As I neared the end of high school and considered career options, I was confronted with the harsh economic reality of India in the mid‐1970s.

In those days in India, nobody asked, “What's your dream? What's your passion?” Even asking such questions was a luxury.  The only relevant question was, “How the hell are you going to get a job and survive in the world?” Unlike for my cousins, going back to the village was not an option for me. But my prospects in the outside world were not good. India had been run as a semi‐socialist democracy since Independence in 1947. The country's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, deemed that the government should control the “commanding heights” of the economy, through direct ownership and heavy oversight. As a result, India had a centrally planned economy with a huge public sector; government‐owned corporations dominated many sectors. Stifling government regulations bred stagnation and massive corruption.

Nehru's autocratic daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister in 1966 and doubled down on state domination. She nationalized all the country's banks in 1969. The oil crisis of 1973 quadrupled the price of oil, crippling an already anemic economy. Taxes were numbingly high; the highest marginal income tax rate in 1974, the year I graduated from high school, was 97.75%!¹ Per capita GDP that year was $163.² The economy was virtually closed to the world; non‐oil, non‐food imports amounted to a miniscule 3% of India's GDP in 1975. Tariff barriers were ridiculous, with import duties as high as 300%. People spoke half‐jokingly of the “Hindu rate of growth” – India's per capita income growth averaged 1.3% per year from the 1950s to the 1980s, while the population grew 2.3% a year.

The heavily protected domestic industries made shoddy and expensive products. For example, there were only two car models available – an Italian Fiat model from 1953 and a British Morris model from 1955. There was a four‐year waiting list to get one of them – if you could afford it. Few in the middle class could, so they bought one of two available brands of scooters (the Italian brands Vespa and Lambretta, both produced in India) and ferried around families of up to five or six on them. There was a seven‐year waiting list for those! There was a vibrant “black market” for people unwilling to wait. Phone service was a government monopoly; that meant a 14‐year waiting list to get a clunky, unreliable phone.

We had few career options. Our school had no career counselors; we had to figure things out on our own. Those proficient at math and science tried to get into one of the few engineering schools that existed. If you were good at biology and science, you strove to get into medicine. If you weren't in either of those two categories, God help you! You could get a Bachelor of Commerce degree and try to become a chartered accountant, or get a Bachelor of Arts and pray that you had enough connections to land a government job with petty power, miniscule pay, and the opportunity to take bribes.

I had no idea where to apply or what I should study. My father asked around and came up with two options. One was for me to join the merchant navy, the world of commercial shipping. That would mean years of quasi‐militaristic training, followed by a life of mostly living on a ship. The other option was engineering school. Being good at math and science and having abandoned biology after eighth grade, my path was obvious. It certainly seemed less distressing to me than being marooned at sea for months on end. My father heard about an elite institution called the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), a philanthropic venture started by G. D. Birla, one of India's leading industrialists. Birla had been a close supporter of Mahatma Gandhi. To aid in nation‐building, he established a world‐class university in Pilani, his hometown in Rajasthan (the state my ancestors came from).

A big believer in the importance and power of education, my father traveled alone to Pilani – an arduous 20‐hour train and bus journey each way – to explore the campus, talk to the admissions staff, and sample the food. He liked what he saw and came back with the application form, including a spare copy. Meanwhile, my friend Sushil was also trying to figure out what he should do. When I told him about BITS, he applied as well. We were both admitted to this iconic institution.

There was one problem: How would we pay for it? The fee was nominal: Rs 500 a semester for tuition and housing.  The primary cost was food, which came to about Rs 200 a month – which my father could certainly not afford. He dispatched me to Kesur, saying, “You need to ask your grandfather to pay for this.” After some joshing about whether engineering was a worthy career path for a Rajput, my grandfather agreed to fund my education.

With a blend of excitement and trepidation, Sushil and I set out together for Pilani, our metal trunks packed with all our worldly possessions. After an overnight train journey to Jaipur, we boarded a bus for the dusty five‐hour ride to Pilani. At the bus stop, we clambered onto creaky cycle rickshaws and rolled through the Institute gate.

The campus was an impressive sight. Though surrounded by a sandy desert, it was green and vibrant. It was also relatively empty. We “freshers” were the only students on campus for the first week, along with a few unfortunates who had been forced to stay back in the brutal heat to take remedial summer courses.

