Sir, you have had a formal education in philosophy, and then you later on entered into the business world, so, what was it that motivated you to start writing and how has your writing developed over the years?

Well, I got into business by accident and I also got into writing by accident. So I didn't plan on a career as a writer, nor did I plan on a career as a business person. You have to go back, I have to go back to kindergarten. And so, when I was four and a half years old, I came home one day. This was in 1947. India became independent. I came home one day carrying a report card, a green card in my hand and my mother saw me running into the house. And so she saw the smile on my face and she said, did you stand first? And my father was standing close by. And he said that was the wrong question. Don't ask him if he came first. Ask him what he likes about school. What teachers does he like? What subjects? Which friends? He has got and so very early. I had two different voices in my childhood, my mother was concerned about my making a living. Working hard to get a job. You know, creating a family. My father was more relaxed and he talked about making a life. Not making a living alone. So this refrain when I was 17, and I got a scholarship to go to Harvard, My mother came to the airport with tears in her eyes. She said, make sure you study something useful. You have to come back and get a job. Why don't you like to be like your father to become an engineer? You'll get a job. So, as soon as I arrived at Harvard, I forgot my mother's advice because in the course catalog. I don't think you have this in your college in Aurangabad. But Harvard had a course catalog where you could choose anything you could do. So I studied Greek tragedy. I read Russian novels and economic history, I studied international relations, I studied Sanskrit, and I love the poetry of Kalidas in Sanskrit.

Please tell us more about this.

Finally, I graduated in philosophy. And that, and only the last two years, I studied some philosophy in those four years. And so I got a very rounded education without realizing it. I mean, my mother was horrified when I was studying Sanskrit, she said” What! A dead language? Only dead people will give you a job.” So How did I get my first job? I answered the first advertisement in the newspaper. It was a job for trainees by a company that made Vicks VapoRub. So I didn't know what a trainee was. My degree was in philosophy, but I think they must have been impressed with my Harvard degree. So they gave me the job. But very soon I missed the intellectual.  I mean it was a big change from Ivy-covered halls at Harvard doing philosophy to the dusty bazaars going from chemist shop to shop selling Vicks vapor rub in the Indian bazaar. I even went to Aurangabad. And I remember on the weekend on Sunday, I went to Ajanta and Ellora caves in Aurangabad in those days. Anyways, it was a very different life. But I missed the intellectual life. And so I would read and I would write on the weekends. And suddenly one morning, I decided to write something myself. So I thought I was reading a lot about history and there was a very interesting history about an Englishman in India. Who made a lot of friends. People loved him in India. His name was Henry Lawrence. So I told myself I would write a play about him. I had no training in writing, no training in the first place. But then I said, even Shakespeare one day, one morning must have sat on a chair and started to write Hamlet, so I would do the same. And so, I wrote the play, I was lucky! I won a prize and then it got performed in Bombay by the Theatre group, then it got published by Oxford University Press in England, and I was all set for a second career. So I became a weekend writer. Meaning, I had two jobs, Monday to Friday, I was a corporate executive, and Saturday Sunday I was a writer and that's how my writing career began. Then I wrote a play on Mirabai. By then I was transferred to an American company. I wanted my play to be performed after all, you write  so that it's performed on the stage. And they composed Meera bhajans in rock music. And they did a rock musical. It was the best production of Meerabai that you would imagine!  Let’s talk about the articles. And as a writer, I wrote many articles on why the reforms were important. The 1991 reforms, why we needed more reforms, and so on. And that, it was like a broken record every week on Sunday, my column would introduce some new area of reform that I felt we were at. Also, telecom was going to open up and there were a lot of people against it, the whole telecom department said, they would never know, the competition in telephone in India. And look what happened after that. And, you know, the waitlist was terrible. It was 10 years, you had to wait, or you had to know the minister to get a phone. So this was the benefit but there were so many other benefits that came with you. You're too young to remember all this, but your parents will tell you what the situation was in those days. Anyway, there was no middle class. Only if you worked for the government, do you belong to the middle class. Same time, in 1991 Communism collapsed, and the 1991 license Raj collapsed. So I was the first champion of the new India. I wrote a lot about it and India and Unbound. My first book is all about that story about where we could be. And of course, it's 30 years now after the reforms.

