1. The Leap of Faith: My ‘Why’

I’ll never forget the night I decided to move to India.

The 10th of November, 2022. It started as a quiet night, dinner with a few close friends in Atlanta, Georgia, sprawled out on low cushions on the floor, a homecooked meal thoroughly enjoyed, a raga humming in the background, simply sharing space. And yet, something in the air had been cracked open.

The conversation had drifted from philosophy to history to ancestry, into the quiet inheritance of culture, and expectation. I spoke of my grandfather, who taught me the harmonium at five, his hands resting over mine, guiding each note with a tenderness that needed no translation. I spoke of how, around the same time, I learned to answer to “Shaun” at school for ease of pronunciation, even as Shaurya lived on at home. I spoke of my father’s years in the Indian Army: of how he came down from Siachen Glacier, the highest battlefield in the world, for my birth; of how the Shaurya Veer Chakra he was nominated for became my namesake. He was the third generation in uniform. His discipline and sense of duty converged with my mother’s lineage—doctors, entrepreneurs, builders in their own right, rooted in selfless service and purpose.

We traced lineage, not just through bloodlines, but through the ideas that shaped us. Conversation slipped into memory, and turned into something more fundamental. We spoke of India as it was and as it remains: a place that once carried a quarter of the world’s wealth, where trade moved with intention and knowledge passed hand to hand. Then came the long interruption, a quiet dismantling. A colonizing force that did not stop at borders or economies, but moved inward—into language, into imagination, until even the idea of power had to be relearned. Until now. How, in our lifetimes, India had surpassed the UK’s economy. A rebalancing that felt less like data, and more like something ancestral reclaiming its breath.

My friends didn’t offer answers. They offered questions, the kind that turn over in your chest long after they’re spoken.

One asked me, “How does heritage play a role in your future?”

Another said, “What part of you are you waiting to reclaim?”

The conversations hit somewhere I didn’t know I’d been bracing.

For weeks, I had been in quiet, practical conversations all pointing toward India as a potential place to build from. But I hadn’t said it out loud. Not to any of my friends or family, until that night. I hadn’t let the idea move from logic into longing.

Once everyone had cleared my apartment and silence settled in, the real conversation began.

My mind was awake in ways my body wasn’t prepared for. More than racing, it was assembling. Quietly. Intently. Like some deeper part of me had opened the vault and started laying pieces on the floor.

I began a brain dump in my notebook. No framework, just fragments. A phrase here, a year there. I opened old writings, essays, articles, each one like a drawer pulled out from a different life: Medical missions. MDJunior reports. Hopkins lectures. UNDP briefs. McKinsey decks. Insight strategy docs. Letters from Honduras. Essays from South Africa. Papers on India. Field notes I’d forgotten I wrote.

It felt as if my experiences were a set of disparate puzzle pieces coming together. A shape here echoing a contour there. Each node not a web but a trend, quietly forming part consciously part subconsciously, leading me back through the years like tuning forks across time.

The wildfire relief camp in Los Angeles was where it all began. It was 2005. I was ten, tucked inside a Red Cross tent that smelled of antiseptic and ash. My hands were too small to carry most things, but I passed out what I could: first aid kits, water bottles, peanut butter jelly sandwiches. What I remember most, though, were the long lines of people waiting outside the makeshift tents: a doctor for every thousand. No clear system, just improvisation. Something in my body absorbed that feeling: when formal structures collapse, people who care find ways to help. I didn’t have words for it then, but I left that day with a quiet knowing. Presence matters most when order is gone.

At fourteen, MDJunior started as a scribble in a school notebook—an idea to inspire selfless service through mentorship, pairing students with healthcare professionals for service projects. It was messy at first: handwritten flyers, cold emails to doctors, planning in between classes (and occasionally during). But then, almost overnight, it spread. Facebook was still raw and new, and the idea caught fire. One chapter became ten. Ten became thirty. I started pitching MDJunior to anyone who would listen: board rooms, city halls, school assemblies, CSR heads, rotaries, hackathons. Sometimes it was ten people. Sometimes a thousand.

