The Airport That Taught Me to Travel as a Student

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.

September Was a Reckoning

September 2026 arrived with the weight of completion and the lightness of beginning—a peculiar paradox I'm still learning to sit with.

A year at Harvard's Senior Leadership Program ended not with fanfare but with quiet clarity. The classrooms, the case studies, the relentless self-interrogation—they've rewired something fundamental in how I see problems and possibility. 

I returned to India different, though I'm still unpacking what exactly changed. Maybe it's the frameworks. Maybe it's the permission to acknowledge that transformation isn't always visible to the naked eye.

Between Boston and Dubai, through Mumbai and back to Chennai, I walked through retail temples that have been whispering their secrets for decades. 

High Streets. Shopping districts. Malls. And airport terminals where I've trodden countless times. 

But this time, I was listening differently. Less to the pulse of commerce, more to the heartbeat of human choice—why we buy, why we belong, why we return. The Purpose.

Twenty-nine years in this industry, and I'm still learning to see.

Then came the book. After years of saying it, of planning it, of living it—I finally started writing. 

The pages are raw. Unpolished. Some paragraphs make me wince. But they're honest, and that's all a first draft can ask for. 

I don't know when I'll finish. But I know now that finishing is no longer the question. Showing up is.

October sprawls ahead, mapped out with precision. 

Professional goals that excite me. Health targets that humble me. The machinery of ambition is running again, and I've learned to trust it without abandoning myself to it.

But September also left scars I can't yet talk about—disappointments so private they belong only to the quiet hours when no one's watching. Grief dressed as quiet. 

Loss dressed as acceptance. I won't perform recovery or false positivity about these. Some things remain buried because they deserve that dignity. 

What I know is this: the weight of these hidden things hasn't crushed me. It's only made me more deliberate about the rest.

Life does move on. 

Not because we forget or heal in neat timelines, but because the sheer momentum of being human—wanting, building, risking—carries us forward despite everything.

I have Miles to go... 

The road ahead is clearer now, even if the terrain remains uncertain. 

And I've learned something important in September: the destination matters less than the person you become while traveling toward it.

The Day Average Joe walked into Harvard

Thirty years ago, I left school barely able to hold a conversation in English. Writing was a distant dream — a country I had no visa for.

My parents, bless them, believed in me more than I ever did in myself. They pledged gold to send me to NIIT every morning from 7am to 9am. I would then take the bus to RKM Vivekananda College, Chennai for my B.Com every evening from 4pm to 8pm. In between, from 11am to 3pm, six days a week, I scooped ice cream at Baskin Robbins — their second outlet in India, right near my home.

Eighteen months of DOS, C, C++, Java, and MS Access. Long lab sessions staring at what I called a "smart-box." I scored in the top percentile. And then I prostrated before my parents and said — “I have no plans to save the world from Y2K”.

They pledged their newly bought house next. For my MBA. No parent should ever have to do that. No son should ever forget it, I say.

Campus placement at RPG Retail followed — a decent salary at the turn of the millennium, when jobs were genuinely hard to find. 

What came next felt like a long relay race across fourteen extraordinary years — Musicworld, Foodworld, Central Malls by the Future Group, United Colors of Benetton, Cafe Coffee Day, and Royal Enfield. 

Each baton pass shaped me more than I understood at the time.

Twenty years ago, I became the first Indian to pioneer Airport Retail — at the country's first PPP greenfield airport in Bangalore. That single chapter handed me a confidence I had never owned before, and a reputation that quietly preceded me across the Indian retail industry.

Fifteen years of Strategy Advisory and Consulting later, something stirred. In August 2024, I began exploring the Senior Executive Leadership Program at Harvard Business School. I enrolled in December 2025. A fat tuition fee. Full-on debt.

My maiden trip to Boston was equal parts surreal and stunning. 

Standing in the rain outside the Mumbai Consulate in mid-July. A 90-second visa interview. Four tense minutes at Boston Logan — answering a curious officer's questions while he read my HBS invitation letter with what felt like deliberate slowness.

And then — the campus. The Baker Library. One hundred and fifty case studies across nine months, led by eighteen of the world's finest teachers, professors, and human beings.

My opinions mattered in that classroom. They rarely shifted. But my lens changed — permanently.

In the closing session, I told our Dean: "I came here in January 2026 hungry and impatient. I am leaving as a human being — taught humility, and to live with Purpose."

On 11 September 2026, forty-eight rockstars of the 22nd SELP-India batch stood outside Baker Hall together. I felt equal, grateful, and ready.

Average Joe. Done well, I say.

I still have Miles To Go.

Boston Days - Part 8

The Man Who Saved Best Buy Walked Into My Classroom Today.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers “Culture as Strategy — a Leadership Class with Hubert Joly”)

There is a specific kind of pause that happens inside you when you register, fully and without warning, who exactly is standing at the front of the room.

It happened to me this morning at HBS.

The professor for today’s session was Hubert Joly. Former chairman and CEO of Best Buy. 