Please tell us about the book “The Difficulty of being good”.

 I can see prosperity spreading. But, I was troubled by the fact that there was still a lot of corruption in India. So I wanted to comprehend that. And I had read somewhere, the Mahabharata. The epic is obsessed with Dharma. But what I mean to say is that I was bothered by the exceeding amount of corruption in Indian life. For anything that you had to approach the government for, you had to pay a bribe. Do you want to start a school? You have to pay a bribe. So, I decided to study the Mahabharata. That led me. Fortunately! I studied Sanskrit at Harvard, and it gave me confidence. And so I studied Mahabharata. And I used to read it in Sanskrit, but Sanskrit would take me a long time. It's such a big work, so I read most of it. I read and translated but I read enough in Sanskrit to get the feeling for the, for the characters, for the action and all that was going on. Anyway, so the Mahabharata was the inspiration. And Dharma. I learned a lot about Dharma. You know, if you study in an English medium school nobody teaches you about Dharma. But everybody in Indian Village knows what the means are. And so, I got a good, very deep understanding. I think it's also translated into Marathi. But I'm not sure. It's translated into Hindi. It's called Achai Ki Kahani in Hindi and it's translated in other languages such as Tamil and so on. So I studied the notion of Dharma, and I also realized a lot of the problems of governance had to do with governance practices.

You have had a successful career both in the corporate world as well as in writing. You have balanced both. What advice would you like to give to young people who are planning to pursue multiple passions?

 I think the important thing is not multiple passions. At least  have one passion, and that is what my father was talking about. Now, you see, when I changed from being a full-time executive to a full-time writer I was in a sense following my passion. I wanted to be a writer for 25 years. I had been writing on weekends and I took my writing seriously. I loved it. And so you have to learn to love your work. And that is the problem in the world. They did a study in England some years ago and they found that 70% of English people did not like their work. They hated their jobs. What a waste of a life! You spend one-third of your life at the job. You know, eight hours a day out of the 24 hours you spend at work. Then to hate your work, and that's very sad. And, you know, I was an executive but I didn't mind it. I mean, I kind of enjoyed it. I didn't hate it, but I had other interests. Also, so in my case, I achieved this balance of two. Two hats, two careers. You know. but the important thing is what my father was saying to my mother when I brought my report card from Kindergartens, he said that the job of a parent is not to make sure that your child is first in class but to make sure they begin to love their work, their study, or whatever they're doing. And so those four years at Harvard were making a life. When I was going from Greek tragedy to the Russian novel to Sanskrit, love poetry to economics, all these things were making a life. You have to be a child to understand to begin to love something. You know, the child has curiosity, and he wants to know how the world works. And the child, you know, it's raining outside, older people will carry umbrellas, put on a raincoat and there's a puddle in the middle of the road and all the adults will go around that puddle. What will a child do? He'll go and jump into the puddle. To see how it feels like, well, that characteristic we should not lose. Unfortunately, our education system, our parents want to know, did you stand first? That child in you  runs away. And to reach that passion, you have to bring back that child in you. And so I would say that it would be my advice that even if you have a hobby, take it seriously. As seriously as your job. You know and then when you take anything seriously, you begin to love it. It has also happened many times like when you study your favorite subjects as you get completely absorbed into them. That's true.

As you said, we have to be more efficient, and more into developing the manufacturing sector. In entrepreneurship, we generally focus on service-based products. So like what steps should be taken by these young entrepreneurs so that they kind of enter into this manufacturing entrepreneurship?

It's always good to do some work. During your summer vacation at any time. Get involved in some job, even if it doesn't pay you. When I was a child, I used to live in Washington DC. I used to distribute the newspaper in the morning. I was a paperboy. And so I learned many things. As a paperboy. So I would say just do some work in the summer, especially, you know, you have a holiday from college. You can go to work as an intern and don't have to be paid much, just get a job. And that's something you have to experience, you see? Start something on your own in the summer. But it’s also important to learn a little bit about the work world.

What projects are you currently working on and what readers can expect from you?

