpler. We have had the fortune of early breakthroughs and minimal setbacks, but we don’t even have a product yet. We need the magic machine for that. It’ll be here in a couple of weeks. Maybe.

So yes, plenty of entrepreneuring left to do. And hopefully, that never changes.

Narratives

April 4, 2021

I don’t have anything significant to say these days. Or maybe, saying “significant” stuff doesn’t cut it anymore.

I could paint a perfectly plush picture on how the tides of entrepreneurship are rough but rewarding. “Exactly what I signed up for.”

Or I could flip it, juxtaposing it with the perils of getting drawn into a fantasy world that makes little sense to the people outside of it, all the while secretly seeking sympathy likes. “Look, I’m humble but I’m trying to be better than you.”

I could repeat the same lessons countless other entrepreneurs have written about, seeking refuge in being akin to a rare sailor, sailing solo across the start-up ocean full of storms and pivots. “Look how brave I am.”

I could talk about our early tech breakthroughs, and how exciting those are, hiding the fact that they mean little until we conquer what comes next. “I’m trying to focus on the positives, okay.”

I could talk about how nothing and no one else matters besides this thing I am dedicating myself to. About how all I think and dream about is this. “Look how hard I am working.”

I could ruse about how what we are doing is different from everyone else — how it’s at the intersection of impact and innovation and something else that you don’t understand, how conventional rules don’t apply to us, even when they generally do. “I’m special, okay.”

I could project my sophistication, drawing from books I’m currently reading, showing vulnerability and humility, about how I feel I am not antifragile enough. About how I recently learnt that making plastics from scratch is technically much harder than recycling it because of this polymer textbook I am currently reading. About how I get nuance and you don’t. “Look how smart I am.”

The truth is that all this strays between being somewhat true and somewhat false. But underneath it all, they are all just narratives, probably influenced by my mood this morning, potentially correlated to how bitter my coffee is.

Stories I’m probably telling myself to make sense of what I’m doing. Rationalizations that ensure my self-worth is intact, and that you know about it.

Never mind that I get to shape them, with my integrity as the only filter, hoping that the best use of my IQ is bending my integrity just enough, layering it with the perfect number of imperfections, just close enough to the truth for me to fool myself. So, I can fool you.

See, you play a big role in all this. Because you have the power to interpret my narrative in whatever way you want, the apparent power to approve or disapprove. As long as I ensure that I leave enough room for interpretation, enough mystery you can colour with your projections, enough faith that you have good faith, knowing that the way our brains germinate is limited by the way we communicate — slowly, with arbitrarily defined words and rules and emotions; knowing that you are seeking an interpretation that fits your own narrative — seeking inspiration, a deflation of envy, an excuse or just listless curiosity.

This is all like a massive game of telephone. I’ve just got to ensure that there’s always a decent signal.

And that’s fine, I’m happy to play it, it is what it is — that’s not what I’m grappling with.

It’s just that at this point, narratives are irrelevant to me. It doesn’t matter how significant or insignificant my words are to me or to you.

Right now, all that matters to me is doing.

The Best Books I Read In 2020

January 1, 2021

A Final Restart?

November 19, 2020

I’m currently locked out of my bathroom.

The locksmith is an hour or so away, familiar with where I live and what he needs to do, because he solved the same problem yesterday. It’s early morning so my black coffee must do as an anti-bacterial mouthwash for now.

Nothing like a sloppy start to life in a new city.

After spending almost a year meandering around Maharashtra, Pune seems like a city with the right balance — just the right amount of hustle and bustle, and cheaper than the other urban behemoths.

It should be my home for now. Or for a while. Hopefully for a long time. And that is important because ever since I decided to quit New York and Corporate America some four years ago, there has never been this amount of certainty about staying put in one city.

The last few years have been full of restarts. Life was condensed into a large enough suitcase, and then it was time to hop around the globe, one continent at a time. That suitcase was the only physical constant.

Even though these restarts took place in different parts of the world, the pattern of adaptation was similar —  find an apartment, make sure it has good internet, find a place to play football and find the courage to make new friends so you don’t feel alone and miserable.

