Diversity

Win or Die: Notes from a Noisy Nation

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“There are only two possibilities here, right? Win or die.”
That’s not a war general. That’s Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI.

He said this after his fledgling startup made an audacious offer to buy Google Chrome just as Google was considering acquiring his company. It wasn’t a stunt. It was a statement. Stand your ground. Don’t wait to be chosen. Act. Or disappear.

The clarity in those three words hit me harder than I expected. Because it reminded me of something else entirely: home.

A few months ago, I was traveling overseas. I was in Queensland, Australia. Clean air. Empty roads. Birds louder than people.

A woman who had once travelled to India leaned in and asked, not unkindly, “How do you live there? You’re packed like sardines.”

Fair question. All of Australia has as much people as in the city of Mumbai. We are packed. In trains. In queues and contradictions. We live close—to each other, to chaos, to survival.

And for millions, survival itself is a kind of victory.

India Wasn’t Meant to Make It

In 1947, perhaps that was the national mood. Survival. That’s all we had. A bruised nation, a broken economy, and a whole lot of people with very little of everything else.

India wasn’t meant to make it. Winston Churchill famously scoffed that India was just a “geographical expression” and predicted it would splinter into chaos after the British left.

We were a “developing country” before the term became polite. A country stitched together by courage and imagination.

And Yet—Here We Are

Seventy-eight years later. Messy. Loud. Functionally dysfunctional. Fractious. But moving. Rising.

There are parts of India today that can beat the world on any stage. Others still trying to find the stage. And yet others just finding their feet.

We are world-class in patches and at cross purposes in others. But we are trying. We are showing up. That counts. India is no superpower. But it is a super possibility. Our lived experiences vary more than all climate zones of the world. But deep down, the story is the same. The fight is the same.


One. Because of Many.

What makes India remarkable isn’t just its size or scale—it’s its stunning, often stubborn, diversity. Languages, cultures, cuisines, gods, gods within gods. We are made up of parts. Gloriously different parts. And yet, we are one. Not in spite of our differences, but because of them.

This plural existence that is messy, layered and opinionated is not a bug in the system. It is the system.

It may look inefficient from a distance. And may confound those seeking sleek, clinical uniformity. But in India, sameness has never been the soul. Diversity is. And that predates independence!

To truly be Indian is to celebrate that. To respect what is not ours. And honour where we came from. And to defer, with humility, to where we are headed.

We can disagree—on politics, beliefs, or the best way to eat dosa. But when we hold hands, we can move forward. That is our superpower.

One. Because of many.

Victory Means Living Fully

Victory, my dad used to say, is living to your full potential. Anything less, and something inside quietly dies. You may not acknowledge it at first. But a part of you knows. And shrinks a little further each time.

That’s the real journey. Especially for a country like ours. To go from simply surviving to fully showing up.

From “How do you live there?” to “How do they do that?” That arc takes courage. Not the loud, chest-thumping kind. But the quiet, daily, persistent kind.

The kind that keeps going even when things seem okay. The kind that still believes.

Aravind Srinivas’s clarity in that pithy statement reminded me of the many times India has stood at a cliff’s edge and chosen to jump forward—uncertain, unready, but unwilling to back down. Here are my top five moments India had no choice but to Win or Die. Of course, these are through my imperfect lens. And you would have yours!

Five Moments India had no choice but to show up. And win!

1. 1991: Economic Liberalisation

India was on the brink. Foreign reserves were down to a few weeks. A default loomed. As a last resort, the government flew out gold reserves to secure emergency credit. In response, Finance Minister Manmohan Singh and Prime Minister Narasimha Rao dismantled decades of economic protectionism. And how! The reforms were unpopular. Risky. Uncertain. But the alternative was collapse. That pivot didn’t just save the economy. It opened up opportunity for millions. Win. Or die.