 I have talked about two books. Now, it's so happens that those two books were about, have you heard of the notion of Purushartha? Purusharthas are the goals of life. The classical Indian life. The next book is about Another sort of freedom. It's coming out this year. It'll come out in October or September. But, it is a sort of freedom that is also based on my own life, it's a memoir of my memories and what I went through. So some of the stories I've told you like at kindergarten coming home and also the difference between making a life and making a living are stories in the book because those years at Harvard I was making a life. Those subjects I took. And what I studied was making a life. I hope that one day in India the education system will allow students to do that while they do engineering also, you should study other things in class, etc. So now, you know what my next book is about.

In your book, the elephant paradigm you discuss, the importance of building trust and cooperation in India. So how can we achieve this as an individual organizational and also cycle level?

It’s trust. It is very important because you go to the market and you buy something. Suppose you go and buy mangoes. And those are Alphonso, mangoes. They're expensive. So you come back home after buying and you see that they're bad and the seller overcharged you. So you won't go back to him. You'll go to his competitor next time. So that is the trust of a good business person. Build trust with the customer. Also, a good businessperson will make sure the employers are fair to the employees. They will trust him. And that we should trust our government. But if corruption exists in the government, we won’t trust the government. So, therefore I would say trust is very important. And trust will come if all of us also engage. Not just in our own little life, but our work, in our job. But we must also do something for the community. How can we do something in the community? For example, one hour a day. One hour a week. Teach poor children in our community you know. Also, work on something. I mean, in every community, there is a municipality in a ward or a panchayat. There are so many things to be done, the light on the street is broken. So   call the government office. And say this light is broken, please fix it now. Those kinds of actions. It’s a kind of politics. You are entering into the public sphere. If you take an interest in your neighborhood, at least keep it clean. People are throwing garbage in some places. Convince the neighbors not to do that. Build bonds with the neighbors. Invite them home for dinner. You go to their house for dinner. That's creating a community life.

So what advice would you like to give to people who want to create a positive impact on society and contribute to India's growth and development?

 I just told you that there are many ways you can contribute. Become an entrepreneur at a start-up. Commit, and take an interest in the community. If the light is broken go and tell the municipal office, call them. Garbage. Call the people who collect garbage. If they don't listen, you create a little group then they have to listen, if ten people are suddenly saying, and that's how you stop corruption. Also, don't pay. If he says, he won't lift the garbage, unless you pay him. So instead of paying him, you create a large group of people and go and inform his boss that he's corrupt, he's asking for money. That's the kind of action that we all need as a community action, we should be acting in our neighborhood. That's the best form of politics. Don't worry about Modi. Not worry about some ministers and this and that. Your neighborhood, improve it. So small actions bring out a big impact.

Lastly, what are your thoughts on the theme of Panorama and how can we broaden our perspective and understanding of the world around us?

Well, this talk of mine is a good example. Engaging with the community. That's the real form of politics. Not just becoming an MLA, but real politics is community involvement. I think of our new ideas and I keep up these talks with others. And that's one way to do it. Maybe one of you will be inspired to seek a passion. And a Passion Out of Love for Your Work. I have a very simple definition of happiness. Love the work you do and love the person you live with. A simple, one-line definition.

A successful entrepreneur, strategic designer, engineer, and confident lady—well, words fall short of introducing you! Why not hear your introduction from you? Because who better than yourself to shed light on your journey?