And then, just when there is an inkling of rhythm and comfort, it is time to pack that suitcase up again and move. This happened so often that towards the end I stopped fully unpacking my suitcase. Why bother.

But amidst all this uprooting, I found constant opportunities to purge and cleanse. Starting afresh in a new country meant that I had a clean slate of sorts. I tried to weed out parts of me that I was not proud of while doubling down on those that reaped better relationships, stronger morals and less self-loathe.

I also got a chance to take the best from each culture and hold on to it, even if it seemed strange to the next country. Exposure to a wide range of people and thoughts gave me a level of tolerance and open-mindedness that no book or institute can provide.

But, enough of that.

Real change takes time and commitment. While frolicking around the world is a glamorous luxury I have been fortunate to have, it’s at best only a decent education and at worst, a hedonistic treadmill treading towards perceived, epicurean superiority.

It’s in depth that there is real purpose, real love, real contentment. And for that, it’s important to find stillness — of the mind, of the body, of space.

It’s important to build comfort and familiarity around you so that you can face discomfort that lies at a much deeper level. A level that we are either blind to or that we like to run away from. True purpose lies right there, in that deep-rooted discomfort, where change yearns to be found.

That’s where I’m trying to go.

India, Pune, Aundh is where I will start sowing those seeds, where I’ll unpack my suitcase and put it away until dust can finally find a home on it. Where I hope to stay for as long as it takes to drive the change I wish to see in the systemic injustice that drowns a large proportion of our world.

And I am so friggin’ fortunate to get a chance to do this.

This past year, I have inched closer and closer to figuring out what I want to do. My social enterprise, Ashaya, has started to take shape. I have found a co-founding Chief Scientist to support me in making waste more valuable. The impact ecosystem I have landed into and embraced here in India has been nothing short of encouraging and resourceful. I have reconnected with family that almost competes to shower me with their love and support. I finally have a city and a place that I don’t already have plans to leave from.

So much has happened but I still feel like everything is moving so slowly. I know that the fastest way to make progress is to take your time, but Anish, hurry up already. That’s a constant dilemma I need to continue getting better at handling.

It’s now been a few weeks since I restarted life in Pune. In those few weeks, I have hunted for apartments, found one, moved in, celebrated Diwali in a different town, come back to the new apartment and become best buddies with the security guard downstairs.

I cannot stomach how nice and how large my new apartment is. Will I find the right set of friends? The right internet? The right football league? How long will it take?

Even though I am a seasoned life restart-er, this final restart seems harder than others. Maybe because I’m sick of starting over and over again. Or maybe because this one is for the long haul.

Meanwhile, I am still locked out of my bathroom. The locksmith was supposed to be here a while ago.

I’ll have to call him again.

Aurangabad, Pune, Mumbai, Ups, Downs

August 23, 2020

My “Custom MBA”: Way More For Way Less

June 25, 2020

I quit the corporate world to pursue purpose in the social impact space. But I knew nothing about social impact.

So, I thought of doing an MBA with a focus on social entrepreneurship. But that just didn’t ring right — how am I going to learn about poverty sitting in a fancy classroom? And expensive much? So, I settled on doing it myself — essentially learning by doing.

In two years, I lived in three countries, worked closely with three organizations and over fifteen social entrepreneurs, learnt a new lenguaje, learnt how to code, earned board seats on two non-profits, built a deep, meaningful network with a plethora of people across borders, made the best of friends immersing myself in cultures inertly foreign, and most importantly, I learnt about the social impact space by living and working in the field.

And the kicker? All this cost me less than 1/5th of what a top two-year MBA school would cost. Yes, I did the math. A two-year MBA from Harvard in 2019 cost $211,336 and my two year “custom MBA” cost me $36,337 (scroll to the end for a summary and I also breakdown expenses in each country throughout this post).

Yes, with the COVID-19 pandemic, things seem different and strange right now. But I believe it will pass, and borders will open. It will probably never be the same, but we will embrace a new version of normal that isn’t too different from how it used to be.

So, was this “custom MBA” a better option than doing a traditional top-tier MBA? I’d like to think so. But I have incomplete information — I haven’t done an MBA now have I? So, I’ll let you decide once you’ve read through this.

