Kay’s Odyssey

Category: About Life Choices & Potholes

  • The Longest Book I’ve Ever Read

    The Longest Book I’ve Ever Read

    I have never quite understood why we ask people how long a book is. How many pages? How many words? How many chapters? It makes reading sound like an endurance sport, as though there is a finish line at the end and someone is waiting with a stopwatch to congratulate you for surviving 847 pages.

    I have read some very long books. The kind that require commitment, a reliable bookmark and a reasonably stable life. The kind you carry around for weeks, occasionally wondering whether you are reading the book or the book is slowly taking over your life.

    But these days, I am less interested in how long a book is than in how long it stays with me.

    Some books disappear as soon as you finish them. Others follow you for years. You remember a character, a sentence, a feeling, or simply the strange coincidence of having encountered that story at exactly the right moment in your life.

    Some books don’t really end when you close them.

    They continue unfolding somewhere inside you.

    Perhaps that is why I became a writer.

    I didn’t begin with a grand plan to write dozens of books. I began with questions. Life had a rather annoying habit of putting me in situations I didn’t understand and then expecting me to behave like a fully functioning adult.

    I spent years building a career in technology and data science, living in America and doing what sensible people are encouraged to do: work hard, build a profession and create a life. Then life decided to rearrange the furniture.

    A career ended. Immigration became complicated. India began pulling me home.

    Returning to Mumbai after so many years was hardly a cinematic homecoming. There was missing luggage at the airport, a rented family home because the old one was caught up in redevelopment, parents, paperwork, visas, phone calls and a ridiculous number of decisions that seemed to produce even more decisions.

    And then there was Mumbai itself, which has a remarkable ability to make you question every decision you have ever made while simultaneously making you grateful that you are here.

    I started writing about that experience because I was trying to understand it. That became About Life Choices & Potholes, a book about careers, immigration, family, relationships and the unsettling business of starting over when the life you carefully constructed no longer fits quite the way it used to.

    Writing it taught me something I would keep discovering in different forms: I wasn’t particularly interested in giving people neat answers. I was interested in what happens when there aren’t any.

    That question eventually led me into the stories we tell ourselves about love and identity. We inherit so many rules about how life is supposed to work—follow your heart, know your worth, everything happens for a reason, if it’s meant to be, it will be. We repeat them often enough that they start sounding like wisdom.

    I became curious about what happens when we stop repeating them and actually examine them.

    Why do we tolerate things we would tell our best friend to walk away from? Why do boundaries make us feel guilty? Why do we sometimes confuse being wanted with being loved? How much of the person we think we are was actually chosen by us?

    Those questions became Diary of Cliches, which grew beyond relationships into a book about self-discovery, expectations, boundaries and the stories we inherit about ourselves.

    Then writing collided with the less romantic realities of being an author.

    There is something wonderfully optimistic about spending months creating a book and imagining that readers are waiting somewhere to discover it. Then you publish it, look at your sales dashboard and discover that the world has apparently been busy doing other things.

    I eventually wrote Why Is Nobody Buying My Book?, because sometimes the most honest title is also the most embarrassing question.

    That book led naturally into my interest in money, business, creativity and the uncomfortable gap between making something and making something work. I have written about those subjects because I have lived the uncertainty myself. Success looks very different when you are sitting on the other side of it, trying to figure out what to do next.

    Somewhere along the way, fiction gave me another place to explore those questions.

    Fever Dreams, Finding Noir and my Beautiful Men stories allowed me to step outside my own life and wander through love, longing, attraction, separation and the wonderfully irrational things human beings do when emotion gets involved. Fiction is useful that way. You can give a character a terrible decision and pretend you are merely observing human nature.

    Then there were the dogs.

    Dogs have a habit of completely disrupting literary ambition. You can spend an afternoon thinking about identity, grief and the meaning of human attachment, and then your dog looks at you because you have stopped throwing the ball. Suddenly your deepest philosophical concern is whether you have failed as a human being.

    Romo taught me about loss. Sauli brought chaos, resilience and an extraordinary amount of personality into my life. She also gave me another world to write about, one involving rescue, animals, friendship and the peculiar wisdom of creatures who have never read a self-help book.

    That became Adventures of Sauli the Rescue Pup, along with my other writing about dogs, food, Mother Earth and the everyday choices through which we decide what kind of lives we want to live. I have written in very different genres because I am curious about very different things, but when I look back at the books together, I see the same questions underneath them.

    What do we do when the plan changes?

    Who are we when the thing that defined us disappears?

    How do we love without losing ourselves?

    What does success mean when nobody else is handing us the definition?

    How do we continue after loss?

    And perhaps the biggest question of all: how do we make peace with not knowing?

    That is the territory I keep returning to.

    The books may look unrelated from the outside. A memoir about returning to Mumbai, a book about clichés and self-discovery, an honest look at publishing, fiction about complicated relationships, stories about rescue dogs, and books about food, business and the planet don’t exactly form an obvious shelf.

    But from the inside, they feel like one long conversation.

    I am still trying to understand the same messy business of being human. I simply keep approaching it from different directions.

    Perhaps that is why the question about the longest book makes me think about something other than pages.

    The longest book any of us ever reads is our own life.

    It begins before we understand the language. Our parents, families, cultures, teachers, and circumstances write the early chapters for us. Eventually, we begin picking up the pen ourselves.

    Some chapters make us proud. Some embarrass us. Some contain people we were convinced would stay until the final page. Others contain people who appeared briefly but changed the direction of the entire story.

    There are chapters we would happily rewrite. There are others we wouldn’t touch because, painful as they were, they made us who we became.

    And then there are the pages we haven’t written yet.

    Mine are still being written.

    Maybe that is why I keep writing books. Each one gives me another way to sit with a question, make sense of an experience, or simply explore something that won’t leave me alone.

