From building companies to building a life closer to silence.
Enlightening Entrepreneurs
A life rarely moves in a straight line.
Looking back, I can see distinct chapters in mine: engineering, entrepreneurship, investing, writing, inner inquiry and White Light.
At the time, however, each chapter felt less orderly. One experience led to another. Certain doors opened, while others quietly lost their meaning.
This is the journey as I understand it today.
The Engineer
I studied computer science at Punjab Engineering College in Chandigarh.
Engineering gave me a structured way of approaching the world. It taught me to break complicated problems into smaller parts, to work patiently and to trust that systems could be understood and improved.
After college, I joined TCS and worked in India for a little over two years. I then moved to the United States and worked with EDS, which later became part of HP.
These years gave me exposure to large organisations, global teams and the world of technology at a time when the industry was transforming rapidly.
Yet I also sensed that I did not want to remain within a large corporate structure forever. I wanted to create something of my own.
Becoming an Entrepreneur
While studying entrepreneurship at George Washington University (GW) in Washington DC, United States, I wrote a business plan for an e-learning company.
That plan eventually became a real enterprise.
I began the company in the United States and later returned to India to establish its development and operational base. What had started as an idea on paper became a living organisation with employees, customers, investors, responsibilities and uncertainty.
Entrepreneurship changed my understanding of work.
An entrepreneur does not simply execute a defined role. The entrepreneur must imagine something that does not yet exist and then persuade others—employees, customers, partners and investors—to believe in it.
There were no complete maps. Most decisions had to be made before all the information was available.
Over time, I built and participated in businesses across technology, human resources, digital media and other sectors. Some ideas worked. Others taught me through failure, delay or difficulty.
Every company became a classroom.
From Entrepreneur to Investor
As I spent more time building businesses, I became increasingly interested in other founders.
I was fascinated not only by their ideas but by the people they became while pursuing those ideas.
Why could one founder build a lasting organisation while another remained trapped in daily operations? Why did certain teams grow stronger under pressure while others fragmented? Why were some entrepreneurs able to accept guidance while others resisted every perspective except their own?
These questions led me from entrepreneurship into incubation, mentoring and investing.
I helped establish The HR Fund, created to support emerging businesses in human resources, staffing, training and HR technology.
The intention was to offer more than financial capital. Early-stage founders also needed knowledge, relationships, strategic support and access to people who understood the sector.
This became one of the central principles of my work:
Money can help a company grow.
It cannot replace clarity, character or leadership.
From Investor to Coach
As I began working closely with founders and coaching chief executives, I noticed that many of them were struggling with similar questions.
How do I build a strong leadership team? How do I stop every decision from coming back to me? How do I manage employees, investors and other stakeholders? How do I turn a founder-led business into an institution that can grow beyond its founder?
These conversations gradually became an important part of my work. My role was not limited to business strategy. I was helping leaders understand their own behaviour—their need for control, their difficulty in delegating, their relationship with power and their ability to trust others.
I began to see that the growth of a company was closely connected to the growth of the entrepreneur. A business could not truly evolve unless the person leading it was also willing to evolve.
The Entrepreneurship Quotient, published in 2012, was a natural progression of this coaching work. The book brought together the patterns, lessons and questions that repeatedly emerged in my conversations with entrepreneurs and CEOs.
It explored teams, stakeholders, leadership, ideas, institution-building and the inner qualities required to create a company that could eventually operate independently of its founder. Its final chapters encouraged entrepreneurs to build companies they could be proud of and to think beyond the financial bottom line.
The book was not simply about how to build a successful enterprise. It was about the person the entrepreneur must become while building it.
The Search
Even while I was building companies, another search was developing within me.
I had begun reading spiritual literature, including the Bhagavad Gita. Its ideas about life, death, action, identity and reincarnation stayed with me.
The death of a close friend when we were still young brought mortality out of the realm of philosophy and into my immediate life.
Unable to sleep and struggling with grief, I was introduced to hypnotherapy. During those sessions, I encountered experiences that I understood as memories extending beyond my present life.
Whether such experiences can be explained intellectually became less important to me than the effect they had.
They changed the kinds of questions I was asking. Why am I here? Is a human life only about achievement and accumulation? What remains when the identities we build begin to fall away? For a period, I tried to continue my professional life while carrying these questions within me. Gradually, that became more difficult.
They changed the kinds of questions I was asking. Why am I here? Is a human life only about achievement and accumulation? What remains when the identities we build begin to fall away? For a period, I tried to continue my professional life while carrying these questions within me. Gradually, that became more difficult.
Burnout and the Need to Stop
After years of continuous creation, my body began to resist the life I was living.
Physical pain and exhaustion eventually forced me to stop. A long stay at an Ayurvedic hospital gave me something I had avoided for years: time with nowhere to go and nothing to build.
In that pause, I began to see that small adjustments would not be enough.
I did not simply need a holiday. I needed to reconsider the structure and direction of my life.
I wanted to live more slowly. I wanted to be closer to nature. I wanted to understand what existed beneath the identity of entrepreneur, investor and builder.
Moving to Solan
I began spending more time on land that we had for several years near Solan in Himachal Pradesh.
There was no developed retreat centre and no detailed plan for what the land would become. In the beginning, I was trying to create a simpler place in which I could live and heal.
The first structures were built with earth, mud, wood and other natural materials.
Living close to the land changed the rhythm of my days. There was less noise, less urgency and less need to perform a role.
I continued to work selectively with founders and chief executives, particularly around institutionalisation and building organisations that could operate independently of their founders.
But the centre of my life had shifted.
Meeting a fellow traveller
My wife and I first met during a silent meditation programme.
Because the programme was held in silence, we hardly spoke and did not remain closely connected afterward. Years later, our paths crossed again.
Her journey had begun in a different world. She had trained as a healer in Germany, spent time in service in Africa and moved toward art therapy, yoga, meditation and hypnotherapy.
Over time, our individual journeys began to converge.
White Light grew from this meeting—not as a project we decided to launch, but as a natural extension of the life we were learning to live together.
Where I Am Today
I no longer see my professional and spiritual journeys as separate.
Entrepreneurship taught me responsibility, courage, persistence and the discipline required to turn an idea into reality.
Inner inquiry taught me to question ambition, identity, attachment and the assumption that more is always better.
White Light brings these two worlds together.
It requires practical building, planning, people and resources. But its purpose is not expansion for its own sake. Its purpose is to protect a certain quality of silence and create a space where people can encounter themselves more honestly.