On 24 May 2008, Bangalore's new airport opened its doors, and I stood in a terminal that had been built, shop by shop, from an empty plan. As Head of Travel Retail at BIAL, I had spent two years answering one question: what does a passenger in a hurry actually want to buy?
Nobody in India had the answer then. We had to learn it on the floor.
That habit of learning on the floor never left me. Through Royal Enfield's dealerships, Levista's distribution and the shelves of Indian Terrain, I kept returning to the same classroom: the shop itself.
So when I finally took my maiden trip to the US this August, it was no surprise that I carried that classroom with me.
Strangely, the trip had waited long. Opportunities to travel had come my way several times, and I had refrained.
Then things moved swiftly: my decision to join Harvard Business School, the funding arrangements, the visa process. Before I knew it, I was on a flight to Boston.
I landed on a sunny afternoon, excited like a kid. By the time I reached the campus, the excitement had turned gentler. I felt like a child on the first day at a new pre-school: wide-eyed, slightly nervous, wanting to touch everything.
For three weeks, I walked the corridors of the various buildings, the Baker Library, our hostel rooms and, most importantly, the classrooms.
Each step carried the thought that legends have lived and walked here. Some places make you quieter, and they make you want to deserve the seat you sit in.
Yet my fondest memories also lie outside the campus walls. The evening walks. The train and bus rides. The retail explorations across town, where every store was a case study and every queue a lesson in design and patience.
A retailer never travels as a tourist. He travels as a student of the shop floor.
What struck me was how the two classrooms spoke to each other. The case method sharpened my questions in the morning, and the shop floor tested them by evening. Frameworks without floors are just theory.
Floors without frameworks are just habit. Real learning lives where the two meet.
Sitting on the student's bench after decades in the industry was humbling. I have taught in business schools since 2005, yet listening more than speaking reminded me how much remains unlearned.
A month after returning, I still reminisce about those good times, and the lessons keep surfacing in ordinary moments.
Perhaps that is where it all began, back in 1997, behind a Baskin Robbins counter in Chennai, learning to scoop. A good scoop is never about the ice cream alone. It is about the right portion, the customer's smile and the patience to get it right, again and again.
Twenty-nine years and a Harvard classroom later, I am still that beginner with the scooper in hand, and I hope I never outgrow it.
Boston, thank you. You have changed how I look at everything that comes next.