    So, what is the longest book I have ever read?

    It isn’t sitting on my bookshelf.

    It is the one I am still living.

    It has no page numbers, no table of contents and no guarantee of a satisfying ending. Unfortunately, there is also no option to skip the boring chapters.

    But I have finally learned that I don’t need to know how the story ends before I turn the page.

    Explore
  • Embracing Uncertainty: Life Lessons from Mumbai’s Streets

    Embracing Uncertainty: Life Lessons from Mumbai’s Streets

    If someone younger than me asked for the best advice I could give them, I don’t think I would tell them to work harder, dream bigger or start saving for retirement immediately. I would probably say, “Please stop trying to get your life right.”

    It is strange advice, especially because most of us spend the first few decades of our lives doing precisely the opposite. We are constantly trying to get things right. We want the right education, the right career, the right relationship, the right city, the right house, the right bank balance, and, preferably, the right amount of happiness to prove those decisions were worth it.

    An entire industry is built around helping us accomplish this. We have planners, vision boards, podcasts, five-year plans, ten-year plans, and morning routines that begin at 4:37 a.m. because apparently successful people have somehow negotiated a separate arrangement with sleep. We are told to manifest, optimize, maximize, and strategize our lives. And then there are the rest of us, trying to remember where we kept the charger.

    When I was younger, I genuinely believed there was a correct way to become an adult. You worked hard, built a career, became financially secure, had a stable relationship, made your parents proud, and developed enough emotional maturity to stop making embarrassing mistakes in public. There was, I imagined, a point at which you could finally say, “Right. I’ve got this.”

    I have yet to reach it.

    For years, I was very good at making plans. I built a career in technology and data. I accumulated experience, qualifications and responsibilities. I lived in America for years and built a life there. From the outside, there was plenty that looked reassuringly successful. I had followed many of the rules I had been given.

    Then life changed the question.

    A career can end. A relationship can change. A city that once felt like home can begin to feel unfamiliar. A plan that looked perfectly sensible five years ago can suddenly seem like something you wrote for a completely different person.

    We don’t talk enough about how frightening that can be.

    “Starting over” sounds beautiful when it is written in a motivational quote over a photograph of someone standing on a mountain. Starting over in real life involves paperwork, money, logistics, family conversations, and uncertainty. Sometimes it involves standing at the airport waiting for a suitcase that has apparently decided to begin its own independent journey. Sometimes it means coming home.

    For me, coming home meant coming back to Mumbai after years of living away from it.

    That sounds simple until you actually do it.

    There is a particular kind of disorientation in returning to a city you spent your childhood calling home. You remember the city, but the city has not been waiting patiently for you. It has carried on without you. Buildings have changed. Roads have changed. People have moved. Familiar landmarks disappear behind construction. A place you remember as one thing is now something else entirely.

    Even home itself can become temporary.

    The family home I had known was caught up in redevelopment, so returning to Mumbai did not mean walking back into the exact life I had left behind. I came back to parents, memories, boxes, rented spaces, and the strange realization that “home” can be both deeply familiar and completely unfamiliar at the same time.

    I began noticing Mumbai differently.

    For years, I had carried around a very particular picture of the city in my head. Coming back made me see the Mumbai beyond the postcard version. Not just Marine Drive and South Mumbai and the places people like to photograph when they talk about Bombay, but the Mumbai of Dadar, Ghatkopar, Chembur, Bhandup and Mulund. The Mumbai of crowded roads, local trains, autos, neighbourhood shops, vegetable vendors and people who have somewhere to be even when you have absolutely no idea how they intend to get there.

    This was the city I recognized in my bones.

    There is something comforting about the familiarity of a Mumbai street even when you have been away for years. The sound of an auto accelerating before you have properly closed the door. The negotiation over whether a driver will take you where you want to go. The smell of food coming from a small shop when you are walking past without any intention of eating. The sudden appearance of a vada pav when you weren’t hungry five minutes earlier but have now decided that hunger is a completely subjective concept.

    And then there are the potholes.

    Mumbai has always had a special relationship with potholes. I say this with affection because they are one of the few things that seem capable of surviving every change of government, redevelopment project and monsoon. You learn where the bad ones are. You warn someone about them. You forget one, hit it anyway and spend the next few seconds wondering whether your car, your spine or your ancestral karma has suffered more damage.

    But somewhere along the way, I stopped thinking of the pothole only as an irritation.

    It became a useful way of thinking about life.

    For years, I had thought of unexpected things as interruptions. The job that ended. The relationships that didn’t become what I thought they would. The decisions that looked sensible at the time but took me somewhere I hadn’t anticipated. The circumstances that forced me to reconsider what I thought my future was supposed to look like.

    I wanted life to behave like a well-written plan.

    It didn’t.

    The older I get, the more I understand that most important decisions are made before we have the luxury of knowing everything. You choose a career before you know the person you will become. You enter relationships before you understand what you need. You move cities because you believe one version of yourself belongs there, only to discover years later that you have changed.

    There isn’t an answer key.

    You make the best choice you can with the person you are at that moment. Then you deal with what comes next.

    That has made me much kinder to my younger self.

    She was not foolish because she didn’t know what I know now. She couldn’t. She was working with the information available to her.

    If I could sit across from her today, perhaps over a cutting chai somewhere between Dadar and Matunga, I wouldn’t give her a ten-point plan for living.

    I’d tell her to make choices she could respect.

    Because so much of what we call advice is really just fear dressed up as certainty. We inherit instructions about what a respectable career looks like, what a good daughter does, when you should settle down, how much money is enough, what kind of house you should live in, what your family should look like and what success is supposed to feel like.

    Even the age at which you are apparently required to stop reinventing yourself.

