“Innovation, an instrument specific to entrepreneurship, endows resources with a new capacity to create wealth”.  -Peter Drucker Until the age of sixteen, I never considered time, knowledge, or skills as resource. Born and brought up in a joint family environment, I always thought that the biggest resource I had was relatives. During my younger days, I could easily list the names of over a hundred relatives (paternal and maternal) with whom I was fairly familiar, although I could take liberty only with a few. I always received support from my immediate and extended family directly or indirectly. It is only when I received my first National Merit Scholarship of six hundred rupees in 1967 that I understood the importance of money as a resource and the associated freedom. All through my growing years I wasn’t greatly motivated by money; what pushed me more was to experiment with my life by doing something different from what my family elders were doing.  My paternal great ...

  It is not about proving anything to the world. It is all about proving your capabilities to yourself and stretching your own boundaries.” ― Manoj Arora, Author of Dream On (2015) Generally when we face failure or a situation that we don’t know how to handle, we worry about our capabilities. Sometimes, we develop capability just to meet the demands of the situation. From my younger years, I’ve had to bear additional responsibilities both at school and home, which I fortunately considered as part of my work and not as a burden. Till I entered high school, I was the class monitor and the school assembly in-charge; I also represented the school in several extra-curricular activities like debates and sports. On many occasions I got prizes and lavish praise from teachers. I also acted as the hero in dramas and happened to perform well in academics. Thus, expectations started rising within myself by the time I turned fourteen and had entered high-school. On entering high-school, I prefe...

  “When your values are clear to you, making decisions become easier”. – Roy E Disney (b. 1930) – Son of Roy Oliver Disney, Co founder of Walt Disney Co I think confidence and empowerment are interconnected. Empowerment comes from within; typically it stems from and is fostered by self-assurance. To feel empowered is to feel free and that’s when one can do his best. Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900), who believed that embracing difficulty is essential for a fulfilling life, considered the journey of self-discovery one of the greatest and most fertile existential difficulties.  During my growing years (1950-68), I wasn’t subject to great academic or peer pressure. I could spend sufficient time in play, reading a variety of books, and being with people, both young and old. This helped me build a general perspective of life for later years. Having spent most of my growing years in my ancestral home amidst elders, siblings, and visiting relatives, my focus was on sustaining family a...

  “Faith consists in believing when it is beyond power of reason to believe”. – Voltaire  I must have been three or four years old when my mother started teaching me Sanskrit shlokas. My mother recited many such shlokas in the early morning and also during the day when she was relatively free from work. Because of this, by default, some of them got embedded into my memory. Because the shlokas were taught by my mother, who has taken so much care of me, I believed that reciting such shlokas will make me happy and successful. Almost until I entered adolescence, I regularly recited some of the shlokas. Once I entered my teens, my curiosity, peer groups, extra-curricular activities, and academics occupied most of my mental space and reciting these shlokas stopped. After I turned sixty, when I tried to understand the meaning for these shlokas, I found that they mainly praise with gratitude the various forms of nature/God. When my mother desired that few of the shlokas that she was r...

  “Transformation does not happen by learning new information. It happens when you change how you view and react to other people, events, and things around you”. I started feeling helplessness when I was about seven. My elder sister who was suffering from Type-1 Diabetes succumbed to the disease when she was just about twelve. This happened within a few weeks of our moving to Khadakavasala (a small town situated seven and a half miles from Pune) following my father’s transfer from Bangalore. I saw the elders at home wailing and didn’t know how to console them. The fact that my sister didn’t return home after my father had taken her out with a few of our neighbours and his colleagues made me seek the reason for it. I was told that she has reached God. It was only a couple of years later I learnt a little more about death.   When I was almost nine, I was afflicted by eczema and it was terribly itchy and painful. I suffered from jaundice a couple of years later; there were severe...

  “We will only understand the miracle of life fully when we allow the unexpected to happen”. – Paulo Coelho, Brazilian Poet and Author During my younger years, I was mostly driven by the systems practised in my family, school, college, and the society at large. During those growing years, doing anything against the established norms I deemed as risky. In my early twenties I began perceiving risk in relation to a particular activity based on my capabilities, perceptions, and the environment in which I have to undertake the work. Until my late thirties, in spite of all my academic qualifications, while taking decisions, I was more driven by my nature, focusing on perceived needs and values (as per the frameworks that I had developed) rather than from the perspective of risk. I must admit that on many occasions things fell in place as I had expected, perhaps due to the frameworks or one can even attribute it to luck. Generally I’ve perceived risk from the perspective of reputation or...