Finished reading: The Courage to Be Happy by Ichiro Kishimi 📚
Race vs. Marathon: The Two Leaders I've Chosen

In my career, I’ve had the rare opportunity to experience two vastly different types of leadership. They’ve left such a deep impression that I now see them not just as management styles, but as philosophies of life.
Picture this.
One type of leader treats the workplace like a race.
- Win fast. Win hard. Win at all costs.
- Efficiency is everything. Drive the team like an engine on max throttle—results over relationships.
- It’s about hierarchy, competition, and stories of lone heroes rising above the rest.
- There’s praise, yes—but it’s often delivered by contrasting one teammate as “brilliant” by calling another “not good enough.” The goal? Inspire through comparison. Motivate through fear of inadequacy.
The other treats work like a marathon.
- Pacing matters. Shared progress. Winning together.
- Effectiveness over frenzy. Use the car only when needed—not just because we paid for it.
- Here, growth isn’t measured just in revenue or headcount, but in how much people actually want to come to work.
- There are no whispered stories of who’s underperforming. Instead, leaders work hard to make everyone’s strengths visible and valued.
In the race world:
- You’re trained to outsmart, outshine, outperform—even deceive.
- Respect is conditional. Trust is transactional.
- Leadership is about control, comparison, and closing deals fast.
In the marathon world:
- You’re guided to be truthful, collaborative, and proud of collective wins.
- Respect is mutual. Trust is foundational.
- Leadership is about care, character, and continuous growth.
A Moment From the Marathon
I once saw the early signs of this “race” mindset taking root—right in a team I had helped build.
Back in the early days of the offshore team I was helping scale up, a group of three began subtly vying for influence. Rather than collaborating they started escalating issues directly to me, bypassing the person right next to them. It was an early warning sign—one that reminded me just how quickly hierarchy and competition can sneak in.
At our next monthly company-wide meeting, I brought it up—not as a scolding, but as a reset. I clarified that there was no pecking order. That line managers existed only for operational efficiency—not as symbols of rank, authority, or value.
What happened next was quietly powerful. A new sense of camaraderie formed. People opened up more, leaned on each other, and worked as a unit again. It felt like we were back on the marathon track. A horizontal hierarchy was established.
Unfortunately, wider organizational dynamics eventually pulled us back into a more traditional vertical hierarchy. The culture shifted, and with it came the usual symptoms—guardedness, mistrust, and subtle internal competition.
But that brief period remains a reminder: when leadership makes space for equality, people naturally move toward connection—not comparison.
One type of leader rewards clever deception and praises the ability to “play the game.” The other promotes honesty, mutual respect, and morals over manipulation.
One builds walls of hierarchy. The other builds bridges across roles.
One talks about money as the final prize, the endpoint. The other treats meaningful work as a lifelong journey worth continuing—even without a finish line.
The first type gets things done. But often at the cost of joy, trust, and personal dignity or a contrived version of these qualities that is imposed in a manipulative way. The second type? They might move slower. They might not scale teams to giant sizes or show dramatic profit spikes overnight. But they create something that lasts: a culture of happiness, of togetherness, of shared purpose.
Interestingly, I’ve come to believe that these leadership instincts aren’t just personal—they’re cultural. The first kind of leader I worked with was shaped by a world that prizes competition, individualism, and high-stakes performance—traits often emphasized in Western corporate environments. The second came from a background steeped in Eastern philosophies, where cooperation, inner balance, and mutual respect are often held in higher regard. For him, leading like a marathon runner came naturally.
The strange thing is, many people I know still believe the first kind is “how leadership works.” But it doesn’t have to be. It’s not just about what kind of leader you are. It’s also about what kind of leadership you choose to accept around you.
Not every team needs to be a race team. Not every finish line is worth the sprint.
The kind of leadership we accept—or enable—shapes more than our output. It shapes how we feel about ourselves, our work, and each other.
So, ready to choose the leader you’d like to become yourself? The world is full of wonderful people. Start finding your type, now.
Finished reading: The Courage To Be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi 📚
It’s a fantastic feeling to end the day by writing the journal using Hero Fountain Pen.

A KISS Wedding: A Refreshing Reminder of the Power of Simplicity
Currently reading: Why We Die by Venki Ramakrishnan 📚
Finished reading: Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker 📚
Biggest learnings:
- Don’t force teenagers to wake up early. It’s counter productive
- Consider how long it takes for coffee to flush out from our body before thinking of another shot
- Lost sleep hours cannot be compensated with longer sleeps
No drone in sight this time, but next time for sure!
There is something satisfying about growing crops. Despite the complexity and uncertainty involved in it, we have farmers (with big and small farms) still farming. The pace of change in farming is also accelerating. Due to lack of labour, famers are forced to use technology to continue the endeavour. In my recent visit to my village, I heard of a business who is renting drones to be used in farms. Could not get it to see in action this time, but hoping to make use of it during next harvest. Here are some photos of the paddy fields from my recent visit.
A nursery bed in preparation of next season plantation:

The current season crop nearly ready for harvest:

The farmer - Working From Home:

The Hidden Trap of "Growth for Growth's Sake": Why Scaling Too Fast Sinks Start-ups (and How to Avoid It)