Here’s how it flowed — resources, expenses, learnings, pains, joys:

The “Plan”

Right when I quit, I knew I wanted to go back to India to start my own social enterprise focused on poverty. However, the tug-of-war in my brain was this:

Should I go to India right away and learn by doing work there? Or should I frolic around the developing world, gaining a more worldly perspective on the impact space?

Both options made sense, but the latter resonated with my fancies a bit more.

For some odd, irrational reason, I had always wanted to learn Spanish and see the world from a more immersed perspective than a touristic one. So, that became the rationalization, and this became the chosen, Dharmic path. Only later, while I was in Nairobi, did I read that working in different cultures actually enhances creativity, fueling the development of a holistic perspective that can allow you to make more of an impact. However true you believe that to be, it was perfect for my confirmation bias.

Since I was embarking on this Fogg-ian, country-hopping path, the idealistic version of myself thought it was going to be super simple:

I’ll spend 6 months working in South America learning Spanish, 6 months in Africa because it’s tough out there, 6 months in Asia outside of India because why not, and then 6 months in India because I need to understand India. Simple, right?

This “plan” turned out to be as naïve as it sounds. It changed. A lot.

Or rather, I’d like to think that it evolved, while somehow staying true to its ethos. That’s the beauty of a “custom MBA” — flexibility. You never know the perfect answer right off the bat, what’s crucial is the ability to pivot. And boy did I pivot.

But you know what? It’s okay to have an idealistic plan as long as you’re not too attached to it. In fact an ideal plan allows for course correction.

Stop 1: Xela, Guatemala

The first part of the first part of the plan stayed its course. Kind of.

South America evolved into any developing country where Spanish is spoken. And more importantly, the work I’d be doing needed to align with what I wanted to learn.

So how did I find this magical thing? The internet made everything a lot easier.

My incredible sister pointed me to MovingWorlds.org — it’s essentially a Tinder for matching the skills of professionals / experts with the needs of non-profits / social enterprises around the world. Yes, I know — pretty awesome. Through this platform, I matched and got offers from three organizations — two in Peru and one in Haiti. Almost took one of the ones in Peru.

Another friend pointed me to SocialStarters. They do something similar but charge a hefty amount for it which didn’t sit too well with me. I was looking for a barter between my skills and exposure to the impact space and 600 pounds (1,280 pounds now) seemed a bit on the higher end. But if I got desperate, it could be an option. I spoke to them and they did offer me a spot in Brazil. Good back-up but not cost effective or Spanish enough.

Then there were a bunch of forums and groups that were helpful — Skoll Foundation, Ashoka, Social Enterprise Jobs Google Group.

I struck gold on the Skoll Forum — Alterna, a social enterprise cultivator / accelerator based in Guatemala, made the most sense. I would be getting width: a chance to work with many social entrepreneurs and that seemed like a sensible way to start. And, Spanish of course.

Here was the problem though — I didn’t know much Spanish at all, and this job was in Spanish. Alterna took a leap of faith and interviewed me — I wasn’t going to get paid and my work experience seemed valuable to them. I got the offer with a caveat: I would need to do a month of intensive Spanish classes in Guatemala before I started. Perfecto.

I was pretty sure I was going to get robbed as soon as I landed in Guatemala thanks to all the one-sided data on crime we have available today, and also because my lack of Spanish made me essentially deaf and dumb.

But I didn’t get robbed or murdered. In fact, everyone was super friendly. Guatemala isn’t the safest country in the world, but it isn’t as dangerous as fear makes it out to be.

I thought I would learn enough Spanish studying 5–8 hours a day for a month and living with a local host-family. Wrong again. It took me 4–5 months to be decently functional in Spanish.

And I’m not talking basic Spanish, I’m talking work Spanish. That was the hardest part about Guatemala — learning a new language. On the flip side, the best way to learn a new language is to jump into the deep end.

Enough people spoke English at the company to allow me to add at least some value. And I quickly learnt how invaluably incredibly amazingly awesome Google Translate is. I came there as an unpaid fellow but within three months, I was offered a paying job. In the end, knowledge is language-less.

It was at about the six-month mark that I had just earned enough clout to make a significant impact within the organization. My Spanish started to get in key, and it just didn’t make sense to jump ship right then.