My slides were bad. The story wasn’t. What I didn’t know at the time was that I was building infrastructure, disguised as teenage ambition. I didn’t call it “ops” back then, but that’s what it was. We had onboarding packets hacked together in Google Docs, training calls on free conference lines where half the people forgot to unmute, calendars taped to bedroom walls with colored sticky notes for who was doing what by when. I was setting agendas, collecting chapter reports, rewriting the same welcome email twenty different ways to make it sound less like a robot. Somewhere in between, we launched our leadership summits and stitched together our playbooks. I developed a core public health curriculum and culture based on three pillars of success: knowledge, skills, and attitude.

Over time, MDJunior expanded into over fifty chapters across eight countries, engaging tens of thousands of students and medical professionals. We raised over $2 million through grassroots efforts and received recognition from the Obama Administration, Peter Thiel, Harris Wofford, Dr. Ben Carson, and a number of other institutions for our impact.

As MDJunior grew, so did the other sides of me. I spent nights and summers inside clinics and labs—tracking cardiovascular outcomes in a heart surgeon’s clinic over two years, studying socioeconomic disparities in Diffuse B Cell Lymphoma, and researching geriatric care models at Emory.

If MDJunior was where I learned to build community, research was where I learned to investigate its blind spots. And then there was policy debate: my greatest passion at the time, and one of the most demanding learning experiences I’ve ever had. Everything was earned: how fast you could research, how sharply you could rebuild an argument, how clearly you could cut through noise. I competed at the highest levels of the national circuit, but what stayed with me was learning how to take a mountain of complexity and make it matter.

Honduras shifted the ground beneath me. I was sixteen when I first stepped into those rural mountain villages, carrying boxes of medicine in a caravan of volunteers, all medical students about a decade older than me. The sun was brutal, but I did fall in love with the airy comfort of scrubs. Our clinics had dirt floors and paper charts, and yet our work felt like the most innovative thing the region had ever seen.

Somehow, word got around. A few influential people in the country found my story compelling, and just like that, a partnership was born. A commitment to bring our MDJunior students and medical professionals to Honduras, in collaboration with Sister Maria Rosa (the “Mother Teresa” of the country) along with the Honduran presidency.

Over the next eight years, I led fifteen medical missions. Each one a little more organized, a little more trusted, a little more ours. We partnered with local leaders, government agencies, and local partners to co-develop a ‘non-toxic’ model of global health—one that combined clinical care with public health infrastructure, and centered community-based learning over top-down aid. Each mission was student-led, with American and Honduran doctors working side by side.

We assigned leads for medical camps, public health infrastructure, pharmacy & medications, intake & triage, health education, general logistics. We designed health education curricula from scratch, building workshops with local community leaders and youth ambassadors. We learned to listen before acting.

We set up sanitation stations, implemented basic electronic medical records, and established referral systems that could bridge the gap between remote villages and regional hospitals. We built clinics, systems, and infrastructure meant to last long after we left.

Over time, we saw infections drop, access rise, and something deeper begin to take root: trust. But with it came the harder truth: our biggest limitation wasn’t treatment—it was follow through. Though we brought people into systems, generated diagnoses and electronic records, nothing beyond that held them there. Like the woman with a severe diabetic foot ulcer, who, between our visits, never went to the hospital like we’d told her to. We saw her time and time again, until the time she didn’t. These weren’t stories, they were people. And they had lodged themselves deep in my chest. By the end, we brought over 7,500 patients into the healthcare system, built sanitation infrastructure across five villages, and reduced parasitic and infectious disease incidence by over 30%. But what stayed with me wasn’t the impact. It was the gap. 

At Johns Hopkins, I began to see the patterns I had lived through. My coursework in public health and pre-med gave language to what I’d always intuited: access vs. equity, efficacy vs. trust, scale vs. stickiness. I published my public health work and led the undergraduate public health journal, Epidemic Proportions. I launched national health campaigns, conferences, hackathons.

In my mind, healthcare stopped being a point of access but a system: a layered, intersecting mesh of actors, incentives, behaviors, and the residue of decisions made long ago.

And then came my UNDP fellowship in India. My fork in the road. I was dropped into the bloodstream of the country’s immunization policies, handed a wide mandate: find the gaps.