    Eventually, I became suspicious of some of these rules, mostly because I had broken quite a few of them and was still here. Still laughing, still making questionable decisions, still falling in love with ideas, still writing.

    Coming back to Mumbai made that realization feel strangely tangible. I had spent years away, building a life that was real and meaningful, and yet there were pieces of me that seemed to have remained here without my permission. They were tucked into ordinary things: the sound of a local pulling into a station, the chaos around Dadar, an auto ride through Chembur, the familiar stretch of Ghatkopar, the changing landscape of Bhandup and Mulund, the smell of rain hitting hot concrete, the food I grew up around, the particular impatience of people trying to cross a road before the signal changes.

    These things were not grand enough to qualify as nostalgia.

    They were more intimate than that.

    They reminded me that identity is not something we leave behind simply because we move somewhere else.

    Perhaps that was one of the more unexpected lessons of returning. I had spent years thinking of home as a physical place. I eventually understood that home can also be a collection of tiny recognitions. A sound. A smell. A certain kind of afternoon light. A person calling your name from another room. A street you haven’t seen in years and somehow still know how to navigate.

    And sometimes, home is the place where you finally stop trying to explain why you became someone different.

    I have spent enough years making choices, regretting some of them, defending others and occasionally wondering how a perfectly intelligent woman managed to walk directly into yet another metaphorical pothole to know that a life cannot be judged one decision at a time.

    Some of the things that seemed disastrous at the time eventually became necessary. Some things I desperately wanted turned out not to be good for me. Some endings made room for beginnings I could not have imagined. Some mistakes became stories. Some disappointments became freedoms.

    Somewhere along the way, I started writing those stories down. Eventually, some of them found their way into About Life Choices & Potholes.

    Maybe that is what getting older really gives you.

    Perspective.

    You begin to understand that the person you were at twenty-five could not possibly have known what the person you became years later would need. You stop expecting your younger self to have had the wisdom you only acquired by living.

    So if someone younger than me asked me for advice today, I wouldn’t give them a list.

    I’d tell them to leave a little room in their plans for the person they haven’t become yet.

    Then I’d order the cutting chai.

    And probably a vada pav.

    Some things about growing up really do become clearer with age.

    Some things just taste better in Mumbai.

  • The One Thing That Would Instantly Improve My City

    The One Thing That Would Instantly Improve My City

    Fix the roads.

    There. I have solved urban planning.

    I know Mumbai has bigger problems. Traffic. Pollution. Garbage. Public transport. The price of a one-bedroom apartment that has approximately the square footage of my childhood kitchen. There are questions about housing, flooding, overcrowding, air quality, public safety, and the small matter of how an entire city can be simultaneously exhausted and in a hurry.

    But fix the roads.

    Because Mumbai’s potholes are not potholes anymore. They are infrastructure with an attitude. They are permanent features of the landscape, like the sea, the local trains, the monsoon, and the man outside every building who knows exactly where you are going even when you don’t.

    You leave home in a perfectly reasonable state of mind and twenty minutes later, after navigating Dadar, Ghatkopar, Chembur, Bhandup, Mulund—or anywhere else where the road has been repeatedly dug up and then abandoned—you have experienced a full spiritual awakening. You have confronted mortality, questioned your financial decisions, reconsidered your relationship with your vehicle, and developed a new respect for the human spine.

    THUD.

    Your car goes up.

    Your body goes down.

    Your soul briefly leaves the vehicle.

    Your dog looks at you.

    You look at the road.

    The road looks innocent.

    This is how Mumbai teaches mindfulness. Not through meditation apps or silent retreats, but through the sudden and violent reminder that you are not in control of anything. Not your speed. Not your suspension. Not your lower back. Certainly not the municipal corporation.

    And perhaps that is why potholes have always felt strangely familiar to me.

    My life has had a few.

    Actually, if we’re being honest, I’ve had enough to qualify for municipal funding.

    I left Mumbai and spent nearly two decades building a life in America. I built a career in technology. I became the person who could explain data to executives without making them want to throw themselves out of a window. I learned how to speak confidently in rooms where everyone else seemed to know exactly what they were doing. I learned how to make plans, meet deadlines, manage expectations, and use phrases like “let’s circle back” without visibly losing the will to live.

    From the outside, it probably looked like I had found the road.

    Not necessarily the perfect road, but a respectable one. A road with lanes, signs, exits, and the occasional reassuringly expensive toll. I had a career. I had routines. I had a life that made sense when described in a biography or a family WhatsApp message.

    And then life did what life does.

    It threw a pothole into the middle of the road.

    I lost my job. Plans changed. Certainties became question marks. Eventually, I came back to Mumbai.

    Which sounds very graceful when you put it in a sentence.

    “I returned to Mumbai after nearly two decades abroad.”

    It sounds intentional. Almost literary. Like I had spent years gathering wisdom in the West and then returned to my roots with a suitcase full of perspective.

    The actual experience involved airports, missing luggage, redevelopment, rented homes, bureaucracy, complicated decisions, and the general Indian experience of having one person tell you something is absolutely impossible before another person fixes it in twelve minutes. It involved trying to explain to people that I was not exactly starting over, although I was also not entirely sure what I was doing. It involved answering questions about work, money, marriage, housing, and the future while privately wondering whether I had made a catastrophic mistake.

    Coming back to Mumbai is not simply a geographical decision. It is an encounter with every version of yourself you thought you had outgrown. The city remembers you differently from the way you remember yourself. It contains your childhood, your family, your old ambitions, your old embarrassments, and the particular smell of rain on roads that have not been repaired properly.

    You can leave Mumbai for years, but the city does not leave you. It waits in the background, occasionally appearing in the form of a craving for street food, a sudden irritation with an American supermarket, or the inexplicable conviction that a journey of three kilometres should take no more than seven minutes.

