Speech at the felicitation ceremony for the Young Alumni Achievers' Award at IIM Ahmedabad

I am the writer among the awardees, and so, over the last few days and nights, I have put myself under not a small amount of pressure to find the right words for this occasion. I’m not afraid to fail, though. Not because failure at this stage might not have consequences today. But because success and failure are often all a mishmash inside my head. I live a writer’s life, a life full of daily failures of expression at the desk, the kind of failures that are private and therefore hurt the most. Consequently, a writer’s life is also full of rising up again and trying, again and again, till one is satisfied or till one reaches a limit and can do no more. My engagement with the processes of writing establishes a distance from their outcome; it gives them the nature of play. This speech, this address, this collegiate communication, is a wish that you, all of you, can find an area of pure play, where you are engaged as if consumed. This area of pure play may not always be the one that makes you the most money. If you must know, my earnings from writing 4 books, from selling screen adaptation rights, from the many stories and newspaper articles over the last decade or so, are yet to surpass even 1 year of income from my corporate career. Not because I earn a lot there, but because it’s how little writing brings in. And yet it is a writer that I am, first and foremost.

I come from Muzaffarnagar, a small town in Western Uttar Pradesh. My mother was a homemaker, my father a not-so-big scientist in the government’s sugar cane department. I am told that there was a time when my father’s pay was 12,000 rupees a month and my school expenses amounted to 3,000. I did study in a school that my father’s peers did not send their kids to, but it would be wrong to say that this sacrifice on my parent’s part did not come with its unsaid expectations. My path was clear even without discussion. I had to become an engineer, and even though in school I liked the languages—English and Hindi—more than the sciences, it was the sciences in which I had to build my life. I got into a decent engineering college, and, because too many of my batchmates were writing the CAT and because I was quite sure of doing well in at least in the verbal section, I decided to write the CAT. It worked, and I got in. I was 21 years old, and mostly blind to the ways in which the world worked.

As you of the incoming batch are probably beginning to realise right about now, a great normalization takes place as soon as you enter this campus. We are all used to being the best wherever we have been before here, and we all land up here by being what we think is the best. But, paradoxically, among this congregation of the best, our individual tag of ‘best’ gets lost. At least inside the boundaries of this campus. The one from NIT has the one from IIT to contend with, the one from IIT has a Chartered Accountant, who will do better than them in the accounting papers, to contend with, and the CA has the extremely athletic one from Anna University or Delhi University to contend with. I was, in my first few days of IIM Ahmedabad, deflated by this great normalization. Please don’t be like me. Please don’t be deflated or daunted by this phenomenon. Understand this as a privilege you have earned, a privilege that you suffered to earn. Each of your batchmates is better than you at something. Embrace the fact that you are surrounded by better people. It’s an asset.

Part of my reaction might have been because of the fact that I arrived in IIM Ahmedabad with a deadly, undiagnosed disease. I ran a fever all through my first year here. I was skeletal, less than fifty kilos. In the third trimester, my dorm mates took me to a hospital. I remember the doctor’s words during the ultrasound procedure: ‘Oh my God.’ Later, inside his cabin, the doctor said that I had more than two dozen tumours in my abdomen. It was either lymphoma or tuberculosis. He said both were curable. When I asked him what the cure for lymphoma was, he said ‘Chemotherapy.’ I had to go home. 

It turned out to be tuberculosis, which meant that I would live. I started the antibiotic course and returned to campus. The kindness of some professors who allowed me to carry my mid-term grades as the final grade saved me from repeating the year. This was quite a lesson: a humane institution always finds a way to be compassionate.

My health improved and I gained weight. And, having bypassed the road to death, I decided not to shrink anymore, to have more of a social life. One evening, I and Arun Poply, a dear friend of mine from dorm 7, went out to watch a film called ‘Bachna Ae Haseeno.’ When we were walking back to the old campus’ main gate, Arun said: ‘Man, you look like Ranbir Kapoor.’ Now I know that my appearance today would make that possibility seem unreal, but things were better once, especially in the hairline department. Hearing that remark, my self-confidence, battered by the great normalization and the trauma of the disease, got a boost. Much later in the second year, when I fell in love, this confidence allowed me to express it, and, to my surprise, find it reciprocated. That love lasted a few years.

Arun Poply, however, passed away a few months ago from an abdominal illness. 

Such is life, isn’t it? Lived forward in a line whose tilt and slope we know nothing of, but understood backwards to be full of cruel ironies and accidents and events that circle back as bittersweet memories. I understand only now that what Arun Poply said to me that evening, in jest or not, true or not, changed my life more than the antibiotics. And I have found one thing to be true again and again since then: that better people are all around me, saying things that, if I just care to listen, if I just open my heart to, would change my day, my month, my life.

I spoke earlier about play, about how writing is play for me. Finding that area of play for yourself is something that you now owe yourself. It requires some honesty. You are here, sure, in the best business school in the country, but if there is still a suspicion in your heart that your area of play exists outside business management, you must be honest enough to at least probe that suspicion. At IIM Ahmedabad, I only suspected that I could be a writer. I’m here today because I probed the suspicion.

The PGP students here will find that the second year can be a year of play. It was in my second year here that I started being serious about finding out whether I had any talent for writing. I wrote poems, silly poems that I will be embarrassed to show anyone today. At that time I posted those on our online noticeboard. I think it was called DBabble if I’m not wrong. Some of my batchmates—never more than six or seven, mind—read them and encouraged me. Today, I am deeply grateful to them. In a way they supported my writing at a time when my talent had only started showing itself in odd spurts and mistakes. Their encouragement allowed me to continue playing. And that’s the thing. The more open you let yourself be about the alternate pathways you explore, the wider you will find your support base to be. The first year is hard, I know, academics is everything. But, trust me, it too passes. Do not lose sight of the fact that this is already the beginning of the end of your academic life, and the beginning of your life with people. Be hungry to know people. 

My last word of advice to you would be to not make IIMA your personality. You are proud of reaching here, you must be. But that pride needs to be worn lightly, not just inside the campus but outside too. If the obvious needs stating, let me state it: there are better people everywhere. 

Like my lovely wife Nikita here, not from IIMA, only Delhi University and Harvard.  And still, you know, to my constant surprise, an exceptional person. 

See, it is ok to be proud of where you study or have studied, but your worth, in your eyes and others' eyes, must be bigger than what IIMA gives you. You haven’t conclusively won any race with those friends of yours who couldn’t make it here. And that is true for two reasons: firstly, that life is long enough to allow most people the chance to reformulate themselves. Even you will not be an IIMA grad in every situation. No single success is definitive. Then how can any single failure be? And the second reason why I say that you haven’t conclusively won any race is that there is actually no race: our only task is to become better than our earlier versions. The cheat code, of course, is that, being from IIMA, we might actually get to choose which area we want to become better at.

Thank you for listening to me with patience. I wish you all the best of luck. May the force be with you.