There had been a lot of turnover when I joined and that gave us fellows an opportunity to add real value. At times we were flying blind, but being thoughtful and thorough goes a long way in making a difference.

I will never forget the time we revamped our signature five-day workshop. We laboured long hours, researching, creating, fighting and ordering late-night pizzas. We were nervous before the start, but after, the feeling of success was priceless.

 

Many of us were unpaid fellows back then, but it didn’t matter. In fact, that made it that much sweeter— we did this because we cared for our entrepreneurs, and the pure elation of believing in something and making it happen is priceless. No chunky New York bonus has ever made me feel that way.

There was no way I was going to leave in six months. Uh oh, the OG plan just changed.

The next six months in Guatemala were even more fruitful. I got more responsibility and ownership, took on a bigger role with internal operations and led the negotiation, implementation and training of the organization’s internal IT infrastructure.

Many non-profits lack technical prowess — there aren’t enough STEM-skilled folks in the space which leaves gaping holes. We need more people filling these holes. I had some (not extensive) experience with these holes and I quickly realized that my ability to add value became my ticket to more exposure and learning. That would be a constant through this custom MBA of mine.

Also, I realized that there is no rush to get into the social impact space. What’s more important is to build hard skills and gain valuable technical experience from wherever you can, and then make the jump. There were a couple of other fellows there who I felt didn’t have enough experience nor a clear skill-set to add significant value with. This didn’t mean that they didn’t grow, it just meant that it was harder for them. Learning about the impact space isn’t as hard as learning a technical skill.

My last three months in Guatemala were tough. I was leading a full-scale tech implementation alone and was also handing off my key responsibilities to a new crop of hires. As important as that was, it wasn’t fun. Letting go of your baby is hard. I thought I’d have to have an actual baby to learn this.

I was flattered when Alterna offered me a Director position and to be a part of their future, but my evolved plan held strong. And the leadership team understood — I had always been consistent about starting something in India, and that consistency made it easier to communicate my next steps.

It turns out that having your big goal etched in stone makes decision-making easy and communicating your decisions even easier.

I remain connected to them today with somewhat of a ceremonial position on the Advisory Board, but Alterna and Guatemala will forever have a small piece of my heart.

Expense Breakdown in Guatemala:

• The first month of intensive Spanish classes and living with a host family cost me $836.
• The next 14 months rent was $200/month and living expenses (food, etc) were between $300 and $400 / month. Yes, Guatemala is cheap.
• For 8 of the 15 months I was there, I got paid ~$1,400 / month. I didn’t negotiate because I wasn’t looking to make money (I negotiated responsibility instead) so there could be some upside here.
• If I add-in around $2,000 for additional travel in and out of Guatemala that I wouldn’t really incur during an MBA, I would still end up breaking-even.

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Stop 2: Nairobi, Kenya

After over a year in Guatemala, nine months longer than ‘planned’, I knew that my stint in East Africa had to be a little more constrained — no more than six months.

If the goal is to start something in India, I can’t just keep frolicking around the globe, delaying the inevitable. But working in sub-Saharan Africa seemed like an important step in this custom MBA of mine.

Shoddy as this sounds, the income per capita, the infant mortality rates, and disease-inflicted deaths in parts of Africa are among the gravest. Add that to the exploding youth population, the lack of jobs, and the rising temperatures, and what the continent is drifting towards is a largely young population of two billion by 2050, struggling to find employment as the world boils over. There could be a lot of other things that boil over as well.

But don’t get me wrong — there has been a ton of progress over the last few decades. Overall, as much as we shouldn’t generalize, African countries are freer and more developed than they have ever been. There has been innovation and expression, a better quality of life, and a Twitterverse exploding with opinion. It’s better, but there is still a long way to go.

And that’s why there is a lot of game-changing work being done there, especially in the social sector. So, I had to work there.

This time I was looking for more depth — i.e. working more closely with a couple of entrepreneurs, rather than at a more superficial level with many entrepreneurs, which was the case in Guatemala.

An email from the incredibly helpful Social Enterprise Jobs Google Group landed in my inbox that talked about a certain Amani Institute. It was new but what I liked about a program they offered was that it involved a four-month apprenticeship in Nairobi with local social enterprises / NGOs.