    I had spent years believing that if I planned carefully enough, worked hard enough and made sensible enough choices, life would eventually behave itself.

    Adorable.

    It doesn’t.

    Life doesn’t behave itself. It does not reward preparation with predictability. It does not consult your calendar before changing the subject. It does not care that you have already made a five-year plan, colour-coded it, shared it with your family, and created a spreadsheet to track your progress.

    It rains on the day you have washed your hair.

    Your flight is delayed when you are already late.

    The person you thought was forever turns out to be a chapter.

    The career you thought defined you ends.

    The house you grew up in disappears behind construction barricades.

    The restaurant you loved becomes a bank.

    The bank becomes a gym.

    The gym becomes a restaurant.

    And sometimes you are standing in the middle of Mumbai wondering how the hell you got here.

    That question has followed me through more than one stage of my life. How did I get here? How did the person who once thought she knew exactly what she wanted end up making decisions she could not explain neatly? How did a career become an identity? How did a country become a memory? How did returning home become both a comfort and a confrontation?

    I wrote About Life Choices & Potholes because I know something now that I didn’t know when I was younger: a life can look completely wrong from the outside and still be exactly where you need to be.

    That is not the same as saying every difficult thing happens for a reason. I have never been entirely convinced by that idea. Sometimes a bad thing is simply bad. Sometimes a loss is not a lesson waiting to be unwrapped. Sometimes a pothole is just a pothole, created by poor planning and repaired with optimism.

    But even when we cannot choose what happens, we can eventually decide what we will do with the road in front of us. We can stop pretending that the route we are on is working. We can admit that the destination no longer matters. We can turn around, pull over, ask for directions, or continue slowly while trying not to damage the car.

    We are taught to think of our lives as roads.

    Choose the right school. Get the right degree. Get the right job. Marry the right person. Buy the right house. Make the right investments. Have the right five-year plan. Keep moving forward. Do not fall behind. Do not waste time. Do not make a wrong turn.

    And whatever you do, don’t make a wrong turn.

    The pressure to get life right is extraordinary. We are expected to make permanent decisions at temporary ages, often with incomplete information and very little emotional maturity. At eighteen, we are asked to choose a field of study that may determine our future. At twenty-five, we are expected to know whether we have met the person we should spend our life with. At thirty-five, we are supposed to have a home, a career, a retirement plan, and a calm relationship with our parents.

    By forty, apparently, we should be able to explain all of our choices without hesitation.

    But what if the wrong turn is where your life actually begins?

    What if losing the job gives you permission to become a writer? What if leaving a country teaches you what home actually means? What if heartbreak introduces you to parts of yourself that a happy relationship never had to? What if the plan falling apart isn’t evidence that you failed at life? What if it is simply evidence that life had a different plan?

    I know how sentimental that sounds. I also know how difficult it is to believe when you are in the middle of the disruption. It is easy to look back at a difficult period and call it transformative. It is much harder to call it transformative while you are living through the uncertainty, checking your bank account, answering concerned questions, and wondering whether everyone else has somehow received instructions that were not sent to you.

    The truth is, most of us do not become wiser because something goes wrong. We become wiser because something goes wrong and then keeps going wrong long enough that we are forced to pay attention.

    We notice what we had been tolerating. We notice which ambitions were ours and which ones had been handed to us. We notice how much of our identity was built around being competent, successful, desirable, needed, or admired. We notice that the life we were protecting may not have been making us happy.

    Sometimes the pothole does not destroy the car. It reveals that we have been driving in the wrong direction.

    I still want Mumbai to fix its potholes. I want the city to repair roads properly instead of applying a thin layer of asphalt that disappears after the first serious rain. I want contractors to be held accountable. I want roads to be planned, maintained, and treated as essential public infrastructure rather than temporary surfaces between construction projects.

    I want to drive from one end of this city to the other without having my kidneys rearranged.

    I want pedestrians to be able to walk without stepping into traffic. I want older people to cross roads without calculating whether they can survive the journey. I want cyclists, delivery workers, schoolchildren, taxi drivers, and everyone else who shares these streets to be treated as citizens rather than obstacles.

    But perhaps I don’t want life to become completely smooth.

    Because the smooth stretches are rarely the ones I remember.

    I remember the detours. The ridiculous decisions. The terrible dates. The career changes. The airports. The dogs. The people who arrived unexpectedly and the people who left unexpectedly. The moments when I had absolutely no idea what I was doing and did it anyway.

    I remember the conversations that began as arguments and ended as confessions. I remember the friends who appeared during difficult years without asking for an explanation. I remember the strange relief of admitting that I was tired. I remember discovering that starting again does not always feel brave. Sometimes it feels embarrassing. Sometimes it feels expensive. Sometimes it feels like sitting on the edge of a bed surrounded by boxes and wondering whether you have confused movement with progress.

    Those are the stories that became my life.

    Not the polished version. Not the version that fits neatly into a professional biography. The real version, with the wrong turns, the delays, the missed exits, the unnecessary detours, and the occasional moment when the road opens up and you realise you have been moving forward after all.

    And perhaps that is what I would really change about my city.

    I would make it easier for people to admit that they don’t know where they are going.

    I would make room for people to change careers at forty, leave a marriage, move home, start again, disappoint their parents, disappoint themselves, and say, This isn’t working anymore.

    I would make it less shameful to be uncertain. Less embarrassing to be in transition. Less frightening to step away from a life that looks successful but feels unbearable. We are very good at celebrating arrival and not nearly as good at respecting the people who are still trying to find the right road.

    Mumbai is full of people in transition. The student travelling across the city for an entrance exam. The migrant worker sending money home. The young professional sharing a flat with three strangers. The parent commuting two hours each way. The entrepreneur trying to keep a business alive. The actor waiting for an audition. The retiree learning how to live in a smaller home. The person who has returned from abroad and is trying to understand what home means now.

