My first turning point came as a young TAS Official (Tata Administrative Officer) when I attended a week-long HR-led training module in Goa. I reached the designated training room to find a dozen people milling around, with no apparent facilitator. As we sat down in a circle in awkward silence, one of us suggested we introduce ourselves. Like everyone else, I mentioned my name and the organisation I worked for in my introduction. However, one of the participants simply said “I am Sachin”. We waited for more; he said nothing. So, one of us asked him “Sachin from”? He said, “Sachin from Bangalore”. Awkward silence again. “What do you do Sachin?” someone piped up. “Oh, I run and play with my daughter”. “Total loser”, we all affirmed in our minds, while smirking at each other.

Well, it turned out that ‘Sachin’ was the facilitator, and what he told us next changed my life: “Your identity is subordinated to your corporate identity. You have no self-worth, no sense of you as yourselves, you are just ‘x working for y’!” That was the day I made a firm decision: My identity would be separate from my job.

Another turning point came when I walked away from my corporate career. I wanted to learn new things and have my fingers in many pies. The running joke is, that I have them in so many pies, that I’m trying to grow extra fingers!

I spent 25 years in best-in-class organisations like Tata Group, Microsoft and Mahindra Group. All was going well till one fine day when I woke up with a sense of mortality. I felt stifled because I did not have the time or space to cultivate my other interests, and time was running out. I had a spate of other interests, like quizzing, reading and learning new things on a vast range of topics etc. Also, when I wanted to invest in start-ups at one stage, I couldn’t because these start-ups were competing with Microsoft.