2. 1960s–70s: The Green Revolution

Post-independence India was trapped in a cycle of food shortages and foreign aid.
Famines were frequent. Hunger was normalised. Then came a wave of scientific intervention: high-yield seeds, irrigation projects, fertilisers. Led by M.S. Swaminathan and supported politically, the Green Revolution transformed agriculture. India went from begging for grain to becoming self-sufficient. And feeding a large and growing population! More than food, it was about dignity. Win. Or die.

3. 1983 & 2011: Cricket World Cup Wins

In 1983, India entered the World Cup as rank outsiders. The West Indies were expected to cruise.
But Kapil Dev’s team defied every expectation and rewrote history at Lord’s.
It wasn’t just a cricketing upset. It was a shift in national imagination: maybe we can win.
In 2011, the stage was different. India was expected to win. But the pressure was immense.
When Dhoni hit that final six, it wasn’t just a sporting victory—it was emotional closure for a generation.
Two decades. Two trophies. (Read more)
Same mindset: Win. Or die.

4. 2016 onwards: The Data Disruption

Before 2016, mobile data was expensive and unevenly distributed. Internet access was a luxury in many parts of the country. Reliance’s Jio changed the game. Offering cheap data and forcing every telecom operator to adapt or perish. It became more about participation than a phone plan. Rural India started streaming. Teenagers started coding. Small businesses went digital.
Digital inclusion became the new frontier. Win. Or die.

5. 2010s – Present: Aadhaar and UPI

How do you bring a billion people into the financial system? You start by giving them a unique identity—Aadhaar. You link that to banking, subsidies, and digital payments. And build UPI. Today, Indians make millions of real-time transactions a day without cards or cash.
It’s not flashy, but it’s revolutionary. No other country has done it at this scale, with this quiet confidence. Win. Or die.

The Thread That Connects Them All

There are countless others. Partition. Operation Flood. The space programme. The vaccine rollout. Operation Sindhoor. Kargil and other wars. And so on. Besides the ones that make it to the news, there are several personal and community triumphs in unnoticed corners of the country. All of them have imperfections galore. But each one is stitched with the same thread: courage in the face of reality. The refusal to be defined by what is. And the constant push to discover what could be.

More in the Tank

Because in this messy, magnificent democracy of ours, there is always more fuel in the tank of potential. Something that we can access when we come together with mutual respect and collective intent. And when it comes to embracing Win or Die, the latter isn’t really an option.

Happy Independence Day.

Traveller Or Tourist?

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“when all is said and done, much more remains to be said and done”.

At the end of the Chicago leg of this travel, @flyohare ’s elevators say goodbye in a shiny memorable way!
“The traveler sees what he sees, the tourist sees what he has come to see”. Thats G.K.Chesterton. Now that I dint come to see the elevators, I guess I am a traveller! 🙂 

Awareness of Privilege

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It was a straight long road to run on. It was Sunday, the day of my ‘long run’. I had to go down the stretch turn at a particular point and come back where I started. Cruising along until the time that I had to turn. I quite didn’t realise that the return stretch was quite a lesson on ‘awareness of privilege’!

For it was when I turned, I realised that I had the wind backing me all the while I was cruising. I wasn’t seeing any of it, leave alone acknowledging that it was making a difference to my ease of cruise. But after making the turn, I was expending the same amount of effort and having far little to show compared to my run in the other direction. I cursed the wind.

As my body stabilised and as my muscles started working harder, I realised there was no point in cursing the wind. The support that the tailwind had offered me I had appropriated to myself and my capabilities. The wind had remained the same all through!

Headwind and tailwinds are invisible. The headwinds are felt more because we are up against it. As I finished the run I realised that this applies to life as well. We are hardly aware of several of the privileges that we are bestowed with, let alone crediting it with playing a part in success.

Earlier this week, a video on youtube held my attention. Take a minute to go over it. It is a simple yet powerful demonstration of what ‘privilege’ can mean and the material difference it can make.

To be aware of this privilege can be a great start.  I was shooting the breeze with someone who requests anonymity. After three hours and two brimfuls of coffee, we agreed on few foundations.

