Because life is a long game.

I grew up in Jabalpur, a small town in central India, in a middle-class Marwari family. My childhood is mostly memories of following my grandfather into his factory. He ran a business, and he was my first picture of what a life could be. I wanted to be him.

Instead I set out to become a doctor — everyone around me was, my father is one. I failed the pre-medical exam, and I failed it hard. Two years disappeared. I slept because sleep was the only place that didn't hurt. I stopped eating. I played pool and waited for each day to end.

A friend pulled me to Pune for a change of scenery, and my father backed the move — he has always wanted the best for me, and he believed I should have one solid qualification. He's a big part of why I'm standing here at all. I cleared the Chartered Accountancy exam with a merit rank. It taught me the one thing I still live by: when you have no option to fail, you succeed — and you succeed big.

CA took me to Deloitte in Pune, then a small firm in Houston — I hated both jobs from day one. Back home, my grandfather's mining business wasn't mine. Then my father showed me a newspaper ad: Royal Enfield wanted a dealer in Jabalpur. I'd just bought my first Enfield, so I applied — and it worked. Seven years, ten outlets. In build mode I don't stop.

Running came late. In 2014 I couldn't last five minutes on a treadmill, so I started run-walk intervals. On Mumbai's roads in 2017 my knees gave out — until a book, Born to Run, taught me to land midfoot. The next morning I ran five kilometres and nothing hurt. Mumbai twice, Berlin, London, Tokyo. In the last twelve kilometres of Berlin I found a runner I never knew I had.

But the road was only ever half of it. Through those same years I was reading — Vedanta first, given to me by a mentor in the US, then Osho, Rumi, and finally Krishna. The Bhagavad Gita became the book that gave me peace. The running and the stillness aren't a passion and a footnote; they are two halves of one practice — the effort and the surrender, the body and the witness behind it. I call it The Long Run because it is the opposite of the hustle everyone is selling: the long game, run at a pace you can hold for a lifetime.