The man who walked into arguably the most distressed large-format retail situation in modern American business — stock at $11, market cap at $4 billion, Amazon at its most predatory — and rebuilt it by asking one question almost no CEO was asking at the time: what is this company actually for?

I have spent three decades watching Indian retail. One hundred plus cities. Every format from airport terminal to neighbourhood kirana. 

And yet, sitting in that classroom this morning, I had to consciously remind myself to take notes rather than simply listen.

The session was built around two cases. Nvidia. Walmart.

The Nvidia case was not primarily a technology story. At its core, it was a study in Jensen Huang’s deeply personal leadership style — his instinct for flat structures, radical transparency, and a culture where the fear of embarrassment is replaced entirely by the fear of missing a consequential idea. 

Every person in the room left understanding that Nvidia’s extraordinary run cannot be separated from who Huang is as a human being, and how that humanity travels through fifty thousand people. Strategy, in his hands, is inseparable from character.

The Walmart case landed differently, and with equal force. The discussion centred on Doug McMillon’s fundamental conviction that Walmart’s greatest long-term competitive asset is not its logistics network or its store footprint — it is its people. 

His big bets on workforce investment, wage floors, training and dignity are not HR policy. 

They are strategic bets made with the same rigour a CFO applies to capital allocation. McMillon has simply decided that people are the capital.

The thread connecting both cases — and the man teaching them — was impossible to miss.

Culture is not a consequence of strategy. It is the strategy.

What I carried out of that room was not a framework. It was a reckoning.

Thirty years in retail. Thousands of hours on floors and in boardrooms. Have I always been as deliberate about culture as I have been about category, format and footfall?

The man who walked into Best Buy in 2012 — when people around him said he was either crazy or suicidal — did not walk in with a better product or a superior balance sheet. 

He walked in with a clearer answer to that question than anyone else in the building.

As it turns out, that is not a small thing.

It is everything.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.)

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.

Boston Days - Part 7

Is CVS a Pharmacy? A Toy Store? A Convenience Store? Yes.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims. This article covers the “Positioning” of a Retailer) 

After pondering for several minutes, reading the name printed on every miniature car, I picked up three — all American icons.

A Ford, a Chevrolet, and a DHL pickup truck that has moved American commerce and economy since 1969. Three satisfying finds.

I placed them on the counter and looked up. The backlit signage above the cashier read: CVS Pharmacy. I had just spent ten unhurried minutes choosing toy cars inside a pharmacy.

What exactly is this place? Pharmacy, convenience store, seasonal gift shop, beauty destination, or a toy aisle with a dispensing counter? Walking through CVS, the answer changes with every aisle.

CVS was born in 1963 as Consumer Value Stores in Lowell, Massachusetts. Today it operates roughly 9,000 stores across the United States, present in 3,486 cities nationwide.

Applying a Pareto lens, New York leads with 183 stores. Houston follows with 119, Los Angeles 105, Chicago 73, Philadelphia 63. Dense urban concentration — by strategy, not accident.

Each store typically occupies around 4,000 square feet in dense urban neighbourhoods. Large enough to carry pharmacy, merchandise, beauty, food, seasonal gifting, and apparently, a very respectable toy section.

For readers in India, here is essential context. Most Americans pay little or nothing at the pharmacy counter — their health insurance, managed by intermediaries called PBMs, pays instead.

PBM stands for Pharmacy Benefit Manager — a powerful third party sitting between insurer, drug manufacturer, and pharmacy. It determines exactly how much the pharmacy gets reimbursed for every prescription dispensed.

Reimbursement rates have fallen relentlessly for over a decade. CVS’s pharmacy segment operating margin compressed from 9.9% in 2015 to just 3.5% today, on revenues of $139.4 billion. The arithmetic is punishing.

Walgreens, CVS’s closest comparable, ran a negative 5% operating margin on US pharmacy retail before being taken private by Sycamore Partners in 2025. The industry’s economics are structurally broken.

Which brings us back to the toy cars. The prescription customer walks in, hands over their insurance card, pays a nominal copay or sometimes nothing at all, and waits.

CVS needs that customer to also pick up candy, a greeting card, or three miniature diecast cars. Front store margins are meaningfully better than anything earned from a reimbursed prescription.

The business model, stripped to its core, is converting compulsory prescription footfall into discretionary front-store revenue. It is not irrational thinking. It is, in fact, survival thinking.

Except the consumer has not fully cooperated. CVS’s front store same-store sales declined 2.1% in 2024, recovering to just 1.2% in 2025. Customers tolerate the format. They do not embrace it.

The result is a retail identity no shopper can define in one sentence. A pharmacy barely profiting from prescriptions it fills, surrounded by merchandise it hopes will subsidise the enterprise.

The DHL truck, the Ford and the Chevrolet sit on my desk here in Boston. Charming mementos of a pharmacy still searching, with some urgency, for its own positioning clarity.

(I am writing “Boston Days” as a series of articles for quick reference for myself and other retail pilgrims.) 

Read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8 and Part 9 here.