Making a Life — Reflections from a Conversation That Stays

What a wonderful experience it was — one of those rare sessions where a conversation doesn’t just answer questions, it rearranges something inside you. On 22nd November 2025, as the Banyan Hall slowly filled for the session “Making a Life,” I felt an unusual calm settle in the room. Perhaps it was the theme itself. Perhaps it was the presence of a man who has lived many lives within one. But as soon as Gurcharan Das began speaking, something shifted — expectation melted into reflection.

The first thing he said felt almost like a whisper to anyone searching for their own meaning:

Write a memoir, not an autobiography.

He wasn’t talking about publishing a book. He meant something far more intimate — that life becomes clear only when you connect your own dots, when you see not events but a pattern, not a timeline but a theme. The honesty with which he spoke made me realise how few of us ever stop to do this for ourselves. We live, but we rarely pause to understand.

Listening to him speak about his childhood, I felt that memory for him was not a sentimental place but a teacher. His mother’s diary, filled with innocent observations of a “restless baby,” became the anchor to a lifetime of self-awareness. But it was the heavier memories — a brutal moment during Partition, a silence that hurt a classmate — that revealed to me how character is formed not by success but by scars. Those stories stayed with him not as burdens, but as reminders of what it means to be human. And as I listened, I found myself revisiting my own buried memories — the ones that shaped my instincts more than any achievement ever has.

I smiled when he spoke about the transformation from Ashok Kumar to Gurcharan Das. What began as domestic humour ended with a sentence that quietly pierced through the noise in my own head:

Take your work seriously, not yourself seriously.

To hear someone of his stature say this with such simplicity was strangely liberating. It is easy, especially in leadership roles, to confuse responsibility with self-importance. His words felt like a hand resting gently on the shoulder, reminding me to keep my feet on the ground even while my work reaches for the sky.

As he traced his journey from Partition to Harvard, from engineering to philosophy, and from global corporate leadership to writing, I realised that his life was not a series of achievements — it was a series of questions. Questions that nudged him, unsettled him, redirected him. The courage to abandon a PhD at Oxford, the curiosity to move from business to literature, the honesty to admit that clarity sometimes comes disguised as discomfort — all of it reflected a restlessness I recognised within myself.

For years he lived two parallel lives: a corporate leader through the week, a writer on weekends. That dual existence fascinated me because it held a truth that many of us forget — that purpose doesn’t always arrive in one complete piece. Sometimes it arrives in slices, quietly, like a second life waiting to be acknowledged.

His insights on business people being kinder than writers made everyone laugh, but beneath the humour was a profound understanding of interdependence. Business teaches humility because it demands relationships; writing can sometimes encourage the opposite. I left with a new appreciation for the quiet ethics of ordinary work.

But the moment that sat with me the longest was his decision to leave corporate life. He described looking out of a meeting room window, surrounded by strategy papers for Pampers, and asking himself a deceptively simple question:

Is this what I want the rest of my life to be?

It wasn’t rebellion. It was recognition. And in that recognition, he chose a life — not survival, not success, but life.

His idea of making a life was beautifully uncomplicated. He said you know you’ve reached it when time dissolves while you work, when your ego quiets, and when the work feels like play. Happiness, he said, lies in loving the person you live with and loving the work you do. It felt like a distillation of wisdom earned through decades of living, failing, trying again.

What struck me most was his humility. Even after a lifetime of learning, he said he is still a student of freedom, still trying to lighten the weight of ego. There was no grand declaration, only an honest admission that life is a continuous creation, not a finished sculpture.

By the time we reached the rapid-fire round, the room felt full yet light — as if we had all collectively exhaled. His answers were crisp, personal, unguarded. And as the session drew to a close, I realised this wasn’t just a dialogue; it was a quiet invitation for each of us to re-examine the architecture of our own lives.

Some experiences end when the applause fades.

But some linger — softly, insistently — in the choices we make thereafter.

This conversation with Gurcharan Das was one of those.

 

It didn’t just teach me.

It shifted me.