An essay, in five movements.
I. The Discovery
I grew up doing the things a good Indian student is expected to do, and doing them well enough. Top of the state board in a subject or two. A decent run through Narsee Monjee in Bombay. The quiet prizes that come to boys who study hard and keep their heads down. None of it mattered in the way I am about to describe.
What mattered were the lives I was quietly watching.
I was a reader before I was anything else, and I read mostly biographies — the actual lives of actual people. Over the years I noticed a pattern in the lives that drew me. It was never the wealthiest people. It was rarely the most famous. It was almost always the widest — men and women who had given real time to their work and their families and their societies and their reading; who had kept a sense of humour through everything the world had thrown at them; who seemed, above all else, to be paying attention.
I was reading, though I did not know the word for it yet, for ikigai. For the Japanese sense of a life worth the morning. I was reading to learn how a life could be held open — how a person could be a professional and a parent and a citizen and a seeker, and not have one of those lives quietly eat the others.
And I was lucky — this is not a small thing — to fall into work with colleagues who lived like this. Engineers who wrote poetry. Founders who mentored children at schools they would never speak about publicly. Quiet givers. Serious readers. People who, when you sat with them, made you feel like the universe was slightly warmer than you had suspected.
Somewhere in those years — through the books, through the people, through the slow accumulation of watching — I arrived at a conviction I have held ever since.
I did not want a successful life. I wanted a wide one. I wanted a warm one. I wanted, though I would not have the word for another decade, a sunshine one.
That conviction is the origin of everything you are about to read. The technology career. The travel. The writing. The languages. The ventures. The teaching. Every room in the house you are standing in was built around a single idea I borrowed from every generous life I had ever admired: that the point is not to excel in one room. The point is to be awake in many.
II. A Cab Driver in Nice
The contrast was almost cruel. I had been at Auschwitz one weekend and I was at Cannes the next. Introspection in the morning, illumination in the evening. Guilt and glamour. Prayer and party. I do not think I had ever felt the world’s two registers so close together, or so far apart.
Somewhere in between, I was in a cab on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice. It was a beautiful afternoon. The beach was full of people. The cab driver and I began to talk about the thing nobody in the cab wanted to talk about — the truck that had driven down this exact promenade the previous Bastille Day and turned a celebration into a cemetery in four minutes.
I asked him what he thought of the upcoming election. Whether Le Pen could win. Whether the rising tide of intolerance — Brexit a few months earlier, Trump a few months before that — had reached his street. He shrugged the way working men shrug when they have already thought a thing through. He told me he did not believe in politics.
I asked him then what he believed in. He said: be a good citizen. Work hard. Look after your family. Care for your neighbour. Do the right thing in the small things. The world becomes a better place with you in it. That is all.
I have been carrying that cab driver’s sentence with me for years. It is, I think, the cleanest philosophy of a sunshine life I have ever been given.
I have stopped looking for wisdom in the obvious places. I have started looking for it in cabs.
III. What Was Given
Whatever there is in me of warmth was given to me by my mother.
Whatever there is in me of spine was given to me by my father.
I am, in every meaningful sense, a collaboration between those two inheritances. Warmth from one side. Principle from the other.
IV. What I Believe
I have spent my career in technology, and I have come to believe things that many of my peers in this industry do not.
I believe that simplicity is a form of intelligence, and that the ability to unplug is now a rarer skill than the ability to code.
And I believe, most of all, that warmth matters more than intellect.
V. What I Fear
I am writing this at a moment when the world is teaching itself to be more efficient than it has ever been, and I am afraid of what we are quietly giving up for that efficiency.
This fear is, in the end, why this site exists.
VI. What I Am Trying To Be
I am not trying to be successful. I am trying to be wide. I am trying to be warm. I am trying to be useful.
And I am trying, most of all, to live a sunshine life.
He was a human being who loved and lived well.
— Ash
This page is an essay, not a biography. For the résumé version, see Exec Profile.