1. When did you first feel the urge to write, and what sparked that journey?
Honestly, the urge crept up on me the way most important things in life do — quietly, without announcement. I had been writing for years: personal diary, reports, assessments, coaching reflections, LinkedIn posts. But that’s functional writing. The urge to write — to make sense of a life rather than document a career — came much later, and not from inspiration. It came from a kind of restlessness. I had decades of experience sitting in my chest and no clean way to organise it. Writing the memoir was less about becoming an author and more about finally having an honest conversation with myself.
2. Your childhood in Air Force cantonments seems deeply influential. How did that constantly changing environment shape you as a person and later as a writer?
Every two years, we packed up and moved. New location, new school, new set of familiar strangers to figure out. As a child, you don’t analyse this — you just adapt. But looking back, what it gave me was a particular kind of literacy: reading rooms quickly, reading people quickly, never assuming that any arrangement is permanent. That instinct never left me. It served me in banking, in leadership, and oddly enough, in coaching — where you have to understand someone’s world fast, without the comfort of long familiarity. As a writer, it gave me material. Forty years of watching people and places and power — that’s not nothing.
3. Many moments in the book feel vivid and personal. How did you go about recalling and structuring these memories? Was it emotional?
Structure came second. Memory came first — and memory, I discovered, is not linear. You don’t recall chronologically. You recall by feeling. A smell, a phrase someone used, a specific embarrassment — these are the hooks. I followed those hooks rather than fighting them into a tidy timeline.
Was it emotional? Some of it, yes. Not in the way people expect — not tears at every paragraph. More a quiet reckoning. There were moments I had conveniently filed away, and the writing process had a way of pulling them back out. You can’t write honestly about your life and remain entirely comfortable. That discomfort, I think, is what makes a memoir worth reading.
4. The title “Restless Roots” is powerful. What does it personally mean to you?
It contains a contradiction, which is the point. Roots suggest belonging, stability, groundedness. Restless suggests the opposite. My life has been both — simultaneously. I have deep roots: in values, in family, in a clear sense of who I am. And yet I have never quite stayed still. Geographically, professionally, intellectually. The title is not a lament. It is an honest description. I think many people — especially those who have moved often, reinvented often, questioned often — will recognise themselves in that contradiction.
5. Which early life lesson has stayed with you the most, even today?
That you are responsible for your own adjustment. Nobody owes you a soft landing in a new place or a new situation. As a child moving between cantonments, there was no orientation programme. You watched, you figured it out, you got on with it. That lesson — that the environment does not adapt to you, you adapt to the environment — has been more useful to me than most things I formally studied. I still apply it. When circumstances change, which they always do, the question is never “why is this happening to me?” The question is “what do I do from here?”
6. Your transition from a long corporate career to coaching — what was the exact turning point?
There wasn’t one dramatic moment. That is the honest answer, and I know it is less satisfying than a good crisis story. What there was, was a growing sense of misalignment. I was functioning at an important level professionally, but the work that gave me the most energy — the conversations where I helped someone think more clearly, make a better decision, see themselves more accurately — that was happening in the margins of my official role. At some point the margins became more interesting than the centre. Coaching gave those conversations a proper home.
7. Was there a specific failure or setback that helped you truly understand that success isn’t about titles?
Yes. And it isn’t my setback — it’s someone else’s.
Debu was one of my best sales officers. A personal crisis forced him out. When he returned, a rigid appraisal cycle caught him mid-recovery. Then the division restructured. Most of the team got absorbed quickly. Debu’s rating held him back.
We worked every angle. By the deadline, nothing. One suitable role opened. The hiring manager hesitated — the rating again. I asked him one question: “If you were in Debu’s position, how would you feel?” He gave Debu six months.
Six months later, Debu exceeded every expectation.
That’s when I understood — you can administer a system, or you can see the person inside it. I had spent too many years calling the first one professionalism.
8. How do you think personal values influence leadership in the real world?
Directly, and whether the leader intends it or not. Values are not what you write in a strategy document. They are what you do when it is inconvenient. How you treat someone who can do nothing for you. Whether you say privately what you say publicly. People in organisations watch this with extraordinary precision — they may not articulate it, but they know. The most corrosive thing a leader can do is publicly espouse values they privately ignore. Teams do not follow mission statements. They follow behavior. And they remember the gap between the two longer than they remember almost anything else.
9. Was there any chapter or incident that was particularly difficult to share?
There were moments I wrote and then sat with for a long time before deciding to keep them in. The difficulty wasn’t always about personal pain — sometimes it was about fairness to others. When you write about your own life, other people appear in your version of events. I was conscious that their story might look different from their side. That responsibility — to be honest without being careless with other people’s dignity — was the hardest editorial challenge.
10. If you could go back and give advice to your younger self — that boy moving across cities — what would you tell him?
Stop trying to appear more settled than you are. The restlessness is not a flaw. It is how you are wired, and eventually it will work in your favor. Also: pay attention to the people who are kind to you when they have no reason to be. Those are the people worth remembering. And one more thing — your father’s discipline, which you will resent for years, is teaching you something you will not be able to name until you are fifty. Trust it.
11. What do you hope a young reader, just starting their career, takes away from Restless Roots?
That a career is rarely a plan. It is mostly a series of responses to circumstances you didn’t fully choose. What matters is not whether the path was straight, but whether you stayed honest — to yourself and to the people around you. I also hope they take away a certain skepticism about the official story of success. The version that gets told in interviews and awards evenings is curated. The real version is messier, luckier, and more interesting. Restless Roots is the real version.
12. After writing this book, how has your own perspective on life, success, and purpose evolved?
Writing a memoir forces a particular kind of audit. You cannot selectively remember your way through sixty-plus years without the gaps becoming obvious. What shifted for me is that I became less interested in the arc and more interested in the texture. Not “what did I achieve” but “what did I actually experience.” Purpose, I have come to believe, is not something you find. It is something you construct — slowly, from the choices you make and the things you keep returning to. Writing this book was one of those things I kept returning to. That probably tells me something.
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