    Everyone is going somewhere. Everyone is carrying something. Everyone is pretending to know the route.

    Perhaps the city would improve instantly if we became a little more patient with one another. If we stopped assuming that the slow person was careless, the confused person was incompetent, the person changing direction was weak, or the person who had fallen behind had failed.

    Perhaps we could understand that every person on the road is navigating a different map.

    Because sometimes we spend so much energy cursing the pothole that we forget to look up. We forget to notice the person beside us. We forget that the driver who cut us off may be rushing to a hospital, that the pedestrian who stopped suddenly may be carrying news they do not know how to process, that the person who seems lost may simply be trying to find a way through a city that was never designed to make anything easy.

    Maybe the road was never supposed to be smooth.

    Maybe the point was never to arrive without a scratch.

    Maybe the point was to become someone who could keep driving after the map stopped making sense.

    That does not mean we should romanticise difficulty. We should still fix the roads. We should still demand better systems, better planning, better accountability, and better care for the people who live here. Resilience is not an excuse for neglect. People should not have to become philosophical because basic infrastructure has failed them.

    But on a personal level, I have stopped believing that a good life is one without potholes.

    A good life may be one in which you learn how to recognise them sooner. One in which you stop blaming yourself for every unexpected turn. One in which you understand that changing direction is not the same as losing your way. One in which you can look back at the road behind you without needing to justify every mile.

    And if you’ve ever found yourself sitting in a car somewhere between Dadar and your next existential crisis, wondering whether you have taken a wrong turn, welcome to Mumbai.

    You’re probably exactly where you need to be.

    Just watch that pothole.

    And if you do hit it, slow down.

    That is something Sauli taught me without ever having to say it.

    She came into my life at a time when I thought I was supposed to have everything figured out. She reminded me, in her own quiet way, that life isn’t a straight road and that love doesn’t ask for a map before it arrives. Sometimes it simply sits beside you while you work out where you’re going.

    Perhaps that is what I have learned from all the potholes—both the ones on Mumbai’s roads and the ones in my life.

    You don’t always get to choose the road.

    You don’t always get to avoid the pothole.

    You don’t always understand why you ended up here.

    But you can choose who you travel with.

    And sometimes, when you look across at the person sitting beside you, you realise that the detour wasn’t the disaster you thought it was.

    It was the journey.

    It was the life.

    It was home.

    And maybe that is the one thing I would instantly improve about my city—not by making every road smooth, but by making sure that nobody feels ashamed when theirs isn’t.

    Because in the end, we are all just trying to get somewhere.

    Some of us have better maps.

    Some of us have worse suspension.

    And some of us are lucky enough to have a Sauli in the passenger seat.

    I’ll take that over a smooth road any day.

  • The Longest Trip I’ve Ever Taken

    The Longest Trip I’ve Ever Taken

    The longest trip I have ever taken was from Mumbai to America and back.

    And if you know Mumbai, you will understand that I was already well prepared for uncertainty.

    I grew up in a city where crossing the road requires faith, instinct, peripheral vision and occasionally a small prayer to Shivji. We grow up knowing that traffic lights are suggestions, autorickshaws have their own constitutional rights, and a journey of three kilometres can become a spiritual pilgrimage.

    So perhaps I was destined to spend twenty years travelling across continents and eventually discover that the longest journey was the one back home.

    I left India and built a life in America.

    For almost two decades, I lived there. I had a career, a home, friendships, routines, responsibilities and the very American ability to complain about traffic while sitting in traffic for forty-five minutes.

    I became good at being away.

    Then life did what life does.

    It pulled the rug out from underneath me and waited to see what I would do next.

    I came back to Mumbai.

    There was no dramatic soundtrack. No perfectly planned homecoming. There was, however, a missing bag on the airport conveyor belt, which felt like an appropriately Indian welcome.

    And then came the rest.

    My parents were living in a rented house because the old family home was under redevelopment. I had to figure out visas, houses, landlords, money, careers and what exactly one does with herself when the professional identity she has carried for years suddenly stops being useful as an introduction.

    At one point, getting a visa required an urgent phone call, a Mumbai-to-Hyderabad journey in an autorickshaw for an interview, another interview in Delhi, a four-day migraine and a hotel booking that I would rather forget.

    There were moments when I genuinely wondered whether I was applying for a visa or auditioning for an obstacle course.

    And that was only one chapter.

    There were landlords.

    If you have never negotiated with an Indian landlord, I don’t know how you can claim to have fully experienced life.

    There was house hunting.

    There was family.

    There was spirituality.

    There was love, which has its own immigration policy and rarely grants permanent residency.

    There were decisions I made confidently and regretted immediately.

    There were decisions everyone else thought were insane that turned out to be exactly what I needed.

    Somewhere along the way, I realised that I had spent much of my life trying to make the right choices.

    Career choices.

    Relationship choices.

    Financial choices.

    Life choices.

    As though adulthood came with an answer key and I had simply misplaced mine.

    It didn’t.

    Life came with potholes.

    Some were small.

    Some swallowed the entire car.

    And some turned out to be shortcuts to places I would never have found otherwise.

    That became the heart of About Life Choices & Potholes — my memoir about leaving, returning, changing careers, breaking traditions, getting things spectacularly wrong, getting a few things surprisingly right, and making peace with the fact that uncertainty is not a temporary phase of life.

    It is life.

    But there was another journey tucked inside all of this.

    Sauli.

    My rescue pup.

    Bringing Sauli from America to India was supposed to be a journey.

    It became a production.

    There were caretakers. Temporary homes. Crate training. Flights. An escape attempt. A leg injury. Airport logistics. Moments when I thought I had planned everything, followed by moments when Sauli looked at my plan, tore it up and ate it.

