THE UPSIDE WITHIN

 

The morning we launched NSDL, the newspaper called it “a new era for Indian investors.”

I kept that line in my head in the coming days as the purpose of our existence. Because for almost a year, that was all we had. The headline said new era. The ledger said single digits.

Not thousands of accounts. Not hundreds. Single digits, against a country of investors we were supposed to be opening this for.

And every few weeks the phone would ring, from the press, from the markets. “How many today?” And I would give a number you could count on one hand.

Then the same newspapers that had written “new era” printed the verdict. “A costly experiment that isn’t working.” Change the model. It has failed.

I was not the man in charge, I was young, and a part of the founding team. But when you read your project’s obituary in the same paper that announced its birth, seniority doesn’t protect you. It felt like mine.

And I had the choice a lot of you either have had or are going to have. Walk away from something the world has already buried or don’t.

Now you’re waiting for the grit speech. I pushed harder, I never gave up, believe in yourself.

That would be a lie. It wasn’t grit. Grit often is just fear with its teeth clenched, and fear cannot build anything new, a mind in panic can only defend, it cannot imagine.

What got us through was quieter. Two things that our MD and mentor Mr Bhave instilled in us. A sense of gratitude to steady the mind, a grip on what was still standing, even at single digits. And a purpose to point it, a reason worth the year.

Steady, and aimed. That combination will attempt almost anything. We just didn’t have the words for it yet. We only had the account that wouldn’t open, and a reason I couldn’t let go of.

Here’s the thing nobody warns you about hard problems. There’s a kind where you know the problem and you know the answer, you just do the work. There’s a harder kind where you know the problem but not the answer. And then there’s the last kind, where you don’t know the problem and you don’t know the answer. You set out with nothing but the shape of a dream in the dark.

That’s where the depository lived. That’s where anything worth building lives. Not with a plan, with a shape, and the nerve to walk toward it.

There’s an old story. A mouse complains to a lion his life is too dangerous. “Simple,” says the lion. “Become as big as me.” “But how?” asks the mouse. “That’s your problem,” says the lion. “I’m the king. I only make policy.”

Most grand visions are that lion. A magnificent goal, and none of the weight of how. A real purpose is the opposite; it’s a dream you agree to carry the how for. That’s the whole difference between a leader and a slogan.

Picture a metro station that’s been spotless for years. Not one wrapper. Not one mark on the wall. And notice what that does to you, you’d feel ashamed to be the one who drops the first thing.

Now picture one cigarette butt in the corner. Just one. And something in you shifts. Now one more won’t matter. And if there are already ten thousand complaints no one has answered, what harm can one more do?

That’s how a station falls apart. That’s how an institution falls apart. And that’s how a person falls apart. Never in one collapse, always one small permission at a time.

So the hardest discipline of that whole year wasn’t heroic. It was an account that everyone said wasn’t worth chasing. And chasing it anyway. Because the day you stop caring about the one, you’ve already started to fall.

Years later I was asked to build something much larger. An open network, so the smallest shopkeeper in the country could reach a buyer anywhere, without belonging to anyone’s walled garden.

And early on, it came back. The doubt. The “this will never work.” The pressure to quietly change the model. The same cold feeling I’d had years before, alone, at single digits.

But this time I recognised it. I knew exactly what state I was in, and I knew it was lying to me. The steadiness I’d stumbled into by accident the first time, I could now find on purpose.

Same two things. Bigger stage. I won’t walk you through what got built. What matters today is only this, it was portable. Whatever carried a frightened young man through one project carried a national idea through the next. It travelled with me.

And then it did something I didn’t expect. It left.

The idea travelled to another country. There’s an Indonesia Open Network now, and I’m part of it, but not as the founder, and not as the man in charge. As a mentor. My entire job is to help a local team learn from our idea, and our mistakes, and then to make sure they own it, and they deliver it.

Think about what that proves. If this had really been mine, my brilliance, my achievement, it couldn’t move. It would still need me. The fact that it’s growing in Jakarta, in hands that aren’t mine, in a language I don’t speak, that’s the proof it was never mine to begin with.

The idea was never in me. It was in the idea. And the idea only proved its upside the moment it stopped needing me.

So, that headline. “A new era for Indian investors.” It turned out it was never really about investors, or accounts, or a model that worked.

It was a test of what was inside, whether there was something under the failure steady enough, and aimed enough, to chase one stuck account through almost a year of obituaries.

Every one of you is carrying something right now that looks, from the outside, like the odds are against it. And you’ve been told the upside is out there, in a better year, more money, an easier hand.

It isn’t out there. It never was.

And you’ll know it was real not when it makes you look big, but when it outgrows you. When you can put it in someone else’s hands, step back, and watch it stand without you.

That’s the upside within. It was never meant to stay inside you.