Where do I begin? So, I feel much more energized and, at the same time, very old when I'm with a young crowd like yours. Twenty years of my career, and I'll split them. We'll call it two decades. The first decade was spent mostly figuring out what I wanted to do. And at that time, I was alternating between various roles, trying out, and doing various things. Technologist is how I first started, specifically as a programmer in C++ and C sharp. I questioned, "What happens at the back end?” Curiosity grasped me, so I went ahead and did a lot of work as a database administrator. And then I asked, Okay, how do we work on the front end? It is fascinating. Thus, I arrived at the opposite end of the spectrum from which many engineers believe that it is not worthwhile. You already know my skill level, but as a front-end HTML, CSS, and html programmer, I learned a lot. I, therefore, began writing many of the affirmation controls using JavaScript and scripts. Then a crucial question was raised, which was followed by the statement, "Okay, but who decides what appears on this user interface?" One checkbox can be added to a text box, a radio button, or both, but who decides? So that is how I learned about the field of human-computer interaction, and I did pursue a master's degree at NTU. And after that, without looking back, I left Engineering. I then declared that this is where I intend to spend the majority of my remaining years. HCL was therefore very intriguing to me because it provided a link between humans and technology, highlighting both human needs and how technology operates. So I began as a designer. One of the things I created was an electronic bill payment presentation system. Companies use all of these peculiar systems to process payments and other transactions. So I carried out this for State Farm Insurance. It is a well-known insurance provider in the US. I think they are number one. Usually, they rank one, two, or three. Furthermore, it was fascinating to comprehend how using a few provided data, we could perform accident and fraud analysis. You can upload a photo and the user interface will be able to determine whether it was caused by a fake accident or a real one. So it's very interesting there is so much mathematical computation that goes behind it. I realized that to make things sensible for humans, the design needs to be great. But when you have a great design, you need the greatest form of engineering because it does all the heavy lifting on the back end. I also studied cognitive science, neuroscience, and behavioral science, which helps us understand how human nature works, how our brain processes information, and how we work as a bunch of human beings. What is cognition? What is distributed? Cognitive things, and more. So yeah, I think after that, I have gotten deeper and deeper into the strategic side of design. Then people started to say, "Hey, we want to make money using design. Thus, at that time, you learn product management and develop your business acumen. After I had established a small business, I wondered why I was still working for other people. Let me go and do something on my own. So that is how I got started in business. It was fun. I think I built 13 brands (now). To be exact, I sold three of the seven companies I invested in after they went bankrupt for a lot of lessons learned. In every aspect of business and design, there is an altruistic act that we do not perform. The altruism is, how can we build an ecosystem for makers? That is when I had the idea, "Well, why not we make a forest?" Take a look at a forest, yes? It is not like a garden, it just grows a few trees, you know. The forest has its order, but at the end of the day, if you just die down, fall one, you know, harsh weather, then it will not stand. They continue to grow for around 400 years. So, using communities, ecosystems, and various types of things that we want in a maker ecosystem is what I was attempting to create. I will therefore be more visible there as a community developer and designer. There, hiring a developer is still a bad idea. It's about designing communities because you need to put society together in a certain way. And finally, I understand that there was one thing I overlooked in all of this: building for billions of people. They number around 8 billion, and if you want to create large systems, we are not going to do it as a small business. There are businesses like that—for instance, WhatsApp and Midway—but I was not a part of any of them. All I was doing was the design work. So I decided to join Microsoft, a company I love and helped build for billions. So yeah, that's been two decades. However, with a different route from technology to design, strategic design to products, product leadership to design leadership, and so on. It has been an extremely exciting journey thus far, and I believe every journey has taught me something new, and I continue to learn something new every day. A lot of people don't understand this journey. They just say, Okay, you know, one, two, three, and four. This is what I did. But for you to understand what we do and how we do it, I wanted you to be aware that, as students, there is a lot of texture involved.

To begin with, let us start with your college days. What role does our college play in framing our future, from the environment we get to the college we get, to the company we make?

Hmm. Okay, I know that I'm here, I can connect the dots backward and say, but if you asked me when I was in college, I wouldn't have said this. I feel. Both school and college, for that matter, play a larger role in giving us our friends for life. Your peers, colleagues, seniors, and alums are the people who will come with you for life. Your instructors and the caliber of the facilities teach you how to have fine taste. It concerns everything else you do, including the clubs you belong to. Therefore, as a person, you grow in patience, perseverance, work ethic, grit, and all other aspects of human development, including the ability to work diligently under pressure. In colleges, typically, professors don’t tell you, call you into their room and say, “Trupti, you should study Well, it's important” No one is interested in it, right? As a result, they treat you like an adult, which I believe we have misinterpreted. Therefore, college teaches you much more than just engineering, medicine, or whatever college you are in. A part of, I would say, the daily college is just a waste of time. Because if you think about it, you study basic engineering for the first two years, and then you study your subject for the final two years, as I did when I studied electronics and communication. So I studied communication engineering. What did that do to me? Nothing. Honestly, today I don't use even a piece of that information. In that sense, it's a waste of time. It could have been like, if every engineer is going to be a software engineer, I start doing that from the first year. Do not do that unless you want to double-click and dive deep. I mean, how many of you enjoyed your civil classes? You tell me, how many of you enjoyed your engineering drawing classes? So only those who want to leave should do so, but not the instructors of engineering drawing. Provide the perspective by saying, "Oh, you can see everything in such fine detail." When it comes to design, you will be very good at pixels if you are very good at engineering drawing. Sometimes we think that college is just for fun, but sadly, your time is already here, is not it? Even if you live for, let us say, eight years, am I correct? I do not want to offend you, but 29,700 days if I just convert it to days. That's all you got. That's all you and I have. All right, in that, you slept for 12,500 days. Including all of the afternoon naps, of course. I believe it will be a little bit more if I only count the years I spent growing up, which comes to about 5000 days. Yeah. And colleges are a big part of that, right? What are we talking about? So, I am not sure. I wish someone had mentioned all of these things because you have this preconceived notion that having fun in college. We should have fun. Of course, we should have fun. However, it is also a crucial time in development, so I would say just do not do a good job there. I doubt that any of our professors even know it, let alone that they would teach you if they knew they would. So these days, when I meet college students, I tell them this is a precious time. You know, you should understand that you are in precious time and really make use of your aging curve. If you look at it, it's a bell. So how should you treat your life? I will leave the answer up to you.