    She had opinions.

    Strong ones.

    And somewhere between trying to get her safely across the world and wondering whether I had completely lost my mind, I understood something rather profound about home.

    Home isn’t necessarily the place where you have lived the longest.

    Sometimes home is the creature waiting for you at the other end of the journey.

    Sometimes it is a city you left and returned to with a completely different version of yourself.

    Sometimes it is your mother calling from another room.

    Sometimes it is a dog who has no idea what immigration means but knows exactly who her person is.

    Sauli’s journey became Adventures of Sauli the Rescue Pup, because apparently one immigrant’s return to India wasn’t enough drama for one household.

    And perhaps that is why I don’t think of my life in terms of destinations anymore.

    I think of it in journeys.

    America was a journey.

    Coming home was a journey.

    Writing books was a journey.

    Learning to live with uncertainty was a journey.

    Even finding myself again has been a journey.

    The funny thing is, when I left Mumbai all those years ago, I thought I was going somewhere.

    When I came back, I realised I had been travelling toward myself.

    And that journey is still going.

    I don’t know where it ends.

    At this point, I’ve stopped asking.

    I’ve got a dog, a few books, an unreasonable number of stories, and enough potholes behind me to know that the road doesn’t have to make sense for the journey to matter.

    Sometimes you just keep going.

    Sometimes you stop.

    Sometimes you take the wrong turn.

    And sometimes, after travelling halfway around the world, you find yourself standing exactly where you began — except you finally recognise the person standing there.

    That, for me, has been the longest trip of all.

  • Embrace Wandering Over Sightseeing

    Embrace Wandering Over Sightseeing

    My Best Tip for Budget Travel? Stop Trying to Travel Like a Tourist.

    The best way to travel on a budget is surprisingly simple: stop trying to make every trip impressive.

    Somewhere along the way, travel became another form of consumption. We collect destinations, photograph landmarks, book the hotel with the infinity pool, and return home exhausted from having had such a wonderful time.

    I’ve learned to travel differently.

    Some of my most memorable experiences have cost very little. Walking through a city without a particular destination. Eating what the locals are eating. Taking a train instead of the scenic tourist transfer. Sitting in a neighborhood café long enough to become part of the furniture. Getting slightly lost and discovering that the best meal of the trip was hiding behind a door I would never have found on a travel app.

    Copenhagen taught me the pleasure of wandering without urgency. London gave me museums, parks and streets that can entertain you for hours without requiring an admission ticket. San Francisco gave me hills, beaches, fog and neighborhoods that were best understood on foot. Mumbai, of course, requires very little money to provide an entire day’s worth of sensory overload.

    And then there are the trips that don’t go according to budget—or plan.

    I’ve had luggage disappear. I’ve travelled across cities and countries for visas. I’ve moved a dog across continents. I’ve booked things that looked perfectly sensible until reality got involved.

    Those experiences taught me something that has very little to do with money.

    Budget travel is really about knowing what deserves your money and what doesn’t.

    Spend on the thing that will make the experience possible. Save on the things that merely make it look impressive.

    Sometimes that means a tiny room in a brilliant neighborhood instead of a beautiful hotel miles away. Sometimes it means a local meal instead of the restaurant everyone has photographed. Sometimes it means taking the cheap train and watching the landscape change outside the window.

    And sometimes, the most expensive mistake is insisting that the itinerary must go exactly as planned.

    I’ve come to think of travel as a particularly good rehearsal for life. You make a plan, buy a ticket, pack your bag—and then discover that the universe has misplaced your luggage.

    You can spend the rest of the trip being angry about it.

    Or you can go find dinner.

    That philosophy—of finding the story inside the disruption—runs through About Life Choices & Potholes, my memoir about migration, ambition, belonging, and the curious things that happen when life refuses to follow the itinerary.

    Travel light. Spend selectively. Leave room for getting lost. The best parts rarely make it onto the original plan.

  • Navigating Uncertainty: Advice for Life’s Journey

    Navigating Uncertainty: Advice for Life’s Journey

    The Best Advice I Ever Received Was Not About Success

    The best advice I ever received did not come in a boardroom, a leadership seminar, or from someone who had figured life out.

    It came from the realization that nobody really has.

    For years, I believed life was a problem to be solved. If I worked harder, planned better, made smarter choices, collected enough experience, and avoided enough mistakes, I would eventually reach that mythical place called “settled.”

    The problem was that life kept changing the questions.

    Every time I thought I had found the answer, life quietly changed the exam paper.

    A career that looked secure could disappear overnight. A dream could become a burden. A relationship that felt like destiny could become a lesson. A decision that looked like a mistake could become the turning point you needed.

    The advice that stayed with me was simple:

    “You don’t have to get every decision right. You just have to keep making yourself available for the next chapter.”

    It changed the way I looked at mistakes.

    For a long time, I saw wrong turns as evidence that I had failed. The job that didn’t work out. The opportunities I missed. The people I trusted. The roads I took that eventually led nowhere.

    But maybe life was never a straight road.

    Maybe the potholes were part of the journey.

    We spend so much of our lives trying to avoid uncertainty. We create five-year plans, career trajectories, financial goals, and carefully designed identities. But somewhere along the way, we forget that the most meaningful parts of our lives rarely arrive according to schedule.

    The unexpected friendships.

    The accidental discoveries.

    The painful endings.

    The moments when everything falls apart and forces us to meet ourselves again.

    Looking back, many of my biggest transformations did not come from moments when everything went right. They came from moments when nothing made sense.

    The layoffs. The transitions. The doubts. The uncomfortable periods where the old version of myself was slowly disappearing, but the new one had not yet arrived.

    That messy middle is where most of life actually happens.

