Should Employers Read Our Social Lives?

At Harvard Business School, a batchmate of mine shared an unusual visa experience. 

His US visa was approved but not issued. The consular officer noted that his social media handles were private and asked him to make them public during scrutiny. His Indian passport was returned immediately, and he was told to check the website in two to three days.

He walked out of the consulate and made his handles public. His visa came through within three days. I followed the same advice, and my own process was smooth.

I thought of this when I read about Hamam al-Hammami, the Omani co-pilot who attacked the Indian-origin captain of the flydubai flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv last week and tried to seize the controls. 

The UAE has called it an attempted terrorist attack. Al-Hammami had reportedly been barred from flying with his own country's airline over extremist concerns, and his Instagram account was deleted on the day of the flight.

That raises an uncomfortable question. 

Should employers be allowed to look into the social lives of their people, especially pilots, crew and government employees who cross borders for work? The line is thin. 

How much policing is too much, and who does it?

My own approach to social media is simple. A LinkedIn connection of mine persistently posted anti-Modi content. I disconnect from people who cross the limits of decency, but never from someone merely because their political or religious views differ from mine. 

Vulgarity and hatred, however, get you removed from my list.

Can an employer apply that standard to an entire workforce? In my own organisation, people of every faith and political ideology are welcome. 

Other employers see it differently, and that is their call. But controversies like the allegations that surfaced at TCS Pune earlier this year might have been handled better with clear social media guidelines.

As EVP at one of the world's largest media organisations, I helped write such guidelines with our HR consulting partner. A breach could lead to termination. 

Employees were never told to stay silent. They could express views, follow film stars and politicians, and share posts. They simply could not turn a disagreement into an altercation or cross into extremism. It worked.

Airlines carry millions of passengers daily, who trust the airline, the crew and the pilots with their families' lives. A pilot with extremist leanings is not a private matter. It is a public safety risk.

Airlines should adopt clear social media guidelines, with transparency about what is monitored and why. Clear rules protect the honest employee as much as the passenger. 

The aim is not surveillance, but trust.

The Customer: The Purpose, Not the Interruption

I first saw this quote on the Calcutta Metro Rail Station in 2001, during those twenty-minute underground rides from Rabindra Sarovar to Park Street. Those journeys cost me INR 7 per day; the monthly pass was a lifesaver on my meagre five-figure post-MBA salary.

I was a Management Trainee at RPG Retail then, fresh off campus recruitment. I was responsible for the Operations of Asia’s largest music retail store in the day - all of 7,000 sq ft, designed by Fitch PLC and a monthly turnover of INR 60 lakhs. That’s INR 2 lakhs a day, selling cassettes worth INR 28 for Bengali music and INR 33 for Hindi. 

CDs and DVDs were just hitting the market and were priced at INR 299, restricting them for just a few hundred in the city and a few thousands in the country, perhaps. 

Retail wasn't entirely new to me — I'd worked part-time as a waiter at Baskin Robbins Ice Cream parlour in Chennai, the second outlet in India and the first in the city. 

I already understood, however faintly, the mechanics of managing customers.

Reading Gandhi's words daily only deepened what I was beginning to learn: that customers were everything. 

Back then, many shopkeepers still believed they were doing the community a service — stocking shelves at competitive prices with wafer-thin margins, almost grudgingly. The servitude was absent.

Curiously, little has changed in twenty-five years.

I'm uncertain if Gandhi's quote still adorns that metro corridor, but I notice something troubling: despite all the talk about customer experience and digital transformation, servitude has largely disappeared. 

From luxury brands to neighbourhood shops, there's an undercurrent of indifference masquerading as efficiency.

I've run retail businesses and launched startups. 

I've always tried to live this principle visibly — showing my teams that the rice and milk we buy at home exists because customers chose to give us their business yesterday. 

Without them, regardless of title or designation, there's no revenue to manage, no salary to draw.

We've certainly shifted customer focus dramatically. Technology has changed the experience. Yet we have miles to go in creating exemplary customer moments. 

The irony isn't lost on me: we've mastered the transaction but forgotten the transaction's foundation — genuine respect for the person across the counter.

Today, on Gandhi Jayanti, his words resonate as loudly as they did in 2001. Perhaps more so. Happy Birthday, Late Shri, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi ji.

Hey! Ram.

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.