No Map

In 2018 I went to Vishakhapatnam for 11th and 12th. First time I left home for real. I was seventeen, I didn’t know what I was doing, and that was fine because nobody around me knew what I was doing either.

When you leave and come back, something breaks. Not dramatically — you don’t have some movie moment. You just start hearing things differently. The stuff everyone at home agreed was true — study, degree, government job — you realize those aren’t laws. They’re just another perspective. From another person. Someone who loves you, who absolutely wants good for you, but who just doesn’t know what else is out there. They’re not wrong. They’re just working with what they have.

And that’s the part that’s on you. Not to resent them for it. To teach them. To show them what you’ve seen. Because they can’t want better for you if they don’t know better exists.

My grandfather was a primary school teacher. My dad is a high school teacher. My mom held the entire family together and nobody ever gave that a title. The path was obvious. Three items on the menu. I didn’t fight it because I had some grand vision. I just couldn’t make myself believe it.

Came back. Did IIT coaching. Failed.

I’m not going to dress that up. I failed. Didn’t get into a good college. And here’s the thing about failing something everyone around you treats as the only thing that matters — it doesn’t free you. It just makes you desperate.

COVID hit. I had a plan to go to Germany. My parents said no, stay in Kolkata. So I stayed. 2020 to 2023. Three years.

First year — COVID. Everything shut. Second year — still mostly COVID. The world was frozen and so was I.

Third year I was depressed. Properly depressed. I was going to college, I was trying to run an agency, I was trying to make money online, I was doing a job on the side because I already knew — I knew in my bones — that college wasn’t going to give me shit. I was doing five things at once and none of them were working and I was twenty-something in Kolkata watching my life not start.

Here’s what nobody tells you about that phase: it’s not that you don’t know what to do. It’s that you’re trying to do everything because the fear of picking wrong is worse than the exhaustion of doing all of it badly.

I have a friend. Ambitious guy, wants to build things, wants to make money, wants to move. His parents want to see him in an office uniform. So he’s trying to do both.

Both doesn’t work. I’ll say that again. Both doesn’t work.

Not because the things are individually bad — they’re not. But they pull in opposite directions. You can’t build something new while performing loyalty to the old thing. You’ll tear yourself in half and then wonder why you’re tired all the time.

There’s a lot you have to unlearn before you can learn anything useful. And we — city people, middle-class people, educated people — we live in this scarcity mindset where starting from zero feels like dying. Like if you let go of the thing you already have, even if the thing is garbage, you’ll fall and never get back up.

I’ll tell you something. In my entire life I have started from zero more times than I can count. Every single time. I move to a new city — zero. I try a new thing — zero. I leave something that isn’t working — zero. And every time it feels like the end and every time it isn’t.

Everything is uncertain. That’s not a motivational poster. That’s just the reality. The sooner you stop pretending you can control it, the sooner you can actually move.

Third year of college. Bangalore was the only thing that made sense. I had one college there I could transfer to, and honestly the college was an excuse. I needed to leave. Kolkata was killing me slowly and politely and I was letting it.

So I quit. Quit college. Moved to Bangalore.

Grandfather: teacher. Father: teacher. Son: dropout who moved to a city where he knew nobody. That sentence doesn’t go over well at family dinners. But here’s the thing — it was my sentence to write. Not theirs.

People love to talk about how someone else’s decision ruined their life. My parents said no to Germany. My college didn’t teach me anything useful. The economy was bad. COVID happened. All true. All irrelevant. Because at some point you have to look at your own life and say: okay, but what am I going to do about it?

That’s the whole thing. That’s the entire point. There is no map. There is no path. There is no sequence of correct decisions that someone can hand you. It’s your life and you fundamentally have to decide. Not your parents. Not your teachers. Not the economy. You.

And that’s terrifying. I know. I’ve been terrified every time. But the alternative is what? Sitting in Kolkata being depressed and running an agency that doesn’t work while attending a college that doesn’t matter? That’s not safe. That’s just slow.

Bangalore didn’t fix anything. Let me be clear about that. I didn’t show up and suddenly everything clicked. I showed up and I was broke and confused and starting from zero again. The only difference was I had chosen it.

That matters more than you think. When the suffering is something you chose, you can work with it. When it’s something that happened to you, it just eats you.

I kept building. Said yes to everything. Worked for free — not because I was being strategic about building trust or whatever LinkedIn nonsense people say. I worked for free because I genuinely could not bring myself to send an invoice. I built entire systems for people and then couldn’t say “pay me.” I still can’t pitch. I can build you everything. Top to bottom, the whole thing. Ask me to sell it and I become a different person. Smaller.

But here’s what happens when you keep showing up. People don’t talk about how talented you are. Nobody’s saying that. They say: he delivers. He doesn’t bullshit. He shows up. And slowly — in a way you’ll never see happening — trust forms.

Trust is the only real currency. I didn’t learn that from a business book. I learned it from the guy who ran a shop in my neighborhood growing up. Never cheated anyone. Didn’t have a brand. Didn’t optimize anything. The whole area trusted him with their lives. He had more real capital than most startup founders I’ve met. Just a different kind.

The internet was my only window. The only thing that showed me the menu had more than three items. I found out product management existed from a YouTube video. That people got paid to think about systems. That there were entire careers nobody in my zip code had mentioned.

When you go from three options to infinite options, you go a little insane. You try everything. Every new thing feels like the thing. You start a hundred projects. Finish three. I did this for years. It looked like chaos from outside. From inside it just felt like my life.

What kept me going wasn’t talent. It was stubbornness. The same stubbornness that made my grandfather walk to school every day for forty years. The same thing that made my mom hold everything together when nothing was designed to help her. I inherited the refusal to stop. I didn’t choose it. I just have it.

I don’t have a map. I’ve never had a map. The map everyone else was using was drawn by people who could only see what was in front of them. Not malicious. Just local.

Nobody told me I couldn’t go this fast. So I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to.

Some days I’m on a call with people in different countries talking about products that handle real money and I think — I dropped out of college. I can’t pitch. Five years ago I had nothing. How is this real?

I don’t know. I don’t think it matters. The game doesn’t care about your backstory. It cares about whether you show up.

I show up.

The decisions are the thing. Not the outcomes, not the circumstances, not the luck. The decisions.

Every time I decided — leave Vishakhapatnam, fail IIT, stay in Kolkata, quit, move to Bangalore, build for free, say yes when I should’ve said maybe — every single one of those decisions was mine. Some were smart. Some were stupid. Most were just desperate.

But they were mine. And that’s the only thing that made the difference.

You’re reading this and maybe you’re in your version of Kolkata. Stuck somewhere, doing five things badly, waiting for permission to start your actual life. Nobody is going to give you that permission. The map doesn’t exist. The path isn’t real. The sequence of safe decisions that guarantees everything works out — fiction.

Your life is yours. Decide something. It’ll probably go wrong. Start from zero again. It’s not the end. It never was.