    We celebrate beginnings and endings. We talk about the dream job, the big achievement, the final destination. But we rarely talk about the confusing years in between—the years where we are rebuilding, questioning, grieving, learning, and becoming.

    Those years are not wasted.

    They are where we become.

    This is the idea behind my book, About Life Choices & Potholes.

    It is not a book about having all the answers. It is a collection of reflections about the choices we make, the mistakes we survive, the people who shape us, and the unexpected paths that define us.

    Because eventually, we all realize something:

    Life is not a highway designed for smooth driving.

    It is a road filled with turns, detours, breakdowns, beautiful views, and potholes.

    The goal is not to avoid every pothole.

    The goal is to learn how to keep driving.

    And perhaps the best advice I ever received was this:

    Be patient with yourself. You are not behind. You are simply becoming someone you have not met yet.

  • Letting Go of Perfection: My Journey

    Letting Go of Perfection: My Journey

    The Things I Stopped Worrying About (and the Potholes That Taught Me Why)

    For most of my life, I worried about getting things right.

    The right career.

    The right decisions.

    The right city.

    The right relationships.

    The right version of myself.

    Like many ambitious people, I believed life was a complicated puzzle, and if I collected enough information, worked hard enough, and made enough intelligent choices, I could solve it.

    I built frameworks.

    I analyzed possibilities.

    I tried to predict outcomes.

    I was the kind of person who could spend hours thinking about a decision that would take five minutes to make.

    Then life did what life does.

    It introduced variables that weren’t in my spreadsheet.

    A career I had invested years building changed overnight.

    Plans I had carefully designed disappeared.

    Things I thought would define me became irrelevant.

    Things I never expected became the chapters I remember most.

    Slowly, I stopped worrying about being right all the time.

    I stopped worrying about whether my journey looked like everyone else’s.

    I stopped worrying about falling behind.

    Because I discovered something strange:

    Most people aren’t actually moving on a straight road. They are simply better at hiding their potholes.

    The person who looks successful may be quietly questioning everything.

    The person who seems certain may be terrified.

    The person who appears to have the perfect plan may be one unexpected turn away from starting over.

    We spend so much energy comparing our behind-the-scenes struggles with someone else’s highlight reel that we forget something important:

    Everyone has potholes.

    The difference is what they do after they hit them.

    Do they sit there and complain about the road?

    Do they pretend the damage never happened?

    Or do they get out, look at what broke, learn something, repair what they can, and continue driving?

    That shift changed how I see life.

    I still plan.

    I still dream.

    I still create frameworks and probably still have too many browser tabs open.

    Some habits are beyond saving.

    But I no longer believe that a perfect plan creates a perfect life.

    The unexpected moments—the failures, detours, delays, and breakdowns—often become the moments that shape us the most.

    That idea became the foundation of my memoir, About Life Choices & Potholes.

    It is a book about the roads we choose, the roads chosen for us, and the unexpected bumps that quietly transform us into the people we were meant to become.

    The biggest thing I stopped worrying about?

    Whether my life was following the map.

    Because I’ve learned that sometimes the best stories begin when you take a wrong turn.

  • Why Life Happens in Potholes, Not Crossroads

    Why Life Happens in Potholes, Not Crossroads

    My favorite quote is one I ended up writing after years of trying to optimize my life:

    “Life doesn’t happen at crossroads. It happens in potholes.”

    I suspect there are two kinds of people in the world.

    The first kind simply lives.

    The second kind—which includes me—creates a spreadsheet about living.

    We have a framework for relationships, a reading list for happiness, a podcast on longevity, a Notion page called Life Strategy, and somewhere between tab #186 and #187 we’re convinced we’ve almost figured life out.

    Then a pothole arrives.

    A layoff.

    A failed venture.

    A broken heart.

    A chance meeting.

    A city you never planned to move to.

    Suddenly, the framework is useless, the spreadsheet is outdated, and life has quietly rewritten the roadmap while you were still color-coding it.

    That’s why this quote has become my outlook on life.

    Not because planning is pointless—I still love a good framework—but because I’ve learned that the best parts of my life never arrived according to plan. They arrived disguised as inconveniences.

    That realization eventually became About Life Choices & Potholes.

    It’s a book for everyone who’s ever mistaken preparation for progress, who has more ideas than finished projects, more bookmarks than memories, and more plans than certainty.

    In other words, it’s for people like me.

  • Navigating Career Pivots: The Systems Approach for Data Scientists

    Navigating Career Pivots: The Systems Approach for Data Scientists

    From Data Panic to Profit: Why Your Next Career Pivot Needs a Systems Upgrade

    For a data scientist, panic isn’t just an emotional state; it is a systemic failure of logic and predictability. When the deterministic foundations of a career—built on carefully modeled patterns and long-term plans—suddenly vanish, the result is profound professional vertigo.

    The Collapse of Determinism

    Corporate layoffs and economic shifts can erase a ten-year career plan in a single week, making the comforting “predictability of patterns” disappear overnight. This plunges professionals into the “messy middle”: a high-stakes, terrifying territory between a collapsed past and an unbuilt future. For analytical minds, this period often triggers:

    • Existential Dread: Losing the structural identity tied to high-level technical roles.
    • Irrational Pivots: Trying to solve structural crises with “pure, unrefined passion”—such as impulsive attempts to launch unrelated side hustles without a roadmap.
    • The Loss of the “Safety Net”: Watching savings bleed dry while trying to navigate unfamiliar operational logistics.

    The Clinical Antidote

    True clarity only returns when you stop looking for a “flash of genius” and start treating your career transition as a complex systems problem. Instead of viewing rejection or setbacks as personal indictments, successful entrepreneurs treat them as “noisy data”—signals to be filtered, analyzed, and optimized.

    If you are ready to replace wishful thinking and burnout hustle with a repeatable framework, you need a blueprint built for reality.

