Which is the best place to live in India.

My office has been my home for the last couple of years - It's where, as my son might paraphrase 'I ran my million start up ideas".

A friend has a hole in their heart - great - Let's start a financial planning company so that they can generate their 'own private insurance' when they eventually need heart surgery ... coz you know - regular insurance companies won't touch them with a barge pole.

We called it 'FinQA - Short for Financial Questions answered'

It's where I learnt how expensive 'free financial advice' can be. Even wrote a book.

Depressed while stuck at home during Covid - watching friends deliver food and find oxygen concentrators, one kept hearing about therapy.

Great - let's start a 'Zomato for Therapists' so that we can get 'soul food' delivered on tap - Not next friday at 4 pm. Coz that's when your therapist is available next.

It's not their fault - Good therapists do a max of 3 to 4 sessions a day. It's an incredible cognitive load and the field is ever evolving so they need to rest and learn.

Ok - Covid's over but the economy is in shambles. What next?

Great - Let's help a million retailers across the country earn some extra cash - so that some of them can reopen their shops and earn Rs 10 - 25,000 per month to feed and educate their kids.

We build an app for micro business loans that 'originated > underwrote > disbursed > collected > repaid to NBFC' - at a cost of less than $1 per transaction.

We had to as the spread was barely $2 dollars on a loan size of $150.

12 months later, we realised shopkeepers wanted and extra 0 or two - and we ran out of money, our investors ran out of conviction.

Serving a million shopkeepers needed an army of 10,000 'Relationship Managers' who would educate 'business owners' on how to use tech to grow their business.

But the shopkeepers were wary - they knew what Zepto, Zomato, Amazon and Reliance Retail were doing to their business - stealing it - and they didn't want to trust a small startup.

Those are just 4 ideas where I really had no business getting involved in - But I did because it sounded like fun.

What's the point of earning money if you aren't having fun at your job - where Monday mornings are exciting because the team is finally back in the office and you are ready to start solving new problems - or finish what you weren't able to do last week.

Rest is important - Take the weekends off. Or even weekdays.

Start work at 12 if that's what your body needs.

The 'async' future is also here to stay - and we need to learn the painful art of building relationships online or over the phone. It's excruciating but what's got to be done has got to be done. The positive side of this is that when you finally meet people in person, it's even more fun and refreshing. Especially if both of your phones are in flight mode.

My lease ran out last month and I did not renew it. So I am kind of technically 'homeless'

I think my love affair with Gurgaon is over for now - The air has worsened over the last decade. I have bought air quality monitors and purifiers, and even researched oxygen generation plants (not the natural variety) but it probably needs a few Vinod Khosla's to work with the government.

Or if (fingers crossed) one of the Ambani kids move to Delhi :)

That's about the only crappy thing I can think about gtown when you compare housing / weather / traffic / talent with other cities like Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Chennai.

So yeah - would love to know where you think is the best place in India to live.

and work. and play.

Have a good week.

cheers

abhik

P.S: If you have made it till here, thank you very much for your time.

If you happen to know a cancer surgeon, or a patient who needs cancer surgery to get well, could you please [email protected]?- Muchos Gracias.