Rock Bottom Is the Only Foundation

The first time I went to a therapist, I came back and told my wife the session went great. I walked in, told them my life story, and they said everything sounded fine.

My wife was not impressed.

What the therapist actually said was: You told me the version of the story you wanted me to hear. What's the other version?

I insisted there was no other version. I was in my early thirties, and I believed that completely.

The Crack in the Mirror

There's a famous line — I can never remember who said it — about how between a reaction and a response, there is a pause, and life is held in that pause. For a long time, I had no pause. I moved through the world reactively: achieving, performing, consuming. If there was a whole cake, I'd eat it in one sitting — not because I was hungry, but because somewhere deep inside me, a boy who grew up without much wasn't sure it would be there tomorrow.

That scarcity mindset showed up everywhere. In how I ate. How I spent. In how I led. I would devour an unlimited buffet not out of appetite but out of anxiety — collapsing my entire arc of fulfilment into twelve hours, or sometimes one tea cake. It took me years of reflection to recognise that I was being shaped by things so distant and so deep that I didn't even know they were operating.

Choosing to do differently starts with seeing differently. And seeing differently starts with creating a pause.

In my family, I'd witnessed someone close to me walk the long road of recovery from alcoholism. I watched how we externalise our helplessness — channelling it into things that help in the moment but never really heal. And slowly, I began to see a pattern in my own life. The hangovers that lasted days. The not knowing how I'd ended up in a particular city. The growing sense that the tools and coping mechanisms I had were no longer working.

There's this idea of rock bottom. People say you need to hit it before you can start again. But there's something they don't always say: rock bottom is the only place you can build a new foundation. You can't build it from anywhere else.

The Education of Sitting Still

When our daughter Anoushka was born, I was fortunate to be able to take a year and a half off while my wife returned to work. I became a stay-at-home dad.

I thought it would be a year of tasks — changing diapers, going for walks, keeping schedules. What I discovered instead was that the act of doing changes the person who does it. Parenting wasn't a series of tasks. It was the building of a relationship that transformed both of us.

The world, of course, had its own opinions. Someone once asked me in a coffee shop if I was a single parent. Where's the mother? Shouldn't the child be with the mother? When they learned I was simply the father caring for his daughter, the bar for praise was astonishingly low: Oh, you've kept the child healthy and safe. Meanwhile, billions of women do this every day, and the standard expected of them is the sky.

I didn't fully understand what it meant to be a woman in India until I realised that for a man doing the same work, the expectations were from a different universe entirely.

But the deeper lesson from that period was this: I had always been comfortable giving. Giving came easily — it felt like strength, like purpose. What was hard was receiving. Being changed by another person. My wife, Shobitha, once said something that still reverberates through me. I was trying to fix something for her, trying to solve, and she said:

Just sit here with me.

I didn't understand it then. What use am I if I'm just sitting here? But that act of sitting — of being present without solving — is what it means to be in relationship with someone. You can't fix it, you can't change it, but you can sit there, and both be changed by the experience.

The person I am today has entirely emerged in a relationship with Shobitha. She held me to account. She saw the best in me when I couldn't. She didn't try to change me — she simply wanted to be in conversation differently, to be held differently. And in that wanting, I was changed.

Carbon to Carbon

I'm no longer on social media. Not on WhatsApp. I don't say this with pride — it's simply a choice I made after noticing what those platforms were doing to my attention and my relationships.

I used to tell myself it was great to be "ambiently aware" of what was going on in people's lives. But I came to realise: if you care about a person, why would you want to be ambiently aware? You want to meet them. You want a deep, meaningful conversation.

A colleague of mine put it perfectly: we need carbon-to-carbon connection, not silicon-to-silicon. In the service of scale and efficiency, we have reduced the rich, carbon elements of relationship into something purely digital. We've taken away the proof of work that connection requires. A relationship used to demand effort — writing a long email, commenting on a blog post, showing up. Now it demands a tap. Maybe soon, a nod.

What I've found is that the real luxury good of the future will be connection. And like all luxury goods, it will eventually become available to everyone — but only if we're willing to build the containers for it.

What My Mother Taught Me from the Edge of a Chair

My mother has this habit. At every dining table, she sits on the edge of her seat. Not relaxed, not settled — perched, ready to get up at any moment to serve someone.