The campus had 12 dorms (called hostels) for boys and one for girls. Our class had 400 boys and eight girls. The hostels were named after religious or political figures: Ram, Buddha, Krishna, Gandhi, Ashok, Rana Pratap (my ancestor), and so on. Sushil and I were allotted adjacent single rooms in Vishwakarma Bhavan for the first week. Feeling homesick, we moved both our beds into one room and our study tables and chairs into the other. That way, we could talk to each other at night to ease our anxiety. This comforting arrangement was short‐lived; within a couple of days, senior students started taunting us as homosexuals. We hastily rearranged our furniture back to the way it was.

We set out to explore what would be our world for the next five years. In contrast to the chaos of much of India, the campus was an orderly oasis. The massive cream‐colored main Institute building with its iconic clock tower in the middle sat at one end of a great lawn. Hostels lined the longer sides of the lawn. Just beyond the other end of the lawn and facing the Institute tower was the Saraswati Mandir, a spectacular white marble temple festooned with countless carvings (Saraswati is the Hindu goddess of knowledge, music, art, speech, wisdom, and learning). Next to that was a little shopping area known as Connaught, named after the main commercial area in New Delhi (which itself had copied the name from London), where we walked to most evenings for milkshakes, iced coffees, restaurant meals, birthday celebrations, haircuts, magazines, stationery, and other essentials.

Between each pair of hostels was a dining hall or “mess.” For the first week, the freshers were housed in two hostels and ate in the same mess. Amid the clamoring of steel trays and nonstop chatter, I noticed an unusually tall, reed‐thin Sikh student robotically walking behind each row of boys, making deliberate eye contact with each boy on the other side of the table. Periodically, he reached across with his long arm, glued a postage stamp on the forehead of a student, and murmured something. Finally, he came to our table and stamped Sushil and me. He bent down and whispered, “3:30 p.m., 162 Ram Bhavan. If you don't show up, God help you. But I doubt that even God can help you, because God is a freshman this year.”

Sushil and I dutifully showed up at his room at 3:30; he ordered us to sweep out his room and the corridor outside it. This was our introduction to ragging (or hazing).

Despite being outlawed by the country's Supreme Court, ragging remains a highly abusive part of college life in India. In most colleges then, ragging continued as long as you were a student. As you moved up the hierarchy, you continued to get ragged by those senior to you and got to rag those who were your juniors. Ragging was often psychologically and physically abusive. Fortunately, BITS had established a more benign tradition: it only permitted ragging for the first month, which ended with a “Freshers Welcome” feast.

But for that month it could get intense. As I had discovered in Kesur, unearned power reveals people's true natures, bringing out latent sadistic tendencies in many. Some boys were ingenious in devising ways to torment freshers, such as ordering them to sit on vertical Coke bottles. If the ragging was good‐natured and fun, I went along with it. But if somebody crossed a line, I refused to comply. I said, “If you're going to rag me, rag me properly. Otherwise, I'm leaving.” I had discovered a steely core of courage within me that would not allow bullies to get their way.

After orientation week, I settled into Buddha Bhavan. I soon discovered that a cultural caste system existed among the students. The westernized students who listened to rock ‘n’ roll music, wore jeans, and smoked pot were known as “casters.” The rest of us, who preferred Indian music and had simpler tastes, were known as “maisters.” The two groups rarely mixed.

Everyone at BITS had been an outstanding student in high school. The competition among students was intense, since professors graded us on a curve; only 10% got an A in any course, and about the same percentage had to fail. In my first semester, the momentum of my intense preparation for the high school exam served me well; I ended up with three As and a B.

Our life was largely contained within the campus. Occasionally, we ventured out to a dilapidated movie theater in town called Jayshree Talkies. Sitting in the threadbare chairs with protruding springs, we noticed shuffling movements above us in the red cloth that hung under the ceiling. We could see the silhouettes of rats scurrying about. Fortunately, none ever fell on us. Our annual cultural festival called Oasis took place in October. It attracted talented actors, musicians, singers, and glamorous women from colleges all over the country. Oasis was the social highlight of the year for us; otherwise, ours was a pretty drab, all‐boys, all‐books existence.