It also promised just enough coursework in some of the softer skills that I had been craving, but wasn’t necessarily ready to stretch for — leadership, management — some of the soft stuff that had haunted me towards the end of my stint in New York. Bingo.

I applied and soon thereafter, I was on my way to Nairobi as an Amani Fellow. I think I would have gone either way, but I was glad to go there with some structure.

The six months in Nairobi were intense. We worked for three days a week and had classes three days a week. The Sunday that was left hanging, left us fellows only wanting to hang around and do nothing.

I was apprenticing with a social enterprise that was trying to fight poverty through job creation in the urban slums of Kenya — where on my first day, we were marginally, indirectly tear-bombed.

More importantly, they are trying to do similar things to what I want to do in India. So, the learning curve was as steep and healthy as any wealthy education, if not more.

They did a lot of things well, but where they struggled was in finding operational prowess. Sadly, in the impact space, this is common.

While there is a ton of passion and drive in the social sector, there aren’t enough seasoned operators or technical folk. Add all that to the lower pay, and what you’re left with are inefficient organizations with tiny technical expertise and gigantic hearts. Burn out is more common than you’d imagine and it happens without any splurging compensation that at least some of the corporate burnouts can fall back on.

Through the Amani Institute, I also got to work with a social entrepreneur from Tanzania. His story is tragically inspiring, and it inspired me to work with him. He runs a non-profit focused on empowering Tanzanian youth and he was trying to figure out how to transition from a typical non-profit to a more financially viable social enterprise that was less dependent on donors. He had the field knowledge and I had the technical skills — and we complemented each other synchronously.

I learnt resilience from him, and I’m not saying that lightly. Despite having nothing, when he got a chance at life, he decided to give back. Despite being devastatingly knocked down multiple times, he hung in there. These few lines actually do injustice to the Everest he has had to climb, and is still climbing.

The six months in Nairobi whizzed by. But it felt like I had been there for an eternity, making new relationships and adapting to a new culture. It’s strange how time loses it structure as we sway from one perspective to the next.

I left Nairobi more ready than ever. I felt both validated and enlightened. I might have been extorted by bad cops with a gun in broad daylight, but I acquired a deep experience that geared me up for my next steps.

Expense Breakdown in Nairobi, Kenya:

• The Amani Institute Social Innovation Management program cost me ~$8,000. I applied before the deadline for a 50% discount / scholarship.
• My rent was $400 / month for a master bedroom and a private bathroom (with a massive bath tub) in a nice apartment with three other flatmates. No formal contract, just an informal email agreement.
• I ordered in a lot because of umm, “efficiency” and because UberEats is pretty efficient there as well. And taking into consideration that I was superfluous in my spending there, I spent about $600/month for food and other boarding-related activities. I could have been more umm, efficient.
• Overall, I spent about ~$17,000 for these six months for everything, without really trying to be cost conscious.

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Stop 3: London, United Kingdom

You’re probably thinking: LONDON? Where did that come from?

Yes, the OG plan changed. A lot. But that’s the beauty of it, right?

One thing I realized in Nairobi is that I know enough about working in the impact space to start something on my own, but what I might be missing is some more technicality.

Remember the lack of operational prowess and technical expertise in the impact space I have been talking about? Well, I didn’t want to be that cliché or at least that was my rationalization. Yes, I could sing some decent finance tunes, but I wanted to learn more about data, and not just at a superficial level.

So, I found this immersive Data Science course that General Assembly offers in London (and other cities). It is a twelve-week bootcamp that tries to download everything it can about Machine Learning and Data Science at rapid speed. Magically, I had twelve weeks to spare in this custom MBA.

The course itself was intense to say the least. We had classes five days a week, 9am — 5pm and a ton of homework afterwards. But I thrived. I learnt how much I love messing around with data. I learnt that while I am not a naturally gifted musician, I do have a natural-ish knack for rows and columns full of numbers and symbols.

There are other institutes that offer similar programs across the world — some are fully virtual and / or after-work friendly. Meanwhile, Lambda School allows you to come into an income-sharing agreement with them. Which basically means you don’t have to pay anything upfront, only a percentage of your income after you get a job. And this past year, they had more applicants than Harvard.