What is the beauty of understanding life through design? (You’ve talked about Business Design, Product Design, and Life Design. Life Design is a term that is a novice on many fronts. It’s a term we generally do not hear. How would you explain Life design?)

Beauty, I don't know. But I'll tell you. Whether it is accidental or incidental, anything that you do incidentally is conscious. That's the process we call design. Therefore, the first step in anything you do consciously is to ask. What do I hope to achieve at the end of this? And the process that we refer to as design is when you consciously give something a shape, form, and structure. So you can view items with good design implying that they are conscious. Given a form and shape. If you don't design it consciously, it’ll get designed accidentally. Yes, some businesses make products. For example, consider Apple. All of these businesses, including Amazon, Microsoft, and others, have designers like me on staff to inform them of this. Hey, I believe we are not taking this user cognition aspect into account. And make it conscious. And yet, you still feel that it is a little complicated, you know? And one day, only Chat Gpt came with a simpler design. Incidentally, it will be accidental. Can we give a product shape and form? Yes. And that is how product design can give a business structure and direction. Yes, that is how his business is set up. Can you give your life direction and structure? You certainly can. You are thus consciously declaring that this is who you want to be. Do they know the cutting-edge technology that's happening for you to teach computer science? No. How are you making use of it? You know, when you come in and when you leave the birth and the death, the in-between, I always say that between the B and the D, there is a C, Right? So between birth and death, there's a choice. And how are you making choices? Is it designed? Is the choice full? Is it deliberate? Is it? Did somebody push it on you because your life is nothing but a sum of choices, isn't it? So think about it from that point, and tell me if the design makes sense. Should you have a design life? Should you have a product design business or not? But What if things don’t go the way we want them to, maybe the way we planned our design or our life? And that's where you get irritated, right? And that's exactly where you can pivot and say, oh, this is not feeling great. So, let me change this. That choice is also yours. So how can you say that? Oh, I'm a victim of this law. You made the choice. Now, it's up to you. To change. You can always change your mind, right? How many of you went through civil engineering and said “This is not for me” Most of us. But there is, I have a few civil friends who live and die that structural engineering. They love it. That's for them. So think about it, how many choices we can make? How many choices do we have to make? There are millions of choices, the billions of choices around us and you get to pick one in that one moment. So, should you do that design fully or not? Yeah, I am. So I am a very strong believer in Parkinson's Law. Parkinson says that, if you give yourself 10 days to finish an assignment, you will take all 10 days. Procrastinate for nine days and do your work on the 10th day; that's us. So what I do is instead of giving myself 10 days, I give myself one-tenth of the time, so I'll give myself one day to finish it. So in that sense, in that one day, you would have learned what is working and what is not working. And then, you can go ahead and iterate as Version 2 on the second day and Version 3, on the third day. You need to keep giving yourself less time and leverage it more so that you will be able to produce better outputs in a very short period. That's how you build your efficacy. I create multiple versions to be a hyper-iterator. If there is only one version, and it has not been altered, I will feel bad.

As we edge toward an era that would predominantly be dominated by AI, how do you compare the ability of a human with that of AI? Should humans be worried that a bot would steal their career?