It used to annoy me. Just sit down, I'd say. It's okay, I'll get up. But it's the most defining image I carry of her. Always at the edge. Always in service.

She shaped us in ways I only see now. She insisted on raising two boys who could cook, who could clean up after dinner, who would show up as whole human beings rather than half ones waiting for someone to complete them. In a world that offered her limited possibilities for her own expression — she was a voracious reader, a gifted cook, someone with enormous creative potential that had nowhere to go — she chose to break the chain. She raised sons who would be different from the world she had to navigate.

There's a line I keep returning to: Hurt people hurt people. The easiest thing, when you've been shaped by painful experiences, is to pass that shaping along. To choose differently — to build a bridge from your lived reality to the world you want your children to experience — is a remarkable act of courage.

From Engineering to Emergence

If I had to name the biggest journey of my last decade, it would be the shift from an engineering mindset to an emergence mindset.

Early in my career, I built platforms and went out selling them. Here's this great thing I made — everyone please use it. Nobody did. Then one day, during a leadership retreat, I had what I call my "O-shift moment." Standing on a stage, I suddenly realised: I'd been asking people to buy into pages of my story. Why would anyone want to do that? The question was never will you use what I've built? It was can we build something together?

That insight reshaped everything. I now believe that the most powerful things don't get engineered from the top — they emerge from relationships. At Pratham Books, where I spent six years, we stopped thinking of ourselves as heroic publishers who would single-handedly put a book in every child's hand. Instead, we opened the doors and asked: What if many people could contribute? Someone translated our books into French. Then German. Then hundreds of languages. What is now the world's largest open publishing platform for children began with a simple invitation.

The invitation and the container create the opportunity. Sometimes our goal is to enable, not to do.

At Rohini Nilekani Philanthropies, where I now work, this philosophy runs deep. We don't ask our partners to solve problems our way. We trust them. We accompany them. And at the end of every year, we ask a simple set of questions: What did you set out to do? What happened? What will you do differently? We're not measuring a single point — we're tracking a journey. Because the only thing that matters is the delta — how people and organisations respond to change over time.

Cartographers of Their Own Lives

People sometimes ask me what I find most meaningful in my work. After a lot of reflection, I can say this: it is helping people become cartographers of their own lives.

Not giving them the map — giving them the map-making tools. Not pointing them in a direction — giving them a compass. So many of the people I work with operate at the edges of the possible, where there are no well-worn paths. A young social entrepreneur trying to reimagine community justice. A group of men gathering for the first time to talk honestly about who they are. A network of organisations that didn't know each other existed until we brought them into a room and simply said: You all care about the same thing. What might happen here?

Nine times out of ten, what happens astonishes us. Collaborations form. Ideas cross-pollinate. Things emerge that no one could have designed.

My nineteen-year-old self would not understand any of this. That version of me was all about self-worth tied to measurable traits — faking it till I made it, pretending to be wealthier and smarter than I was. It took me until my late thirties to get comfortable in my own skin. And the biggest journey has been surrendering — not to the life I thought I wanted, but to the life that makes me feel most alive.

When you do that, the life you wanted becomes irrelevant. It's not a loss. It's a gain of something you never knew was possible.

An Invitation, Not a Prescription

I used to write to convince people. Now I write so that people who are looking will find it. I used to convene gatherings where experts spoke at audiences from a stage. Now we design spaces where people can see each other — their gifts, their fears, their hopes — and let what needs to happen, happen.

If there's one thread running through everything I've learned, it might be this: we don't have to do this alone. The loneliness that we associate with leadership — with parenthood, with growing up, with being a man in this world — isn't an unavoidable part of the journey. It may be a flaw in the model itself.

What if, instead of the hero who conquers alone, we imagined a different kind of figure? One who creates the conditions for others to flourish. Who shows up sometimes from the front, sometimes from the back, sometimes invisibly. Who leads not by certainty but by curiosity. Not by controlling, but by being in relationship with.

My mother sat at the edge of her chair her whole life, always ready to serve. I carry that with me. But I've also learned — from my wife, my daughter, my colleagues, my therapists, my coaches, and a handful of friends who showed up during a pandemic and said we're in this together — that sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is just sit down fully in the chair.

Be present. Be changed. And see what emerges.