Summers were long and unbearably hot, reaching 120°F .  There was no air‐conditioning anywhere on campus except for the room that housed an IBM 1430 mainframe computer. It hardly rained.  Winters were bone‐chillingly cold, dropping close to freezing at night. There was no heating, so we covered ourselves with woolen hats, heavy jackets, wraparound shawls – anything to warm ourselves. We sought the sun like flowering plants or cold‐blooded reptiles.

And then there were the sandstorms. The sky suddenly darkened and the howling wind whipped the sand off the ground and swirled it around. We used wet towels to seal the crevices around our doors and windows. In the aftermath, a fine sheen of sand covered every surface and every item in our rooms. It penetrated our hair and our nostrils, even our food.

My Luck Runs Out

At the end of the first semester, I returned to a new home. My father was now the director of a wheat research station in a remote location. Ten days later, I received a telegram; the BITS student union had decided that we would be on strike to begin the next semester. At issue: whether the students or the Institute should pay the wages of the workers who made our food and served us. This was a selfish, entitled action by the students. BITS heavily subsidized our world‐class education; we paid only Rs 500 a semester for tuition, rental textbooks, and housing. The foolish, self‐indulgent strike lasted nearly two months before the students finally capitulated.

I was ready to return with a trunk full of new clothes, boxes of my favorite sweets that my mother had made, Rs 500 of spending money that was to last me the whole semester, my autograph collection, and my prized international money collection. Every time my father visited another country, he brought back their currency notes and coins for me. During the extended break, I had polished the coins and organized everything in an album.

On the overnight train journey to Delhi, I slept on an upper‐level berth. My metal trunk was under the bottom berth two levels below. I woke up in the early dawn as the train pulled into Mathura (revered as the birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna). I slipped on my shoes and reached under the seat for my trunk.  To my horror, nothing was there. I frantically searched all around in a growing panic. It was gone. I saw another BITS student I recognized and asked to borrow some money so I could get back home. He gave me what he had. I got off the train just as it was pulling away.

My heart pounding hard, I walked toward the railway police station. The constable behind the counter wordlessly pushed a form toward me to report the theft.  When I filled the form out in English, the cops mocked me for not using Hindi, adding to my misery. Far from “serving and protecting,” police in India often harass and intimidate the powerless. Most are corrupt and completely lack compassion.

The next train heading back to my hometown was not for another eight hours. I had no extra money to buy food or drink. I sat all day in a daze on a metal bench, berating myself and consumed with guilt. Not only had I lost the 500 rupees and my irreplaceable money collection, that trunk also contained my newly tailored clothes, which had cost my parents another 800 rupees. The scale of the loss, to my distraught mind, was insurmountable. Just as I had when somebody stole my bicycle, I blamed myself for being so careless. But nobody had warned me that I needed to secure my trunk to the frame of the seat with a chain and lock.

When the train finally arrived, it was overflowing with people, as all trains were in India. I sat down on the cold grimy floor outside the toilet and barely moved for the next 16 hours. The train finally pulled in around dawn to the station closest to our house. With no money for a rickshaw, I walked to the house, reaching just as my parents were sitting down for tea. It shocked them to see me. I had held it together for 24 hours, but now burst into tears. I told them what had happened and apologized profusely for being such a costly burden. My mom was loving and compassionate, as I expected, but my dad surprised me by being understanding as well. He did seem a bit shaken at the financial blow.

Meanwhile, my classes in Pilani had started without me. After giving me a few days to regain my equilibrium, my father told me to go to Kesur to ask my grandfather for money to buy a new trunk and to get new clothes made. Buying “ready‐made” clothes was not an option then. You had to go to a cloth shop, pick out the right colors and patterns and fabrics, get them to cut the right amount, and then take it to a tailor who took your measurements and stitched your clothes in a week or so.

It all took a lot of time, and my anxiety was mounting. I finally made it back to campus two‐and‐a‐half weeks after classes started and was immediately floundering. With a five‐course load, I struggled to catch up. The semester extended long into the summer because of the strike. I managed to get one A, three Bs, and my first C. My GPA plummeted, along with my confidence.