If I can buy you a career, it will undoubtedly take over if you have one. It will right? The code is self-writing. Yes, it seriously spits out a full blog post if I just ask a question. So yes, we need to be cognizant of that fact. First principle. Core way. If you take a close look at our history, there have been about five industrial revolutions. From the first to the fifth, what have you accomplished? Yes, we did it before the Industrial Revolution, which is where we started. Go back to the Stone Age. What did we do? We tried to make tools out of a few stones and then kind of used them to cut and break things. Yes, that is what we did. We are informed that makers can communicate and create tools. Today, I don't know who Trupti is. Ryan may not be familiar to me, but are we both comfortable speaking? Yes, I was pleased to join the team and simply speak with you. Knowing how to work together is a skill that only we humans possess. The third is that we only have language. What? I think I can make you think the same using my language. For once, our tools use AI. We always used the tools of slaves, but now your slave is smarter or equally smarter than you. The tool has more intelligence than us and can suddenly do things that we cannot. And how should you proceed from here? So, as a master, we must adapt. What are the guidelines you can follow to improve? To be a better master, you need adaptation. You require flexibility in various areas of your being. Only we have the future, the imagination, and the creativity that AI possesses. We are the ones who will be able to make the connection between, for example, saying, "Hmm, I am looking at the McDonalds and looking at the art gallery." Can we build a hospital that runs as quickly as McDonald's and is as spotless as a museum? That's one of us. If you ask the AI to connect McDonald's and Art Gallery, it's going to hallucinate and give you some. Yes, or no. So creativity and your ability to Imagine the future is only with us. We can now use AI to complete a lot of the tedious tasks we previously had to perform how many of you spend like 10 days in writing an assignment? Can you finish it off in one hour? Yeah. You have so many things to do, so that's exactly how I would see us using it. You should know how to use, AI. Considering how smart your slave is. As a master, you must now adapt and sharpen your mind. Therefore, read about the special characteristics of people. to be brilliant. It will devour you if your intelligence is equal to or lower than AI's. To stand out and shine in this age, the skills that you need are completely different.

In the tech world, there has been an explosion in start-up culture, predominantly after COVID. You’ve been an entrepreneur for quite some time. For the next generation of young minds, what is your take on Entrepreneurship? Can we learn to be entrepreneurs, or is it something we inherit from our personal environments?

Oh, good question. We all want to be entrepreneurs. Because it's so sexy, right? I mean, we want it because people say you decide when you want to work, you can decide to take a holiday, and you can decide to work from anywhere. All this is amazing. Perks of being an entrepreneur. Freedom is something that everybody wants to pursue entrepreneurship. But we forget the fact that when you pick one stick, you always pick both ends, right? Let us say, you are an engineer. It's not enough. If you're just good at engineering, you should be good at leads. You should be good at marketing. You should be good at, you know, sales. You should be good at least having a view of the financial situation of your company. You should be good at getting things done from the people who work for you, you should be good at delegation; and you should be able to trust them, right? Simple. This means that becoming an entrepreneur requires more than just having subject-matter expertise. You should possess a wide range of skills referred to as entrepreneurship. Even if you don't have subject matter expertise or entrepreneurial skills, you will still be awesome. Because you are an entrepreneur, you can sort of employ the subject matter expert. So yes, all of us can be entrepreneurs, but are we willing to put on those skills? Because there is no environment, first-generation entrepreneurs typically struggle a little. There are not many examples that are difficult to draw inspiration from, such as your environment or the 30 years your parents spent working for the same company. You know, it's a very different environment, right? If you are a second-generation employee or if it is a family business, you have therefore been a part of it for a considerable amount of time. Therefore, the answer is that we all can, but you ought to lean that way. I realize that the subject matter is my love. Entrepreneurial skills while I do better. I'm decent. But that's not what I want to spend my 4,000 days doing. Because it is in your nature to want what you do not have and run after it. Our mentality is one of scarcity. As a result, you treat your skills poorly because, as you are aware, it frequently occurs. Because you have five strengths, you can use them. You have 500 weaknesses. So what are you hoping to run after? These are all typical physical inquiries, after all. I believe no one even inquires, so I am aware that entrepreneurship is not my strong suit. I then thought, "Okay, I am a good designer; that is what I am good at, and I like doing it." I enjoy developing products and creating crafts. It's somebody else.