Some foundations emerged as the coffee coursed our veins. Being born into privilege didn’t mean we didn’t earn our spurs. Or that we were bad people. We were clear that we couldn’t undo our childhoods or born the way we were born. Not that we intended to. Nor did we want to dismiss our achievements or the hard work that contributed to getting us where we are now.  We were proud of what we had accomplished and were energised by what we wanted to do in the future. We still wanted to shoot for the moon and perhaps change the world too.

Accepting that privilege that the system bestowed on us, also contributed to where we are was a good start, we concluded. A modest start. But an important one at that.  What does an ” ‘accusation’ of being privileged do to you?”, was a question we asked each other and examined for a long time.  We had to examine the discomfort with examining the question too.

What more could we do? It was a long conversation and these were our top three conclusions. A call to action for ourselves, so to speak.

a. Examine the day

Between the two of us, we decided to examine our days and weeks. Deciding to sift through random events and uncover each other’s mental models was a natural consequence.   We sought to examine the context of the content of what others spoke or acted and how it impacted us.     Between the two of us, we decided that we would poke each other with questions that are curiosity laden.  We must get somewhere with that.

b. Examine the voices within

Like the wind behind my back that I perhaps would have known better if I had been present to it. There I was coasting in the success that was coming my way. An examination of the ‘why’ is useful.  Reflection and journaling can be a super place to start. “Once in a while is ok”, I proposed. And the gingerly proposal was met with a violent head nod in agreement.

c. A change of context

Privilege and the lack of it become apparent in different contexts. To change contexts, to travel, to work with people of different classes, to sit down and shoot the breeze with someone we usually will not, and several other things of the same ilk were going to be useful. That is one more area we will choose to examine.

We need to understand each other better for us to live rich meaning-laden lives. How better than understanding our contexts and our views of the world to get started. How better than counting our blessings and crediting that wind behind our backs as well.

One more thing we decided on: Share our resolve. Talk about it. Blog about it. Whatever. And this is the first step towards building awareness of my privilege!

Perspective Changes Everything: A Reflection from the Hills of Vagamon

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It’s always about the frame. How you frame the problem changes the problem itself.

One moment, I was talking to people, standing beside them, sharing thoughts. Then came the trudge down the rolling hills—a pleasant, happy descent through Vagamon’s stunning landscape.

Thirty minutes later, I turned around.

The people I had just spoken to? Now tiny silhouettes on the horizon. The hill? A mere bump in the distance. The shifting light made them look like mannequins in a store—motionless, almost unreal.

Perspective changes everything. What looks overwhelming up close may seem insignificant from afar. What seems impossible now may, with distance, reveal new possibilities.

Try changing the frame—you might see things in a whole new way.

The Market That Moves: Maeklong and Its Famous Train

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There are markets, and then there is Maeklong. Fresh seafood, vibrant veggies, neatly stacked produce—all arranged with remarkable precision and unexpected cleanliness for a market of this scale.

But that’s not what pulls in the tourists.

It’s the train. The iconic locomotive that cuts through the market, mere inches away from stalls. The moment arrives—the retractable awnings fold back, baskets are shifted just enough, and in a blink, the train passes. Just as quickly, life resumes.

For the tourist, it’s an unbelievable spectacle. For the locals, it’s routine. And as one vendor put it—with a knowing smile—”publicity.”

Because here, business rolls on, no matter what comes down the tracks.

(at Maeklong Railway Market – 美功铁路市场)

The Importance of Changing Tracks in Life and Work

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There’s always a bit of emotion when you change tracks. A moment of hesitation. A hop, skip, and jump before you commit.

But changing tracks is necessary. Stay too long on one, and you risk becoming a ‘could have been’ story. The world moves, shifts, reinvents—and so must we.

What tracks are you changing?
How long have you been thinking about it?

Richness comes from diversity—of thought, of experience, of action. Stay rich. Keep moving.