BITS was an intensely competitive environment. It was also a land of broken – or at least diverted – dreams. All the students came there to get an engineering degree, but only half eventually did. Uniquely in India, BITS had created (in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of  Technology) an innovative, integrated five‐year curriculum that included liberal arts courses. We all started with no majors. At the end of the first year, 86% of the students entered the engineering and science stream, while 14% had to pick another major, such as economics, pharmacology, or English literature. It depended on your GPA. At the end of the second year, 50% of the 86% made it into engineering, while the other 36% had to pick a science major such as math, physics, or chemistry. At the end of the third year, you got assigned to your major within engineering: chemical, mechanical, electrical, electronics, or a combination of electrical and electronics. Again, it depended on your GPA and the relative demand for majors. It was heartbreakingly common for students to become deeply depressed and even commit suicide when they could not get their desired major in this competitive jungle.

Grim Survivor

I had an almost total collapse as I entered my second year.  We had to survive some incredibly challenging courses. In thermodynamics, the average score on the first test was 16 out of 100; the top score was 34. Mine was 12. A course in modern physics introduced me to the befuddling world of quantum mechanics and Schrödinger's equation. The textbook, appropriately enough, was by H. J. Pain.

I barely understood what was going on and did not know which way to turn. I was still reeling from the shock of the previous semester: the train theft, the money I had squandered, coming back late, and getting poor grades. Now my guilt intensified. How could I waste all the money that my family was spending on me? I felt utterly helpless and worthless.

I cried alone in my room every night, suffering intensely from impostor syndrome. I thought, “I don't deserve to be here. The only reason I am here was because I did well on my high school exam, which was only because Sushil helped me.” I was ashamed to ask Sushil for help again. He was getting straight As every semester; at the end of the five‐year program, he would rank second out of 400, with all As and just a couple of Bs in English. He didn't even have to study very hard; he was just inherently brilliant. I felt myself drifting away from him, thinking, “Why should he waste his time with a loser?” Our friendship weakened as I sought the company of those I could relate to, those who were also struggling in this cutthroat environment.

I wrote anguished, apologetic, tear‐stained letters home. My father told me to drop the semester if I needed to. But I did not know what that would mean, so I soldiered on. The semester finally ended. I had one B, three Cs, and my first D. My GPA took another precipitous drop. From 9.39 (out of 10) my first semester, I was now down in the sevens.

It became all about survival now. The fourth semester was a little better than the third; I was still flailing in deep water but my feet were now touching the ground. The drops in my GPA became less steep. I squeaked past the threshold needed to get into the engineering stream. A year later, I did just well enough to make it into the electrical and electronics engineering major. I found a few courses I enjoyed and did well in. But one nearly killed me, called “UHF and Microwaves.” I still get nightmares about that course. It did not help that the professor had leprosy and was missing several fingers.

Political Awakening

During the shortened summer break after my first year (because of the strike), I was heading to my mother's village from the nearby town of Nagda in an oxcart. On a portable radio we heard the shocking news: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi had declared a state of emergency in the country. Two weeks earlier, the Allahabad High Court had declared her election void because of illegal practices. The judge ordered her to vacate her seat in Parliament (known as the Lok Sabha, or People's Assembly). Egged on by her despotic son Sanjay and suspicious of her ministers, she centralized all power in the Prime Minister's office. She refused to resign in the face of mounting protests around the country and declared a state of emergency on June 25, 1975. She cut off electric power to newspapers, suspended elections, curbed civil liberties, and rounded up and imprisoned hundreds of political opponents. She and her son issued a 25‐point plan for radical “reforms,” including a brutal campaign of forced sterilization of men to get the birthrate down. Over the following year, the government sterilized 8.3 million men, most against their will.

Indira Gandhi's attempts to destroy our fledgling 28‐year‐old democracy outraged me. Such actions could well lead to the death of democracy; I shuddered at the prospect of a despotic future for India, a swerve toward the brutal repressive politics of Pakistan. When I returned to Pilani, I joined an underground movement against the Emergency, attending secret meetings where we listened to smuggled speeches on cassette tapes by imprisoned political leaders.

The Emergency lasted 21 months. Indira Gandhi finally remembered what India stood for. Defying her son, she ended the Emergency and announced fresh elections. A frenetic political campaign ensued. Many opposition parties united into a new party called the Janata, or People's Party. The day the election results were announced, I was in Delhi. I staked out a position outside the Indian Express building; this was the newspaper that had shown the most courage during the Emergency. On a large board, newspaper workers periodically updated the election results. As the evening wore on, the crowd grew euphoric as the opposition neared a landslide majority. The electorate had dealt Mrs. Gandhi and her dictatorial ways a massive rebuke.

