So this happened. @RevantB @shantanukd @tchirag got me all worked up and talk about India DTC and B@B Software market and opportunity. Those of you who know me know that this is how I go into my rant mode. Well apparently these guys were recording and I forgot that I was on record. All errors are mine and i will own them but this is me on India SaaS and how this great market is the next big opportunity. Please go listen and come back here to shout at me for where I was in the wrong.

October is almost done and It has been a tough few days. The sky is falling. Sleep has been rare lately. I land early in the day in delhi. The sandpaper flavour of its people makes a red ruin of my sanity. I finish a tough meeting. It goes well but I am hungry, cranky and have too much cortisol in my system. I need to make a few tough calls. I have been playing excel tetris for days now. The numbers needs to add up but they are not working. It is 3 pm and I am inside a cab. Outside, the hellish Gurgaon landscape plays its depressing dirge. I have had it. I am gonna give up now. I enter the next destination in the uber app but I am not going to my next meeting. I have decided I am going home and so I do. Home I grew up in decades ago. when the days were sepia and skies blue. I get there after 2 hours. Mom is there. She smiles gently and acknowledges that I am home. Asks the housekeeper to make me a cup of tea. we sit in silence for a bit. There really isn’t much me and my mom talk about. we almost never have. She does not understand the world I live in but she knows I know, that I live in it because of her. But as I sip my chai she tells me stories. The cows are giving milk, monkeys come around the evening to destroy her kitchen gardens, the air smells of smoke most mornings. She talks, I listen. I nod along, she keeps talking. She is happy. We both know it. I am ashamed that it took so little from me to make her happy and it took me so much effort to do so little. I give her a hug. My arms remember a rock, but find a frail frame. She feels smaller. I seek the familiar safety I remember but I find that I am holding the person who once held me. I see in that moment that I am the parent now and she gets to be a child. She keeps talking, I keep nodding. The paddy is being harvested, the lime trees are full of fruit, should she make me kheer, It will be cold soon and her joints ache… It has been an hour. I have a flight to catch. She hugs me goodbye and I walk back to my cab. I don’t look back. I am leaving home all over again. I get back to the Excel Tetris. The numbers still don’t make sense. But suddenly they don’t have to. I know what I am going to do. The cortisol haze has lifted and I see the futility of what I was doing. The numbers will never make sense. I just have to change reality around them. Doubt dies. I am the child who knows mom is watching from the stands. I breathe deep and easy. I will do what it takes and I will sleep well tonight.