Just to be clear, this type of course had nothing to do with the impact space. It didn’t need to be. This was about upskilling, and this new skill is applicable in almost every industry. My classmates ranged from engineers to statisticians to recent university grads. The age range was a couple of decades — from 20-year-olds to 45-year-olds. But none of them worked in the impact space.

The course was everything I wanted it to be and more. I feel like it opened a new box of possibilities that has been empowering. At the same time, in the spirit of keeping it real, if you want to be a full-time Data Scientist, just this course is not enough. There is more practice that you would need to do after, but the beauty of the course is that you gain enough of a base to leap off of.

I am not going to be a Data Scientist, but I want to use Data Science to make better decisions — to do better research, better monitoring and evaluation, and most importantly, to better allocate resources to solving this shitshow of a problem that is poverty. It also helps in solution-seeking — how can I use Artificial Intelligence to solve real-world problems?

And as a bonus, I got to spend three months living with my best friend. When else am I going to get a chance to do that at this age? See, a custom MBA also has its social perks.

Expense Breakdown in London, United Kingdom:

• The General Assembly Data Science Immersive course cost GBP 10k or ~US$ 13k.
• I didn’t pay anything for rent as I had the luxury to crash with my best friend. London is expensive so an average room should cost you around GBP 1,000 / month or ~US$ 1,300 / month.
• My best friend made me party a lot, so I did splurge on food and alcohol. So, including that and an additional $2,000 in travel costs, I spent about $18k — $19k for those three months.
• There are ways to do this cheaper — find a cheaper city, get a scholarship through the institute (I know they were offering a ~15% scholarship for women when I was attending the course), cook at home and party less.

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Putting It All Together

So much for the original plan, right?

But that’s the beauty of the world we live in today. Some of us (and if you’re reading this, you are probably in the “us”) have the fortune to choose what we want to learn and how.

The typical MBA is not the only way out. In fact, it might turn out to be more expensive and less educational, which I strongly believe would have been the case if I pursued it.

Let’s summarize the expenses first, because well, that might be the most useful thing in this post.

Expense Summary Summarizing It All:

 

The table above is pretty self-explanatory.

If you analyzed it, you’re probably wondering why I didn’t pay rent in London. I was lucky enough to crash with my best friend, remember?

So, if you want to normalize for that and for the fact that I made money in Guatemala, let’s add rent for three months in London (GBP 1,000 / month) and remove the income I earned in Guatemala (just to be conservative). That brings total expenses to ~$51k which is still only 1/4th of what a Harvard MBA costs.

Reflection

The big lesson for me has been that once you figure out what you care about and are willing to dedicate yourself to that, then it has never been easier to pave your own path of learning. And learning never stops — cliched, but true.

I hadn’t even thought of this as “oh, let me do custom MBA.” I just went down the road I thought I needed to; so I could gain the skills that I needed; so I could working on solving the problem I wanted to solve.

I have also realized that true learning cannot happen only in the classroom. It needs an element of reality to complement all the theory. So yes, it all comes down to finding the right balance. Like most things in life.

It has been six months since I moved back to India. I have never been more focused and content. And I have never felt more ready to start a social enterprise focused on multidimensional poverty.

The Other Side

Look, it has not all been rosy.

I don’t have a fancy $200k Harvard stamp on my resume. Someone who does, commands immediate credibility — at least at a superficial, perceived level. If that stamp is important to you, then a top MBA is unbeatable.

There have also been times on the road when I felt very alone. I missed home, I missed having a home. I missed my best friends. I hated those cold showers. The internet was shoddy in most places besides London. The food in Guatemala wasn’t great. I was extorted by cops in Kenya which wasn’t fun. I had to stay away from committing to a relationship because I was always moving on. It seemed like I was always saying goodbye, while not knowing when I’ll meet those folks again. There was uncertainty and discomfort.

But it was all worth it.

And when all that feels worth it, you know you have grown.

Okay, enough. I have laid it all out. I’ll let you be the judge.

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P.S. Parts of this post have been taken from other posts I have written in the past.