About Me!

My father served in the Indian Army, which meant we moved often, across cities, across states, across the kind of distances that show you, quietly, just how large and how plural India actually is. That childhood marked me more than anything else has. Different cultures, different religions, different cuisines, different traditions, different terrains. A new school every couple of years. A new set of friends to make from scratch. A new dialect of the same country to learn how to listen to.

People assume that kind of upbringing breeds restlessness. In my case, it bred the opposite. When the ground keeps moving, you learn very early how to adapt. You learn to read a room before you've finished entering it, to find common ground with people whose lives look nothing like yours, to make a stranger into a friend without ceremony. An army household adds its own scaffolding to all of this: discipline, resilience, structure, the quiet understanding that things get done because somebody decided to do them. By the time I was old enough to notice, I'd already become the kind of person who could walk into a new classroom on a Monday and leave with three friends by Friday. The extroversion wasn't a personality trait. It was a survival skill that eventually became one.

As I got older, I started to notice something about the conversations I was drawn to. The good ones, the ones I left feeling sharper than when I'd arrived, were almost always with people who knew a little about a lot, and a lot about something. That observation pushed me toward debating, which is where I learned that an idea is only as good as the way you can articulate and defend it. Debating, in turn, pulled me toward quizzing and toward reading widely, because the people who won at either were the people who had taken the trouble to actually understand the world: history, current affairs, technology, the small permanent comedy of human behaviour. I didn't think of any of it as training at the time. It just felt like the most interesting use of an afternoon.

In hindsight, of course, it was training for almost everything I do now. The skills that debating and quizzing quietly built in me, structured thinking, restless curiosity, the instinct for connecting two ideas that don't obviously belong together, and the ability to step inside another person's perspective long enough to actually understand it, turn out to be the exact skills product management asks for. Even before I knew the term, I was already playing the role. I was the friend people called before buying a phone, the cousin asked which app was worth the subscription, the one with a slightly annoying opinion on which tools were built well and which were built poorly. Product sense, I now realise, had been forming in me for years. It just didn't have a name yet.

When I eventually discovered product management as a career, it felt less like a discovery and more like a recognition. It is one of the rare roles that asks for curiosity, analytical thinking, communication, empathy, and product intuition all at once, and refuses to let you get away with being strong at only some of them. What sealed it for me, though, was the cross-functional nature of the work. Product sits at the intersection of technology, business, marketing, sales, and legal, and that intersection is exactly where I'd been most alive my entire life: at the crossroads, learning to translate between rooms. It was, in every meaningful sense, the job I'd been preparing for without knowing it.