Campus & early career · 30–45 min
I didn’t fail exams. Exams failed me.
The talk I gave at TEDx, and the fifteen years that argued for it — for rooms full of people being told what they’re not good at.
School spent years telling me what I wasn’t good at. My parents were a builder with a PhD and a criminal lawyer at the Bombay High Court — academically formidable people whose son wasn’t. Somewhere in there I made a quiet decision: a report card measures one narrow thing and calls it the whole person, and I didn’t have to accept the verdict.
A scorecard measures one thing and calls it you. That’s a measurement problem, not a you problem.
At 17, still in college, I started a design studio with a friend and priced our websites at ₹11 — the cost of the first rickshaw meter in Mumbai. Not a discount: a message. The Times of India ran it. CNBC’s Young Turks put me on television. Forty-odd clients followed.
Then the part nobody expects from a story like this: I came home from London certain I’d start my own agency — and instead spent a decade working for other people.
‘Before you lead, learn to follow.’ It’s an old piece of Marwari wisdom and it cost me ten years, which is exactly why it’s worth talking about with people who are being told to disrupt everything immediately. Knowing when to wait, when to follow, and when to break is the whole game.
What the room leaves with
- Why the scorecard you’re handed isn’t the one that decides your career.
- How to find the thing you’re fluent in when school hasn’t named it.
- The difference between defiance and judgement — and when each pays.
- Why patience is the most underrated ambition strategy there is.
Colleges, campus events, early-career programmes, graduate cohorts, and any audience that has been sorted by a scorecard.
The longer version: early years · the ₹11 studio · what I value.