I did not arrive here on a straight line.

Tuesday morning. Shillong. Mixed family.

Born in Shillong in 1989, into a home with two belief systems under one roof. Festivals, prayers, arguments, love, all in the same week. So I learned early to read a room. Mixed breed from day one, and I took my identity from both.

Mountains, rain, fog, sun: four seasons in a single day. Nobody in Shillong is surprised by anything. You carry an umbrella and an opinion. First skill acquired: crying at exactly the right volume to get fed. Still useful in negotiations.

Class topper. Small-time trader. Always had a challenger next to me.

Somewhere around 1992 things started to register. I became conscious of what was going on around me, and I started observing. Who spoke first. Who paid. Who got the bigger piece. Who was only pretending to be busy. Nobody asked me to watch. I just did, and the habit never left. It is why people think I have been reading them for the whole meeting. I have. It also makes me unbearable at family functions.

Then the details. Class 1 to 5, topper, which meant the teachers liked me and the back-benchers tolerated me. Class 5 to 8, top eight in a batch of two full sections. Maths, science, history, chess, carrom, puzzles, cricket: anything with a system I could figure out. There was always a challenger next to me, in studies, in games, in everything. Honestly, I preferred it that way. Nobody grows next to someone who doesn't push.

The money lesson started long before school ended. Somewhere between six and twelve I was buying and selling marbles, cards, carrom coins. Shopping, eating, trading, and all of it moved with the weather. I noticed that. And in cricket, we played with bets inside our own game. I would go in with ₹2 and mostly come out with ₹20 or more. That ran till Class 10. Nobody called it a business, but it was one.

Cleared Class 10. Applied for Science. No seat. Moved to B.Com instead. Looked like a setback at the time. It wasn't. Maths was always strong, and business was always where I was heading. Also still a very good bathroom singer. Nobody has objected. Nobody has heard.

— my grandmother. She never said it twice. She never needed to.

Late bloomer, by circumstance and not by nature. I am 37 now. Still blooming. No rush.

Store boy. Crockery counter. Then 6 sales in a month became 3000+.

School was ending. The money lessons were not. Time to find out what the real world charged for tuition.

First job: pharmacy store boy. Lasted fifteen days, too shy for the counter. Yes, the future recruiter was too shy to talk to customers. Growth is real. Second: a crockery wholesale shop at ₹4,000 a month. Two months in, I looked at the storeroom full of broken sets the owner called worthless. I called it inventory with a marketing problem. I proposed selling by the piece: one plate ₹2, two glasses ₹5, two spoons ₹1. Day one, he made ₹3,000 and I made ₹5,000. Within a few months we cleared most of the dead stock. First real lesson: value is not fixed. It is framed.

B.Com mornings from 6 to 10, then work from noon to 10 at night. No leaves. Field marketing for a telecom operator, then telecom sales and service at SS Netcom. There I started at 6 sales in a month and watched it grow to 3000+, held for three straight months. Not just me. The whole floor was climbing, the company was genuinely booming that year. Nobody handed me the number. I kept the conversation honest, kept showing up, and so did everyone else on that floor.

Somewhere in the second year I dropped out of B.Com. Work was already running full time, and I chose the work.

Then I left Shillong for Kolkata and joined Wipro, because staying comfortable was going to cost more later.

UK process. Two telecom brands. Learned the discipline, kept the habits.

Kolkata was a bigger stage, a bigger city, and my first proper salary slip.

Wipro, UK process: broadband support and sales for two telecom brands. Three months of proper training before touching a live call, then daily volume that teaches patience quickly. I learned to say "have you tried switching it off and on again" with genuine empathy. Harder than it sounds. My scores stayed the team benchmark and customers kept writing in. X of those commendations reached CEO level.

When a manager went on medical leave, I ran a 22-member floor for three weeks: full attendance, customer scores held at the top. Nobody had asked me to be a leader. I just stopped waiting for the title.

Learned what corporate discipline looks like, which parts to carry forward, and which to leave at the exit gate. Also learned to watch people more than their titles. Titles lie politely.

Billing queries by day. A different education by night.

Four years of headsets teach you patience. They also teach you what you do not want to become.

Concentrix: customer operations across a travel platform and a telecom operator. Billing, itineraries, usage disputes, escalations. Nothing builds character like explaining a bill to a person who has already decided you wrote it personally. Same lesson every single day: large organisations confuse process compliance with actual care. Those observations quietly became the first drawings of what I would build later.