    Continue watching here

    Engineer Your Foundation

    Stop guessing and start building. In How to Start a Small Business That Actually Makes Money, author Kay Jay draws on a decade of senior engineering and data science experience to provide a clinical, data-driven framework for launching a venture that survives and scales.

    • Replace Motivation with Systems: Build a decision-making framework that functions even when emotion and motivation fail.
    • Informed Experimentation: Move away from costly trial-and-error and adopt a structured blueprint forged from real-world business execution.

    Ready to engineer your next chapter? Pick up a copy of How to Start a Small Business That Actually Makes Money and turn uncertainty into your competitive advantage.

  • Top 10 Life-Changing Travel Destinations

    Top 10 Life-Changing Travel Destinations

    My Top 10 Travel Destinations

    People often ask me for my bucket list.

    The truth is, I don’t really travel to collect countries anymore. I travel to collect questions.

    Every city has given me one.

    Some have asked who I wanted to become.
    Others quietly asked who I had been all along.

    Looking back, the places that changed me the most weren’t necessarily the most beautiful. They were the ones that interrupted the story I was telling myself. They made me slower. Hungrier. More observant. Less certain.

    If I had to choose ten destinations, these would be mine.

    1. San Francisco, USA

    Because no city has taught me more about ambition.

    San Francisco smells of roasted coffee, eucalyptus after rain, salt carried inland by the Pacific, and impossible optimism. It is where startups become religions and productivity masquerades as personality.

    I spent years there believing I was building a career.

    In hindsight, I was also building an identity.

    The city gave me friendships, opportunities, heartbreak, layoffs, immigration paperwork, impossible hills, dogs who believed every beach belonged to them, and sunsets that forgave almost everything.

    It also taught me that Silicon Valley’s greatest export isn’t technology.

    It’s hope.

    2. Mumbai, India

    Because nowhere celebrates chaos quite as beautifully.

    Mumbai doesn’t ask for your attention.

    It kidnaps it.

    The city smells simultaneously of monsoon rain, frying vada pav, jasmine flowers, diesel, incense, fresh fish, sea salt and cardamom chai.

    It is impossible to experience quietly.

    Here, weddings become theatrical productions with enough food to feed entire neighborhoods. Local trains become sociology classrooms. Vegetable markets become negotiations worthy of diplomatic summits.

    Mumbai reminded me that life was never meant to be optimized.

    Only experienced.

    3. Copenhagen, Denmark

    Because simplicity is harder than complexity.

    There is a stillness to Copenhagen that almost feels engineered.

    Bicycles glide silently.

    People trust one another.

    Bread deserves its own religion.

    Candles appear even when electricity works perfectly.

    The city quietly dismantled my belief that success must always be loud.

    Sometimes sophistication whispers.

    4. London, England

    Because history has exceptional storytelling skills.

    London doesn’t feel like one city.

    It feels like centuries having an ongoing conversation.

    Every street carries an argument between empire and modernity.

    Every pub contains at least three novels.

    Every rainy afternoon somehow improves the architecture.

    It taught me that civilizations, like people, are beautifully inconsistent.

    5. Goa, India

    Because joy requires less planning than we imagine.

    Goa has an unusual relationship with time.

    Lunch becomes dinner.

    One conversation becomes an afternoon.

    The sea edits priorities with remarkable efficiency.

    The older I become, the more I appreciate places that encourage lingering over arriving.

    6. Lonavala

    Because some journeys are measured in conversations rather than kilometers.

    The drive out of Mumbai has become almost ceremonial.

    Fog rolling over the hills.

    Roadside chai.

    Corn roasted over charcoal.

    Unexpected waterfalls appearing after generous monsoons.

    Sometimes you travel hundreds of miles to escape.

    Sometimes eighty kilometers is enough.

    7. Pune

    Because cities, like people, can mature gracefully.

    Pune possesses an intellectual rhythm that has always appealed to me.

    Bookshops.

    Old cafés.

    Students convinced they’ll change the world.

    Retirees convinced the world was better before everyone else tried.

    They’re probably both right.

    8. New York City, USA

    Because nowhere performs confidence quite like Manhattan.

    New York moves with astonishing certainty.

    Everyone appears late for something important.

    The city celebrates ambition without apology.

    Yet beneath its velocity are tiny moments of astonishing humanity—a jazz musician in the subway, strangers recommending bagel shops with religious conviction, Central Park reminding millions that nature occasionally wins.

    9. The Airports Between Places

    An unusual choice.

    But airports have become some of the most defining places in my life.

    They’re where identities change.

    Visas expire.

    Suitcases disappear.

    Goodbyes become routine.

    Airports are the geography of transition.

    No one dreams of them.

    Everyone remembers them.

    10. Home

    Whichever version of it exists today.

    Home stopped being a location somewhere between immigration queues, corporate layoffs, return flights, family dinners, wedding seasons, and walking Sauli through unfamiliar neighborhoods.

    I’ve discovered that belonging has very little to do with geography.

    Sometimes it sounds like your parents arguing over tea.

    Sometimes it’s the smell of biryani drifting through an apartment window.

    Sometimes it’s watching fog roll over the Golden Gate Bridge.

    Sometimes it’s simply knowing which grocery store sells the good mangoes.

    Perhaps that’s why I struggle with lists like these.

    The best destinations don’t give us photographs.

    They quietly rearrange us.

    Many of these places appear throughout About Life Choices & Potholes, not as tourist destinations, but as characters. They host careers and heartbreaks, immigration interviews and Indian weddings, lost luggage and found friendships, extraordinary meals and ordinary Tuesdays. Looking back, I don’t think I was travelling to discover the world.

    I was travelling to discover that life, much like a good city, is best explored on foot—with curiosity, a healthy appetite, and enough humility to accept that the scenic route is usually the memorable one.