A founder recently asked me how to structure their new consulting firm: “Should I build a marketing team, sales team, and delivery team from day one?” My immediate thought: Bhai, why? When pressed, they admitted they hadn’t considered how this structure would generate revenue—they just assumed it was “what businesses do.” This mindset, coupled with a story from my past, reveals a critical blind spot: scaling fixed costs without a revenue-driven strategy is like building a palace on quicksand.
Let’s grab a chai and dissect why this happens.
DTUs, SUs, CU(s) - OMG!
There are a lot of units in Azure to forecast cost for various services. Yeah, even for pay-as-you-go in the cloud, a decent idea of projected cost is required to justify adoption of a new service.
The most recent for me was CU(s) in relation to Azure Fabric Capacity, which was indeed quite baffling. The usual mistake of thinking it must be something similar to other baffling units like DTUs, SUs etc, could cost us. Especially, as a start-up who have been given certain fixed credits by Microsoft for a year.
Thankfully, The Fabric Guy has written an amazingly detailed article on this matter and this should be a must read for anyone even uttering the word “Fabric”.
With that confidence of having understood what CU(s) (not CUs) are, it’s time to hit the road to get a real feel for it.
Part 3: Offshoring Is a Business Model—Not a Cost-Cutting Exercise

I’ve seen it too many times.
In Part 1, I explained why consultants get laid off even when revenue is good.
In Part 2, I showed how a hybrid offshore-onsite model gives companies more time before resorting to cuts.
Now let’s talk about what many leaders get wrong—when and why they introduce offshoring.
Because here’s the truth:
By the time you’re scrambling to “cut costs,” it’s already too late to build culture, delivery maturity, or trust offshore.
That’s not offshoring. That’s damage control.
No more flickering of my 4K external screen
Finally after many years of frustration, managed to stop the flickering of my 4k monitor when it was connected to my surface book. Turns out that the setting in Edge “Use graphics acceleration where available” was the culprit. As soon as I turned it off, I think the built-in Windows algorithm that decides to switch the graphics card, stopped doing it and now, I have a peaceful screen helping me focus on building Semantic Data Model.
Currently reading: Flirting with Stocks by Anil Lamba 📚
Part 1: Why Am I Being Made Redundant? Understanding The Consulting Business Model
When I asked my friend:
“Do you know the business you’re in?”
He paused, then said, “I’m a data scientist. Why should I worry about that?”
That’s when I realised: most people working in consulting don’t actually understand the business model they’re part of. They’re brilliant in their domains—data, design, software, delivery—but they operate without context on how their company earns revenue or why layoffs really happen.
Making Git Bash, SSH only GIT Remote, Pageant dance together
Given a SSH only GIT Repo, was unable to git clone the repo, despite my public key being successfully stored in the remote repo’s authorization_keys file.
The git clone command invoked from within the git bash kept prompting for password, but could not authenticate for some bizarre reason. Thought it could be some proxy issue. But no, was able to ping successfully to the server hosting the git repo.
Then came the saviour. Pageant.exe, which gets installed when PuTTy SSH client gets installed in windows. Pageant runs on the system tray and serves like a vault of .ppk keys. After adding my ppk to it, was able to successfully connect to the server using putty. Then I thought git clone will also work. But No. Apparently an environment variable GIT_SSH pointing to plink.exe (found within the putty installation directory) is needed. After adding that, I was able to git clone the repository without it prompting me for a password.
Getting started with SaSS, Foundation, Compass on Windows, for PHP web application development
My friend wanted to get started with using Foundation for an upcoming Greenfield project. The trouble is Foundation comes in two flavours:
- Foundation3 with default CSS
- Foundation3 with SCSS (Sassy CSS, which is the syntax used by SASS – "Syntactically Awesome Style Sheets". SASS is an extension of CSS3 which brings familiar programming concepts to CSS like variables, nesting of selectors, functions aka mixins)
The Compass framework does not have a Windows Installer. It is only available as a Ruby Gem package, which means we have to install Ruby for Windows first. After this, we follow the following steps to get Compass with Foundation:
Start Command Prompt with Ruby (Run as Administrator)

Cross-Domain, Ajax Fundamental understanding
I had promised my students that we would implement a “Find nearest XXXX” feature in our on going project. I was doing this for the first time and thought it would not be difficult. But, most of my time while preparing for the class, I was frustrated.
I could not come up with a WCF Web Service (hosted on Visual Studio’s development web server eg., [localhost/MyService...](http://localhost:1234/MyService.svc) ) that could be invoked by Javascript on my website (hosted again on Visual Studio’s development web server eg., [localhost/MyWebsite...](http://localhost:9876/MyWebsite/Default.aspx) ).
Due to time constraints, I abandoned the WCF Service implementation and went in for the ASP.NET Ajax Page Methods
It’s only after reading this nice article, I understand the mistake I made or the way the cross-domain web requests work.
Mash-it Up with ASP.NET AJAX: Using a proxy to access remote API
ASP.NET MVC1.0 installer and VS2008 AddOns
Today I tried all things in vain to try and install ASP.NET MVC 1.0 on to my machine and it just kept failing.
Possible causes, upon Binging focused on conflicting Visual Studio 2008 addons. Among the list of such addons, I had PowerCommands. But, despite uninstalling it, mvc installer complained.
Then I begun uninstalling other possible addons (not listed in the mvc installer readme file). The first to go was SlickEdit gadgets.
Lo and behold, the MVC installation was successful.
Another Foray into Functional Programming
VS2010 beta2 has come with F#. Not that I was not interested in Functional Programming before. I’ve had a go at Erlang nearly 6 months ago and must say that I loved it. But the prospect of Functional Programming with .NET CLR (or rather DLR) definitely gives F# a special place.
More over, the most familiar IDE of Visual Studio is simply wonderful. I must admit, I’ve not yet started doing my katas on F#, partly because the functional programming concepts need to be ingrained before moving ploughing ahead. So, watched a couple of interesting videos tonight.