(at Maeklong Railway Market – 美功铁路市场)

Women in Leadership

Learning & Change,

The invite from Gurprriet and YSC to a discussion on titled “Cracking the Code” – Women in leadership came at the most opportune time. For one, the decibel levels on the topic have been forever rising and for another, here was an opportunity to clarify a few thought strains that were on, in my mind, that needed resolution.

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All of them didn’t get resolved, but the morning was well spent. Listening to both the YSC team and the case study presented by HSBC. Each provided good pointers to explore further.

First off, here are the myths that the research by YSC sought to bust.

  • Women don’t aspire to senior leadership roles
  • Women don’t stick it out to make it to the very top
  • Childrearing stops women getting to the top
  • Women don’t get to the top because they lack confidence
  • Women lack the leadership qualities needed at the top
  • Women don’t have the networks that open doors to the top
  • Senior women leaders pull up the career ladder behind them
  • High potential programmes are fast-tracking women
  • Formal flexible working arrangements ease women’s route to the top
  • The business case for gender diversity is working

Am sure you have heard of these, or variations of these stated not as myths but rather assertions of the truth!  I say “sure’, not as a cliched expression but from personal experience of having heard these and statements of this ilk many times over before. Now there is some research that seeks to dispel these myths.  Before you get all too excited : the data for the research is UK based. But, this can serve as a huge direction pointer to your thought.  The report is here. Obviously the people that you would need to connect up and understand more are the folks from YSC.

Am writing this post to kind of ‘work out loud’ on what sits on my head now.  The TOP five thoughts, if you will, that stays with me even as existing thought got refined and newer ones emerged. Let me know what you think and lets keep the conversation going.

#1. At the heart of it all is a topic that I am quite passionate about : Conversation. There are several layers to conversations and there are hardly any topic that escape its reach! Gender Diversity, is a topic that centres around conversation.
Trouble brews at every level. At a very basic level, yes the space where small talk occupies a big deal of airtime, sometimes see male managers and leaders in an organisation, fumble. “I cannot hang out with her as I hang out with the boys”. “What do I talk to her about, shopping?”. These and comments like these run amok. At another level, far deeper conversations where pointed feedback needs to be taken and received, the discomfort gets only further accentuated. As simple as it sounds, conversations and comfort with either sex can be a deceptive deal breaker!

#2. Recognition (& accepting) that men and women bring a different work rhythm and dynamic to work is a great start, relative to odious blanket pronouncements of ‘there is no difference” etc. Yes indeed, men and women can deliver great results in equal measure. But the tone, tenor and rhythm of achieving these can be fundamentally very different. To stand up, recognize and state that these differences exist, is a great start to uncovering the biases that prevail in us. In most cases, unconscious biases. Valuing such differences and leveraging it for better forms the principle edifice of gender intelligence. That is an area of work that needs to pervade across line managers.

#3. If there is one particular interface that can make or break an organisation it is the interface between the line manager and the direct report! Irrespective of what the policies state and programs hope to achieve, it is the line manager who can make, break or enhance the work and the workplace. If, for example, fostering gender diversity is an important agenda, every line manager’s part is key. Infact, more important than fanciful programs and launches that are sometimes so woefully ‘targeted’ at ‘women’

#4. An organisation can make all the programs and policies. But what will ultimately get done is what the leaders do. ‘What you do speaks so loudly that I cant hear what you are saying’, must be remembered. Especially by those in senior leadership roles. Role modeling of whats ok and whats not ok can easily set the norms for functioning. Several leaders lose the plot with inappropriate comments and inconsistent behavior.

#5. A business case for diversity is often presumed to exist. There obviously is research that points in this direction. But unless a contextual business case is evolved, obvious ones of ‘research proves that men and women working together produce better result..’ etc will continue to sound remote. is seen as distant. Contextual business cases however needs to be evolved, in my opinion, by every organisation. Several pointers & papers (including the one by YSC ) point to making a ‘personal case for diversity’ by the CEO as a great start point.  A good mix of personal leadership and a sound contextual business case can go a long distance.