She Is Always There

My work takes me far. Distant cities, unfamiliar time zones, weeks away from the life I have built at home. I am not complaining. I am genuinely grateful for every bit of it. The ability to build something, to create an organisation and leave behind something that outlasts me, is not something I take lightly.
But travel does something to you. It puts you in rooms with people who speak casually about inherited wealth, about businesses passed down through generations, about parents who laid the foundation so they could simply continue building. And for a long time, in those moments, a quiet grief would find me. I lost my parents early. I have my grandparents, my in-laws, a wider family that loves me fully. Yet there is a hollow somewhere. A space that, if I am not careful, can pull me toward self-pity faster than I would like to admit.

But here is what I have come to understand.
I have my motherland.

When we arrive in this world, two things are given to us without our consent and remain ours for life. We do not choose the family we are born into, and we do not choose the soil we are born on. India is mine. Not by achievement, not by effort, not by luck. By birthright. And that means it comes with responsibility. It means I owe her something.

There is a feeling I cannot fully explain in words, but I will try. It does not matter how long I have been away, or how rough the trip has been. Fever, allergies, exhaustion, the particular kind of fatigue that comes from living out of a suitcase for too long. The moment I land at any airport in India, something shifts. My body settles. A strength comes through that was not there a moment before. She receives me every single time without condition.

That feeling does not let me stay passive.

When people speak about India not living up to its potential, I feel it. I do not dismiss it. But I do not sit in helplessness either. When I began exporting Indian paper in 2014, the first two years were not about selling. They were about undoing. Undoing the negative perception of Indian paper, Indian management, Indian reliability. It was real work, and it was sometimes uncomfortable work. Because yes, not all of us have been the best ambassadors. We know this. But that discomfort is precisely the point. It is not for someone else to fix. It is on us, as a community, to raise the standard quietly and consistently, through what we do every single day.

India can. India will. And when it does, those who stood at the edges will find their way to the front. That is fine. The work still gets done.

I would never do anything to bring shame to the memory of my parents or the name of my family. I hold the same line with my country. She is not an abstraction to me. She is not a passport or a flag or a national holiday. She is the ground I come back to. She is the mother I did not lose.

Every time I return from somewhere far, I touch her ground. Not as a ritual. As gratitude. As acknowledgement that out of 1.4 billion children, I was one of them, and I do not take that lightly.
I am not an orphan. I carry the strength of my biological parents, wherever they are, and I carry hers. That is more than enough to keep going.

 Cover image generated using AI for illustrative purposes.