2016 is also when blockchain and fingerprint science walked into my life together. I did not plan it. I just kept following the curiosity.

The chapter that built the framework.

US operations. A team, a switch to work-from-home, and a lot of numbers.

Then Bangalore. The so-called Silicon Valley of India, LOL, because when a city has nothing left to give you, you go find out what the next one has.

Joined as Altisource. Three months in, it became PolyPlay. About a year after that, it became TSI, Transworld Systems Inc., and I just kept working, kept my desk, kept my head down. US property-insurance operations: escrow and non-escrow accounts, carrier coordination, claim documentation. Turns out you can rebuild a life inside a company that keeps changing its own name. Made real friends there too, good colleagues, a few moments I still think about.

I led a team through the switch to work-from-home and restructured the day around it. The number I am actually proud of from that year: 128 escrow and non-escrow accounts, reconciled, confirmed, and fully closed. No overtime. Fewer errors, and the best attendance on the floor.

Then COVID-19 closed the chapter with a layoff. I won't dress that up. It was a bad month that turned into the best redirection I have had. It pushed me fully into recruitment.

Randstad. SCGB. Idur. Aurokripa. IMS People. Same job, bigger rooms.

COVID took the job. For a while after that there was no job, just unemployment and a phone full of "we will get back to you." Freelance recruiting for Randstad, through a couple of agencies, is what actually got the wheels turning again, before anything formal existed on paper. Turns out I had been training for this since the crockery shop.

Randstad India: commission-based leadership hiring across India and EMEA. Director, VP and Function Head roles. You eat what you close. Excellent teacher.

SCGB Solutions: full-cycle hiring across IT, non-IT, legal, fintech and digital, including CXO-level roles. Started using AI tools early for sourcing and screening, back when most people were still laughing at them.

Idur Global Tech: joined a growing team and built HR from nothing: hiring, onboarding, policies, documentation. The company wound down when the investor pulled funding, and I handled the device recovery and the hard conversations. That is part of the record too.

Aurokripa Technologies: end-to-end recruitment across India, the UAE and Africa, facing both the client and the team. A large client book across many industries, one repeatable process for all of them. Built an AI-assisted matching tool for the team.

IMS People (now): US-market hiring for engineering and executive roles across several staffing programs under one roof.

Across these years the clients ran from Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies to unicorns, startups and the small business where the owner is also the accountant, the HR and the chai boy. Different rooms, same process. The requirement is also the same everywhere: "immediate joiner, 10 years of experience, and a budget that has not met inflation." Recruitment is dating with a notice period.

The business families of Rajasthan, Gujarat and the Sindhi community taught me a lot in these years: patience around money, no drama in negotiation, and the worth of a handshake with paperwork behind it. Every hard challenge in those rooms turned into a lesson I still use.

Somewhere in these years I also kept exploring, on the side: HR as its own domain, L&D, running training sessions almost like a small academy, blockchain, general technology, and then AI once it became impossible to ignore. AI feels like it has slowed a notch lately, compared to the noise of the last couple of years. What is actually going on there, I am still watching closely. 🤔 Anyway.

Recruitment also keeps me in current affairs, whether I like it or not. In one week I talk to a designer, an engineer, an all-rounder enabler and a first-time job seeker. Free MBA, minus the debt. I love learning new things, and this job never runs out of them.

Alongside: resume design, interview preparation and counselling started earning on their own from 2021. Today it is family time, two dogs, weekends off, and a problem from 2016 that is still unsolved at scale. Patient. Consistent. In it for the long haul.

Struggle, competition, challenge: I never had the luxury of avoiding any of them, so somewhere along the way I decided to treat them as opportunities instead of obstacles. Eight to nine hours of real work a day, most of it soaked in human behaviour, not spreadsheets. I am at peace with what I know now. I am still learning, and I would like to keep it that way.

The best asset I own is not a certificate. It is a list.

Which brings me to today.

After all these years, my LinkedIn connection list is the part of the résumé I am quietly proud of. Not the "congratulations on your work anniversary" kind. Real people, built one honest conversation at a time: designers, engineers, government officers, investors, builders, students, counsellors, HR professionals, and a few who fit in no box. The ones who fit in no box are usually the interesting ones.

What I am looking for now: the right people, with long-term thinking. Builders who like slow, hard problems. And investors for GrovNest who measure in decades and don't need a demo by Friday. Real conversation first. Paperwork second. If that is you, say hello.