Gigyasa Project Turns One

On September 3rd, 2019, I wrote my resignation letter to my boss, quitting my full-time job as a product manager in an agritech startup.

I wrote,

"...Ever since I came back from my illness, I have been deeply restless about taking risk and trying out new things, doing stuff which I’ve always wanted to do – Write books, travel and take up interesting consulting projects"

August 2019 was personally a mess of augustine proportions. I was shuttling between my home and the hospital. My wife had been admitted for dengue. My son contracted fever and I quickly joined the feverish party.

As a student of naturopathy, I preferred to let my body decide the necessary course of action without any intervention and iatrogenic effects. I stayed with my body in every waking moment as I would do to a friend going through her rough patch. I ensured that this friend was fed with minimal inputs to do routine maintenance tasks. I stood with her, as she and I pored over every physiological phenomenon that was emerging from within and without.

When I came out of my illness, my body and mind felt deeply nourished. Perhaps the illness was a conspiracy for the body and the mind to shed its unwanted skin. I had lost the ability to relate to almost everything I had done before the illness took over. When my illness forced me to press Ctrl+Alt+Del, perhaps, several cache files of emotions and memories that were unnecessarily clogging my subconscious had been deleted.

No wonder I was rejoicing.

I felt the primordial kick of being left with a tabula rasa to figure out what I wanted to do.

I resigned.

On October 10, 2019, I announced to the world that Gigyasa Project has begun.

(You can read more about the birth of the Gigyasa Project and the circumstances which led to its birth here.)

Today, as I look back at my life on January 1st, 2021, I want to ask myself, in doing what I am doing, what am I really doing.

When I started my free agent V2.0 in September 2019, I saw it as a way to cure myself of pay-cheque addiction. Today, with far more grey hair over my head, I realize that whether you live a paycheck life or gig life, the work you do is the same.

At the end of the day, you buy some certainty and sell some uncertainty. I have chosen to buy the certainty of doing the diverse work I've always wanted to do (which makes my income flow resemble the Indian thali that I love to eat) and decided to pay its price with the uncertainty of cash flows that come along with it.

In my resignation mail, I wrote that I wanted to "Write books, travel and take up interesting consulting projects"

As I look back, the order in which I wrote was very revealing (while the income flow supported this Sankalpa (intent) of mine in the reverse order).

Did I write Books?

I had the privilege of editing my Yoga Mentor Raghu Ananthanarayan's fascinating book which uses the lens of Mahabharata to present a whole new paradigm of leadership that draws extensively from Puranas and Indic wisdom.

It was illuminating to figure the process of building a narrative spine for a nonfiction book. Five Seats of Power will be out soon in Amazon and bookstores near you.

I have been wanting to write a book on the story of my mentor. The original idea was to expand the blog post I had written several moons ago into a long-form personal memoir that narrates my mentor's inspiring life story, as I see it, and as he sees it. The first cut of editing is ready. I need to find a good illustrator for illustrating a few key vignettes. The seeds have been sown. Let's see.

I also have been wanting to translate my great-grandfather's handbook on farming, which was published by Natesan Press in 1908, from Tamizh to English. I found the last surviving copy from the London Museum in 2014. I feel daunted and underprepared to kickstart this mammoth project, although I have been doing my bit of research on the historicity of this subject and learning more about the social context that led my great-grandfather to write the book during that time.

I kickstarted Agribusiness Matters newsletter in substack the month of June, building on the momentum of my two-year-old LinkedIn newsletter, and converted it into a paid newsletter in the month of August. Paid newsletter is a niche territory that I have recently jumped into and I am figuring this game to do it best. With 22K+ free subscribers in LinkedIn, 600+ free signups in substack, and 20+ subscribers, it has been growing steadily.

Truth be told, I had my doubts over whether people would pay 399 INR a month for a newsletter that promised only one article per week. Going by the slow but steady growth of subscribers, it seems clear that readers do value quality over quantity. I've also had friends from Agritech investing fraternity tell me how my articles have helped them frame their investment thesis more sharply and ask hard questions for which there are no easy answers.

Beyond monetary benefits, writing Agribusiness Matters has helped me build deep relationships with a vast phalanx of agritech professionals who are giving their best shot to transform the oldest occupation known to humankind. In case you wondered, the jury is not yet out on whether that will eventually change the lives of farmers across the world.

