A defence-family childhood means my life reads like a train timetable. Follow the dotted line from the top.
The whole thing on one hand-drawn map:
Home base: India. One detour: Nepal. The rest of the world is next.
A place famous for two things: mutton worth a detour, and the Satyagraha that began here. Not a bad pair of origin stories for a founder.
Loud, crowded and already in motion. The first lesson was how to wait in a queue and still be in a hurry.
Defence-family rule number one: the address is temporary, the friends shouldn’t be. New place, new accent to decode.
Still Allahabad in my head, which is how most of us carry the names we learned first. Another move, another set of friends in a week.
Pack light, unpack fast, find the good chai before the boxes are open.
Same rule, new weather. By now I could settle into a city faster than I could assemble its furniture.
Back where the route began. Second time around, I knew which metro line to take.
For a life on a moving timetable, two years counts as a long stay. I got to know a single metro line very well.
I went to Nepal for Vipassana, a 10-day meditation retreat. No phone. No talking. No writing. For a founder, that’s every coping mechanism, taken away.
The hardest part wasn’t the silence or the missing phone. It was the sitting. Hours of it, every day, just me and a body with opinions.
What stayed with me is something I still can’t put into words. I tried for this page. Then I remembered the rule: no writing. So I’ve left the lines below blank on purpose.
Ask me about it over a coffee. I’ll be a worse storyteller than you expect, and a better listener.
Offices that look like spaceships, and traffic that behaves like it has lost something.
Home base, and where I’m building AfterFive. The packing has paused. Silk Board has not.