***

That summer, I was in Delhi for my first internship or “practice school” at the ancient Birla Cotton Spinning and Weaving Mills. I was supposed to learn how a textile factory operates. The first day I stepped into that mill, I nearly collapsed from the combination of intense heat, the almost 100% humidity that had to be maintained inside for the spinning and weaving machines to operate properly, and the unbearably loud clanging noise. Fibers of cotton floated in the air, being inhaled by the huge number of people who worked in the dilapidated structure. It was hellish.

Years later, I read Alexis de Tocqueville's description of the textile mills of Manchester in 1835 and it reminded me of that experience in Delhi: “Here humanity attains its most complete development and its most brutish, here civilization works its miracles and civilized man is turned almost into a savage.”³

Fortunately, my friend and classmate Rajiv lived in a house on the premises, as his father was the Chief Labor Officer of the mill. For most of that summer, we sat comfortably in Rajiv's living room being served snacks and sweets and drinking tea while a succession of managers briefed us about plant operations. This was my idea of engineering!

I entered the fifth and final year of the program. It was time for Practice School 2, a semester‐long experience. I ended up at the Central Bank of India in Bombay.  They asked me to assess a couple of technology businesses that were seeking loans. Of course, I had no idea what I was doing. Mostly, I treated that time as a paid vacation. I indulged my writing hobby, creating, editing, and writing for a publication we called Bombay Newsletter, which was sent back to people in Pilani to learn about what we were up to in Bombay. I had done something similar on campus the year before, editing a publication for the electrical and electronics engineering students and faculty called Sinusoidal Times – engineering humor at its lamest!

I was coming to realize how much I loved writing, though I couldn't see any future in it. One incident I wrote about was when the professor in charge had to reprimand a group of students for behaving unprofessionally while at Practice School. After giving them a stern lecture, he ended with, “Remember, my friends, when you are in Rome, you must behave like Romeos.”

Back in Pilani for the last semester, I geared up for campus placements. As one of India's elite engineering institutions, BITS attracted many leading companies, and I had many interviews despite being a middling student. I must have been good at interviewing, because I received half a dozen job offers. I accepted one from Larson & Toubro, a respected engineering company with Danish roots, to work in their electric switchgear factory in a Bombay suburb, for a princely salary of Rs 800 a month – the same salary as my father when we had returned to India nine years earlier.

Bombay Bound

I headed to the big city to begin my work life. After five years in secluded, spacious, and sandy Pilani, Bombay was quite a change. I shared an apartment with a friend in a suburb called Santa Cruz. I walked to the train station around 7 a.m., squeezed my way onto a packed local train for the short ride to Andheri station, and boarded one of the waiting bright yellow‐and‐black L&T buses. A half hour later, I was on the sprawling hilly campus, working from 8:20 a.m. to 5:40 a.m. as a quality control engineer.

I quickly realized that my engineering degree hadn't prepared me for what I was expected to do. I buried myself in books to understand current transformers to be able to interact with vendors whose products were not performing up to par. Midmorning, a waiter wheeled a trolley around the office with a small snack and a cup of tea for each of us. At 12:30, we walked up the hill to the dining room for a sumptuous, subsidized meal – the highlight of our day. Then it was back to my desk, another snack trolley in the midafternoon, until it was time to make the reverse trek back to Santa Cruz. This was my routine six days a week – for a grand total of 29 days!

Before starting my job, I had learned that if I got a magical degree called an MBA, my salary would likely double and I would get to work in an air‐conditioned office. Immersed in the heat and humidity of Bombay and the stifling atmosphere of the switchgear factory, that sounded extremely appealing to me. I had applied to the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA), the leading business school in India. The competition to get in was intense, bordering on ridiculous – fewer than 1 in 300 applicants made it. IIMA had its own version of the GMAT; as an engineer with good English, I found the test quite easy. I cleared that hurdle and was asked to come for a personal interview and a “group discussion.” Again, my language skills served me well. I received a letter informing me that I was 36th on the waiting list. Two weeks later came the fateful news: the waiting list had been closed after they had admitted the first 25. I was crushed.