Did I travel?

I traveled for the first time to the beautiful country of Guatemala in Central America. Visiting the Mayan ruins in the middle of the forest was an experience of its own kind. It taught me a lot about colonization and the patterns in which it stumps the minds of those who are colonized. It further added momentum to my ongoing personal project of decolonizing my anglicized mind.

I also enjoyed doing a workshop in a remote tribal village of Sittlingi in the heartlands of Tamizhnadu. It was an experience that would remain etched in my learning journeys to understand the heart and soul of this country.

If not for the pandemic, I would have visited Spain. Looking back at the pandemic and the hell it unleashed, it feels like a blessing in disguise to ensure that I remained safe and homebound.

I had plans to kickstart workcation adventures before COVID pandemic broke and changed the world in one swoop. Amidst the uncertainties of vaccines and epidemics, I earnestly hope the world would make it easier for someone like me to slow-travel and discover different cultures of the world with my partner (who also happens to a free agent in the world of Yoga) while doing interesting long-term sustainable agriculture projects with startups, governments, and corporations across the globe

Did I take up interesting consulting projects?

Very soon after I quit my full-time work, the very first consulting project I kickstarted involved me strategizing an e-commerce marketplace with my clients, while speaking in English with a Spanish translator in the room and listening to their Spanish feedback which was translated back to English. It was a rewarding experience to listen to someone intensely all through my being and intuit the essence of what is being communicated, even though I had no clue about the language in which it was being communicated. This experience also gave me a fascinating ringside view of how agriculture is evolving in Central America.

I have been lucky to do all kinds of interesting projects and test my "Your Product is a Story" consulting methodologies out in a wide array of domains, including Health, Safety & Environment, Real-Estate, Education, and of course, agritech in a new continent, several miles away, in a language that I didn't speak, with farmers and other agri stakeholders operating in a completely new supply chain.

While the client pipeline and cashflow seemed healthy even during the lockdown, I learned from my mentor an important lesson on the perils of doing consulting work that pegs time with money.

After all, in all these years when I worked as a consultant to large corporations, I was being paid by the hours that I officially spent at the desk and it seemed reasonable to continue the old ways even though I was a solopreneur consultant. The pandemic was a good wake-up call to realize that my old methods of doing consulting was no longer relevant in the post-pandemic world.

 I decided to change gears and began doing consulting work that was valued by the depth of the engagement I had with the clients. When you don't peg time with money, the engagement is about being engaged with friends' work all the time. It's another thing that these friends also happen to be my clients.

When you don't make a connection in your head between time and money, work is no longer about showing up for engagement and clocking a certain number of hours with a watch in my hand.

It felt so much relieving to do consulting work in which the work and the outcomes mattered over everything else.

Over the last eight years, when I lived a pay-cheque lifestyle, my relationship between time and money was rock solid. I spend more time. I get more money. Plain and simple.

Today, I am discovering a much simpler relationship between time and life.

The more time I spend on something, the more I discover life in it. And when this happens, wealth of all kinds is a natural outcome that flows out of this deep relationship.

This applies to everything. Whether it is consulting, or parenting, or simply living and discovering the best that I can be, the fundamental equation remains the same.

There is a reason why I call this experiment to bridge the chasm between life and livelihood as "Unemployed".

Why should "unemployed" always invoke imagery of despair and suffering? Why can't it evoke a state of deep play to explore the immensity of life?

Today, I am spending my life energies to decouple time and money in interesting ways. I haven't fully figured it yet. I am working my way, as I play the game along.

What's Next?

I honestly don't know. My life is cosily perched on the precipice for any long-term planning to make sense. For the longest time, I've seen "career" as a four-letter curse word; a twentieth-century relic waiting to be blown to smithereens. While I have clarity about where I am oriented and where all I could go, given a choice, I prefer serendipity over goals.

While goals are important in the orientation phase, they can also be quite limiting. More often, I find goals to be inimical to my preferred rhythms of creative living that thrive on serendipity and foundational curiosities about life.

What more joy could there be other than discovering those first principles that animate not just the material world, but also the non-material world!

If you like what you've read so far, and would like to support me in pursuing this journey, there are several things you can do.

1)Hire me or recommend me for consulting gigs!

2) Share with me your wisdom on how to make this business philosophy work

3) Wish me good luck!

Happy New Year 2021!