I have walked miles at ease with myself.
I have gathered pine cones from the hills of Almora.
I have dipped my feet in the Pacific.
I have tasted the rains of Sohra.
I can admire the parijat, mogra, and kaner in bloom.
I can tell tulsi, mint, and ajwain apart by scent alone.
I have wept reading Shafaq and Shivani.
I have lost myself wandering through Ishiguro.
I can appreciate love through Amrita's letters.
I have stood for hours before a Husain or a Sher-Gil.
I have sat in silence for hours under Arvind's tamarind tree.
If I have been able to experience life in these ways alongside a demanding career, it is only because of my teachers who gently awakened my attention to the world, to nature, to art, and to the inner life. My school lives in every ounce of my being, and I carry enduring gratitude for my teachers and the higher forces above us.
As a child, whenever anyone asked me what I wanted to become, my answer came without hesitation: a teacher. It never felt like a career choice. It was a dream infused irrevocably with my will to live. Twelve years of schooling in Saharanpur helped shape this foundation; four years of undergraduate study in Patiala and a postgraduate degree from the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, made this resolve stronger. In the thirteen years that followed, as a banker at Goldman Sachs — in Bangalore, Hong Kong, Japan, London, the United States — the aspiration only deepened: sometimes in contemplation, sometimes in restlessness, year after year.
My father did not want me to become a teacher. He reasoned with me and tried to dissuade me. But I could not be dissuaded either. I spent two months teaching at my alma mater in Saharanpur; three years building a small tuition-cum-school system for the children of non-teaching college staff in Patiala; three years teaching law and management aspirants at Career Launcher, Bangalore, and the last nine years as guest faculty at Mount Carmel College. I kept myself as close to being a teacher as circumstances allowed, and that gave me deep joy, peace, and contentment.
I now wish to take the next step of becoming a full-time teacher, in the spirit this Foundation holds dear — not to fill young minds with answers, but to walk alongside them as they question, observe, and come to know themselves. Whether through literature, statistics, or the social sciences, I want to teach not as one who has arrived, but as one who is still seeking — using the classroom as a place to continue my own inward journey even as I help curious minds find theirs. I sincerely hope that, in a world shaped by AI and instant gratification, teachers who can awaken inquiry, observation, attention, and empathy in their students will help keep alive what is most deeply human in all of us.