Fortunately, I had also applied to the Jamnalal Bajaj Institute of Management Studies in Bombay, which had a similar admissions process. The entering class was only 45, and they had about 7,000 applicants that year. A few days after my IIMA dream ended, I received an admission letter from Bajaj. I was elated and immediately typed out my resignation letter. My manager wordlessly read my letter and then looked up at me over his reading glasses. “Young man, you are making the biggest mistake of your life.”

I didn't care. I was on my way from being a clueless engineer to a comfort‐seeking MBA. I headed home for a brief respite before school started. I put my salary in an envelope – eight crisp 100‐rupee notes – and gave it to my mother, as is the custom in India. She wiped away tears, told me how proud she was of me, and blessed me.

Bajaj was located at the southern tip of Bombay island – the glamorous part of town, with the poshest hotels and the tallest skyscrapers. It was a short walk from the corporate headquarters of many of India's leading companies and across the street from the state legislative assembly. Our graduate dorm was on a short street between the Churchgate train station and Bombay's famed Marine Drive, a picturesque curved highway that ran along the Arabian Sea. Life had suddenly become a lot more interesting.

Bajaj attracted students with a variety of backgrounds from all over the country. Many of us had engineering degrees, but others came with degrees in economics, literature, and commerce. There were five girls and 40 boys. Early on, a student named Manjeev Singh Puri (who would later be India's ambassador to the European Union), with a larger‐than‐life personality, emerged as the unquestioned leader of our class. He came from a family of distinguished civil servants; his father was the chief secretary of the state of Punjab. His nicknames were Tito and Blonde; inexplicably, he had light brown hair and green eyes.

It was a Bajaj tradition for students to have nicknames. Tito anointed himself the official nickname giver of our class. The diminutive Sanjay Sharma became Shorty. The always worried‐looking Sudhir Yadav became Hassle. A math wonk was deemed Stats. An overly Anglicized kid named Praveen Meduri was christened Wog, a mocking term the British had used for “westernized oriental gentleman.” Wog embraced his new moniker with gusto; as we walked past a large lawn on our way to the Institute, he gestured toward it with his pipe and exclaimed, “Egad, the village green!”

Ashwini Malhotra's family owned Weikfield Food Products, best known for their custard powder, a staple in the pantry of every middle‐class Indian household. To preempt Tito, he said, “Thanks, but I already have a nickname; everybody calls me Kitu.” Tito replied, “Your choices are Custard or Pudding. Pick one.” Custard it was.

With a last name like Sisodia, my fate was sealed. For the next two years, my nickname was Sis. I hated it. I had with great difficulty shed my childhood nickname Pappu, only to be saddled with this one now.

I moved into a triple room in the dorm. My roommates were two second‐year students, both avid pot smokers. We made a fine trio: the law firm of Sis, Crow, and Fuzz. Every night, inhaling their secondhand smoke gave me the distinct sensation of floating above my bed, my nose inches from the ceiling.

After the rigors of Pilani and the demands of my short‐lived job at L&T, Bajaj proved to be a cakewalk. This MBA stuff was easy, even fun! We took 10 courses in the first semester, but none were hard. I started informally teaching statistics and computer programming to my classmates with liberal arts backgrounds and found that it came naturally to me. The two primary choices for a major were finance and marketing. I did not like finance, which I found to be too dry and boring, so I chose marketing. It engaged my long‐dormant right brain, after years of slogging through hyper‐analytical engineering courses.

The two years at Bajaj were like a paid vacation. My father had recently taken a job at the University of Zambia in Africa, working for the Canadian International Development Agency. I knew he was earning a good salary in dollars; for the first time in my life, I did not agonize over money. Many kids at Bajaj came from well‐to‐do families. The food in our dorm was terrible, so a group of us started a nightly practice of eating out at the many excellent restaurants in that part of town.

Our strategy professor, Dr. Manesh Shrikant, was the best teacher at Bajaj. He had an MBA from Cornell and a DBA from Harvard Business School. After the first year, I interned at his company, Shrikant Consultants Private Limited. I then headed to Africa for a month to visit my family.

