The first time I saw ITPL from a distance at night, I stopped for a moment just to look at it.
This requires some context. I had grown up in Hubli, run a business from a bar cabin, moved to Bangalore and pitched technology to schools from corridors full of people waiting to meet Swamijis. I had assembled computers from borrowed parts and waited for dial-up connections to resolve and built things in the gap between what existed and what should exist. I knew what a building looked like. I knew what an office looked like.
I had not seen anything that looked like this.
Four towers of glass, connected, twenty or twenty-five floors each, the whole complex lit from within at night so that it glowed against the Whitefield sky like something that had been designed by someone who wanted you to understand, before you even walked through the door, that you were entering a different category of world. It looked like a spaceship. It looked like the future made architectural. It looked like the kind of place where important things happened, where the people inside were doing work that mattered, where the building itself was an argument about what professional life could be.
I had come from Hubli. I had come from Three Aces. And now I was walking into this.
Inside, ITPL was cleaner than a hospital operating theatre.
I had heard stories — probably apocryphal, probably exaggerated in the way that stories about impressive places always are — that certain floors housed semiconductor manufacturing, clean rooms where dust was not permitted, where the air was filtered and controlled and the environment was managed to a precision that most human beings never experience. Whether or not the semiconductor stories were true, the feeling was real: the building was immaculate in a way that felt almost aggressive, almost a statement. Here, things are done properly. Here, the ordinary mess of the world has been excluded by design.
The lifts were fast. This sounds like a small detail. It was not a small detail. In a country where lifts in most buildings moved with the resigned patience of something that had given up hoping for improvement, lifts that moved quickly were a physical signal of a different set of standards. You pressed the button. The lift arrived. It took you where you needed to go without apology or delay. This, too, was part of what ITPL was saying about itself.
I joined First Ring, which occupied space in the complex. Outbound call center, US market, night shifts. My role was telemarketer — specifically, selling credit cards to Americans with low to mid-level credit, taking them through an application process online to determine eligibility. This was not glamorous work. It was precise, demanding, repetitive work that required a specific combination of resilience and persuasion and the ability to maintain energy and clarity of speech at hours when the human body is designed to be asleep.
I was good at it. And then I became better at it. And then I became a team leader, which meant I was responsible not just for my own performance but for the performance of the people around me — their numbers, their development, their ability to do what I had learned to do.
The night shift had its own logic, its own rhythm, its own peculiar beauty.
You arrived at ITPL in the early evening — 5pm, 6pm — when Whitefield was still moving with the last of the day's traffic, the city not yet settled into its night. You walked into the building and the building was already running, already lit, already full of the particular energy of a large number of young people doing work that required them to be alert and present and communicating continuously. Everyone around you was roughly your age. Everyone was earning — earning well, earning more than their parents had earned at the same age, earning in a way that made the future feel funded rather than provisional.
It felt like going back to college. The social texture of it, the friendships formed in the particular crucible of shared night hours, the sense of being in something together — it had the quality of an era, of a time that you would later recognise as having been its own distinct chapter. Not just a job. A world.
At 2am, when the shift ended and you walked out of ITPL into the Whitefield night, the city was asleep around a building that was still fully alive. The roads were empty in the way that Indian roads are never empty during daylight — suddenly navigable, suddenly quiet, suddenly belonging to the people moving through them rather than to the traffic that owned them during the day. You came out of the glass tower into the dark and the air was different and the autorickshaws were waiting and somewhere Bryan Adams was playing in your head because that song understood something about this that you couldn't yet articulate.
Those were the best days of my life.
Not the best days of your career. Not the most productive days or the most consequential days. The best days — in the specific sense that Summer of '69 means it, which is the days that had the quality of pure present tense, the days when you were entirely inside the experience rather than watching yourself have it. The salary was real. The friendships were real. The feeling of walking into that building every evening and being part of something that glowed in the dark — that was real.
I stayed for six years. Two at First Ring, four at HSBC. I rose through the levels — team leader, then into operations management, then Assistant Manager of Operations at HSBC, responsible for teams and processes and the daily machinery of a large data processing organisation. I was good at this work. I brought to it the same instinct I brought to everything — the desire to understand the system, to find its inefficiencies, to make it work better than it had been working. I was not coasting. I was genuinely engaged, genuinely competent, genuinely valued.
And then one morning — a regular morning, not a crisis, not a bad day, just an ordinary Tuesday or Wednesday at my desk at HSBC — I was asked to work on something called Project Tiger.
Project Tiger was a corporate social responsibility initiative. HSBC, like many large organisations of its type, had programs that employees were expected to support and contribute to alongside their primary work. Project Tiger was about saving tigers — the Save the Tiger campaign, the declining population, the conservation effort. I have nothing against tigers. I have genuine affection for tigers. If someone asks me whether tigers should be saved, my answer is yes, unreservedly.
But sitting at my desk that morning, looking at the work in front of me, I had a thought that arrived not as a complaint or a protest but as a clear, quiet, factual observation about the situation:
Someone else could do this better than me. And while I am doing this, I am not doing what I am actually for.
This requires unpacking, because it is easy to mistake for ingratitude or arrogance, and it was neither. It was not that the work was beneath me. It was that the work was misallocated — that the specific thing I was capable of, the specific contribution I could make to the world, was not saving tigers through a corporate campaign. It was creating. Building. Starting things. Making jobs exist that did not exist before, generating economic activity from ideas, taking the instinct that had assembled a computer from borrowed parts in Hubli and the instinct that had pitched school technology to a Swamiji's principal and the instinct that had built a tenders portal and a school database — taking all of that and pointing it at something that only I could build.
I had been an entrepreneur since college. I had always been a builder. And I had spent six years being an excellent manager of other people's systems, in a building that was magnificent and a culture that was genuinely good, earning a salary that made the decision to leave feel irrational to almost everyone around me.
But the thought, once it arrived, could not be un-arrived. This is not what I am for.
I left. Found Position2 — a startup at the time, a company whose co-founder I initially wanted to acquire a portion of from. Stayed because of the people. Stayed because the work was pointed in the right direction. Stayed because it was closer to creation than administration and because the distance between the idea in my head and the thing in the world felt navigable again.
ITPL still glows at night. I have driven past it since, years later, and looked at it the way you look at something that was important to you — with warmth and with the particular clarity of distance. It was a magnificent building. It was a magnificent time. The salary was real and the friendships were real and the feeling of walking into that spaceship every evening with people my age who were all earning and all young and all inside something that felt, in the moment, like the best possible version of professional life.
Bryan Adams understood it. The summer was real. The summer was good. And the summer was always going to end — not because something went wrong, but because summers do that. They become autumns not through failure but through time, through the natural movement of a life that is meant to go somewhere specific.
I knew what I was for. I had always known. I had just spent six years being paid exceptionally well to be something else.
The morning I decided to leave was not dramatic. There was no confrontation, no crisis, no final straw. There was a desk, a campaign about tigers, and a thought that arrived with the quiet authority of something that had been waiting a long time to be acknowledged.
I acknowledged it. Then I stood up. Then I left.
The best days were behind me. The most important ones were still ahead.