Most distinctly, I remember poring over spreadsheets no one had ever touched. I applied queue theory, something I’d picked up in a business class, to model vaccine flow. The insight: it was taking the BCG vaccine (for Tuberculosis) over 1.5 years to get through the supply chain, longer than the 12-month shelf life of the vaccine. The Minister of Health was not happy. Our charter shifted, and leadership leaned in. We integrated my model into the system, making it live to forecast demand and shift from a pull- to push-based supply chain. The team that carried it forward deserves every bit of credit. But I’m proud to have lit the first match—a model that helped save 90 million vaccines from expiring unused. eVIN, as it was known then, would later be rebranded as COWIN during the pandemic. But by then, something had already shifted in me. I had learned to see the story in the numbers. I had seen how systems breathe, and how quietly they can fail.

McKinsey was a different kind of immersion. Like stepping into the cockpit of global decision-making.

Strategy lived at a different altitude here. My first case? A pharma commercial strategy for one of the biggest players on the planet. The next: a portfolio pricing overhaul that would send ripples through the gross-to-net bubble. Over two years, I was part of efforts to help unlock $2B in enterprise value, create digital health ecosystems, support access initiatives across 100+ drugs, redesign governance structures spanning 190+ countries. I moved through C-suites that resembled minimalist shrines: clean lines, filtered light, debates that decided the future of millions in minutes. My days started at 7 a.m. with research handoffs from international teams, followed by twelve hours of meetings, and nights building analytical models until 3 a.m., just in time to send them back across time zones. I stepped through every door I could—pharma, health systems, public health, tech, government. I saw where the models broke. Where good ideas stalled. Where frameworks ran out of breath. McKinsey sharpened my blade with strategic toolkits and analytical rigor. But more than that, it taught me pace. Operating cadence. The discipline of delivery under pressure. And how to move from insight to execution when the stakes were high and the timelines tight.

The venture world gave that blade speed. I wanted to move faster, to be closer to the builders. Inside the companies where growth wasn’t a theory, it was a daily fire to manage. Insight Partners, the leading global B2B SaaS investor with over $90B in AUM, through a partnership with Produx Labs, gave me that front row seat. I moved from diagnosis to deployment, working directly with founders and C-suites as they scaled everything from clinical trial platforms to drug discovery engines to behavioral health EMRs. I built tech roadmaps, launched products, ran user research sprints, and advised on tough calls around GTM, hiring, and prioritization. I fell in love with the mechanics of B2B software: the operating rhythm, the systems thinking, the balance between product vision and execution pressure. Some of the playbooks I built still circulate across Insight’s portfolio today.

After several quarters advising the executive team at Salesloft, I moved in-house to fine-tune the product org’s operating rhythm through rapid scale-up. I became a bridge between strategy and execution, driving engineering efficacy, reinforcing data-driven decision-making, and strengthening how product and GTM aligned around product-led growth. That was the shift. I was no longer advising scale. I was responsible for it.

By then, India had already started showing up in conversations. Quietly at first, then unmistakably. The tech ecosystem was compounding fast. B2B SaaS companies were being built in India for the U.S. and global markets. Strong unit economics enabled teams to build full product suites early in the fundraising journey, while mobile-first behavior created fertile ground for UX innovation. As for Indian Healthcare, it was filled with white spaces: less legacy, more urgency. Only 4 percent of doctors were using digital records, and yet the government was pushing for nationwide platforms like ABDM. Everyone I trusted from mentors, to advisors, to investors, were pointing in the same direction. But beneath the data was something harder to name. A kind of gravitational pull. [watch out for the next article to dive deeper into specific Indian ecosystem dynamics]

In that moment, as I sat there watching the sky turn indigo with the rising sun, I couldn’t help but reflect on the convergence of past, future, and present. The throughline was impossible to ignore.

Sharpening the blade wasn’t the point, it was a means to an end. Underneath it was something quieter, the thread that had been pulling at me for years.  A sense that the real test, the one that would ask all of me, was still ahead.

All the noise had given way to something still.

In that quiet moment the resonance was unmistakable, like tuning forks ringing in harmony. I knew, with more conviction than I’d ever felt, that the only way to honor my past, my heritage, and the privileges that shaped me was to put my conviction to the test. And only one word held tension, history, and possibility all at once. An unfinished sentence, finally finding its missing subject.

India.

That night, I felt something loosen. A kind of exhale that had taken years to arrive. The kind that comes when you finally stop running from your own story.