I want to tell you about a loop.
Not a failure loop — not the story of someone who couldn't escape their circumstances or couldn't make their mind up or couldn't commit to a direction. A different kind of loop. The kind that most people run without naming it, the kind that looks, from the outside, like a series of choices and from the inside like a series of negotiations between who you are and everything the world is offering you to be instead.
The loop goes like this:
You have a signal. Something you know, at some level beneath argument, that you are supposed to be doing — a direction, a calling, a version of yourself that feels more true than the version currently available. The signal is clear, early on. Then life begins to accumulate around it. Money becomes necessary. Relationships become important. Comfort arrives — not as a trap, but as a genuine good, a reward for effort, a version of stability that people who love you have been hoping you would find. And the signal, which was clear, becomes harder to hear. Not because it disappears. Because the noise gets louder.
The noise is never malicious. That is the thing about the noise that nobody tells you. It is made of real things — real relationships, real salaries, real friendships, real environments that feel like home. The noise is made of everything that is genuinely good about the life you have built. And that is precisely what makes it so effective at drowning out the signal.
I have been through this loop an innumerable number of times. Let me count some of them.
School to college. The signal was entrepreneurship — not clearly named yet, not yet understood as a philosophy, but present as an instinct. I wanted to build things. I wanted to create economic stability not just for myself but for the people around me. Growing up in India at that time, with middle-income families everywhere and poverty still very present at the edges of ordinary life, there was something in me that understood economic creation as a moral act — that making jobs, building businesses, generating activity that rippled outward into the lives of others was not just a career choice but a form of contribution.
The noise, in those early years, was simpler: marks, attendance, theory, the academic apparatus of a system I was not naturally suited to. I was good at practical things. I was not good at sitting still and absorbing theory that seemed disconnected from the world I was trying to understand. I attended enough. I passed. But the signal — build something, create something, make something economically real — was always louder than the curriculum.
College to first business. The signal became action. The screen printing press in Hubli. The computer assembled from borrowed parts. The bar called Three Aces where we met merchants and closed deals. The signal was running at full volume here — I was building, I was creating, I was making things that people needed and exchanging them for money and learning, with every transaction, something about how the world actually worked.
The noise arrived in the form of the question everyone around me was asking: but how much are you making? The businesses were real. The learning was real. But the income was uncertain, and uncertain income in a social environment where stability was the primary measure of success produced a particular kind of pressure — not from enemies, but from people who loved me, who wanted certainty for me, who could not see the signal because they were living inside the noise.
First business to the call center. The noise won. Not permanently, not catastrophically, but temporarily and decisively. ITPL was genuinely magnificent. First Ring, then HSBC. The salary was real and exceptional and it enabled a life that the businesses had not yet been able to provide. I do not regret this. I want to be clear about that. The call center years gave me things I could not have gotten any other way — operational discipline, understanding of large systems, the experience of managing teams and processes at scale. The noise, in this case, was also education.
But it was noise. The signal — build something of your own, create an economic ecosystem, contribute to the world through creation rather than administration — never stopped. It got quieter under the weight of a good salary and a good environment and the social warmth of being the person who had figured it out, who had the stable job in the glass tower. But it never stopped.
The call center to Position2. A Save the Tiger campaign on a Tuesday morning, and a thought that arrived not as protest but as clarity: someone else could do this better than me. The signal breaking through the noise in the specific form of opportunity cost — the recognition not of what was wrong with where I was, but of what was right about where I was supposed to be instead.
I left. And the loop started again.
What I want to say about this loop — and I want to say it plainly because I think the plain version is more useful than the philosophical one — is that it is not a sign of weakness or indecision or failure. It is the structure of a particular kind of life. The life of someone who has a signal strong enough to keep returning to, and a personality open enough to let real things become genuinely distracting, and enough self-awareness to eventually recognise the noise for what it is and break through it again.
The shackles are never the same shackles twice. Sometimes it is money. Sometimes it is a relationship. Sometimes it is a lifestyle — new friends, a new city, a new environment that feels like arrival but is actually another form of comfort that needs to eventually be outgrown. The shackles are always real. They are always made of good things. That is why they are shackles rather than simply chains — because you chose them, because they gave you something, because breaking them costs something genuine.
I have broken them an innumerable number of times.
I have not always broken them quickly. I have not always broken them gracefully. Sometimes I broke them years after I should have, having spent the intervening time gradually becoming aware of their shape and weight. And each time, on the other side of the breaking, the signal was still there — patient, unchanged, waiting with the particular equanimity of something that knows it will eventually be heard.
I want to say something about where I am now, because I think honesty requires it.
I am building something. A website, yes — but more accurately, a platform for everything I have been trying to say and build and contribute since Hubli. A place where the stories live, where the thinking lives, where the version of myself that has been signal rather than noise for thirty years finally has a home that is entirely its own.
The signal is clearer now than it has ever been. Not because the noise has disappeared — noise never disappears, it only changes shape. But because something has arrived that makes the signal amplifiable in a way it never was before. Artificial intelligence. Not as a tool in the abstract sense, but as a specific capability that fits the specific shape of what I have always been: someone who thinks in systems, who reasons from first principles, who can speak technology and interpret ideas and build things from the gap between what exists and what should exist. AI does not replace this. It extends it. It takes the signal — which was always strong — and gives it a frequency that the world can finally receive.
I have not arrived. I want to be precise about this because arrival would be the wrong word and the wrong feeling. What I have is clarity. The ability to see the road, to distinguish the signal from the noise with a speed and confidence that earlier loops did not give me. The loop is still running. The noise is still present. But the signal is louder than it has ever been, and I am listening to it with everything I have.
The shackles break differently now. Not with the drama of someone discovering they were trapped. With the quiet intention of someone who knows exactly what they are breaking toward.
I wish I had got here sooner. I think this sometimes — honestly, without excessive regret, but honestly. The printing press in Hubli was the signal. The school database and the tenders portal were the signal. The morning at HSBC with the Tiger campaign was the signal. Each time, the signal was correct, and each time, the noise had its turn, and the loop revolved again.
But here is what the loop gave me that a straight line would not have: the stories. Every detour, every comfort zone entered and eventually broken out of, every year spent in someone else's system and every morning spent recognising it for what it was — all of it became material. All of it became understanding. All of it is now the foundation of the thing I am building, which could only be built by someone who had taken all those detours and emerged from them with something more than a career.
The noise was never wasted. It was always, in its own way, part of the signal.
I just couldn't hear it that way at the time.