Zambia was a former British colony that had until recently been known as Northern Rhodesia. It bordered Zimbabwe, which had just ended its freedom struggle from the British and shed its old name of Rhodesia. True to my father's adventurous spirit, we spent most of that month traveling by car around the region, getting a genuine African experience. We visited Malawi, Tanzania, and Zimbabwe. We went on two safaris and visited the world‐famous Victoria Falls. It was an easygoing and relaxed time, reminiscent of our years in the United States and Canada.

My second year at Bajaj continued the trajectory of the first. I helped organize a conference with the theme “The Business of Business Is Business” that featured a series of conversations between prominent business leaders and journalists about the social responsibility of business. I got to meet the legendary J.R.D. Tata and G. D. Birla – men who had been part of the building of modern India.

We approached our last semester and the frenzy of campus placements. I again received multiple job offers and accepted one from a prestigious consulting company called AF Ferguson, at a starting salary of Rs 2,000 a month – two‐and‐a‐half times what I had earned as an engineer, even better than the doubling I had expected. I thought my career trajectory was set.

Back to the Future

A week after accepting that job, I came down for breakfast in our dorm on a day we didn't have any classes, still in my pajamas. A group of seven of my friends were about to leave. I asked, “Where are you guys headed?”

“The US Information Agency, to pick up GMAT applications.”

“Why? We are already doing our MBA.”

“We want to apply for a PhD in business in the US.”

“You can get a PhD in business?! I didn't know that! Give me five minutes. I'll come with you!” I had long dreamed about returning to the United States, the site of my idyllic childhood years, but I did not know how to make that a reality. A portal had just cracked open.

Six weeks later, we took the exam. Soon, the little envelopes showed up. I had scored in the 97th percentile, transforming my dream from a mirage to a distinct possibility. I swung into high gear and applied to several schools. Dr. Shrikant wrote me a glowing recommendation that probably sealed the deal. I soon received offers of admission from Columbia University, the University of Michigan, and Cornell University – all with full scholarships, including living expenses. This was too good to be true!

When I told my father what had happened, he was stunned. He couldn't believe that on my own, I had managed to get a full scholarship to Columbia University, which had the top‐ranked marketing department in the world. I was on my way to becoming a marketing professor. Two years earlier, I hadn't even known what the word “marketing” meant!

The irony is that I was the only one from that group of eight who ended up going to the United States for a PhD. Who knows how my life would have unfolded if I had come down for breakfast five minutes later or earlier that morning?

My parents were still in Africa, so I prepared to depart India on my own. I went to Kesur to say good‐bye to my grandfather and uncles and cousins. It was the monsoon season; water and mud were everywhere. My cousin took me to the bus stand on the tractor. After a three‐hour bus ride to Ratlam, I spent a couple of days with my mother's family. I have a picture of me with flower garlands around my neck being blessed by my maternal grandfather at the train station. The roof of the train behind me was crowded with people who couldn't find a place inside the train. The lottery of life had handed me an opportunity that was utterly unimaginable to them.

After a couple of days in Bombay, I headed to Santa Cruz International Airport. I had $65 in my wallet, two suitcases in the plane's belly, and a jumble of thoughts, emotions, and dreams crowding my mind. I had strapped myself into a new roller coaster. What lay ahead?

Reflections

Fear drove my decision to go to engineering school. It was all about maximizing the prospects for getting a job. It was not about knowing myself and following my passion.

Think back to a time when you faced a similar decision. How did you make that decision? How did it serve you or not serve you to make it in that way?

The hazing tradition revealed latent sadistic tendencies in many. It reflected the adage that power doesn't change who you are; rather, it reveals who you are.

Have you observed this in yourself or in others? Once we become aware of such tendencies, what can we do to counter them?

The strike by the students was ill‐advised and petty. It served no purpose other than to disrupt our education.

Have you found yourself caught up in groupthink, where a group embarks on a course of action that is obviously flawed and cannot lead to a good outcome?

I experienced my first episode of deep depression in college. My world shrank, and I felt I had no resources and no recourse. I had to pull myself out of it and figure out how to survive.

Can you recall an experience with depression? How did you handle it? What would you do differently today?

Encountering my friends who were heading to the US Information Agency turned out to be one of the most significant turning points in my life. I saw a glimmer of an opportunity and immediately acted upon it.

Do you recall similar turning points in your life? Did doors open that you did not walk through? How could you think differently about such situations in the future?