{"id":4616,"date":"2026-04-29T10:09:20","date_gmt":"2026-04-29T10:09:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/?page_id=4616"},"modified":"2026-06-08T10:19:06","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T10:19:06","slug":"a-life-in-many-rooms","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/a-life-in-many-rooms\/","title":{"rendered":"A Life In Many Rooms"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

An essay, in five movements.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I. The Discovery<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What mattered were the lives I was quietly watching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was a reader before I was anything else, and I read mostly biographies \u2014 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I was lucky \u2014 this is not a small thing \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Somewhere in those years \u2014 through the books, through the people, through the slow accumulation of watching \u2014 I arrived at a conviction I have held ever since.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

II. A Cab Driver in Nice<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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\u2019s two registers so close together, or so far apart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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 \u2014 the truck that had driven down this exact promenade the previous Bastille Day and turned a celebration into a cemetery in four minutes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I asked him what he thought of the upcoming election. Whether Le Pen could win. Whether the rising tide of intolerance \u2014 Brexit a few months earlier, Trump a few months before that \u2014 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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. It was not given to me by a guru or a thinker or a CEO. It was given to me by a man who had been driving a taxi up and down the Promenade des Anglais while the world quietly cracked down its middle, and he had decided that the only sane response was to be useful in his small square of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have stopped looking for wisdom in the obvious places. I have started looking for it in cabs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

III. What Was Given<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Whatever there is in me of warmth was given to me by my mother. She taught me, without ever lecturing me, that relationships are the only real wealth \u2014that a phone call made, a meal shared, a visitor welcomed, is the currency of a well-lived life. She taught me to be generous with time, kinder than was necessary, and to keep the door open. Every Gujarati in our extended family
knew: whatever house she ran would feel like home.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Whatever there is in me of spine was given to me by my father. He taught me, mostly by example, that ethics is not a strategy. That money is useful but never sacred. That a man’s word is the thing he should guard most jealously, and that the family is the thing he should serve most quietly. He did not raise me to be successful. He raised me to be honourable, and trusted that the rest would
follow. It has.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am, in every meaningful sense, a collaboration between those two inheritances. Warmth from one side. Principle from the other. Everything I have built is built on their foundation, and I am still, at this age, trying to be worthy of both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

IV. What I Believe<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I have spent my career in technology, and I have come to believe things that many of my peers in this industry do not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I believe that smarter is not the same as wiser. That the smartest person in the room is often the loneliest. That the wisdom of a grandmother who has buried her griefs and kept her sweetness is worth more than the wisdom of a thousand dashboards.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I believe, most of all, that warmth matters more than intellect. That a kind human is a greater achievement than a clever one. That the point of building anything \u2014 a product, a company, a career, a reputation \u2014 is to make the world warmer than we found it. Not smarter. Warmer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These are not fashionable beliefs in the century we have been handed. I hold them anyway<\/p>\n\n\n\n

V. What I Fear<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am afraid we will forget the small pleasures \u2014 the first sip of morning tea, the quiet of a long train ride, the laughter of a family dinner that nobody photographed. I am afraid we will begin to treat each other as productive units, optimisable and replaceable. I am afraid we will lose our innocence \u2014 the childhood part of ourselves that once believed in wonder for its own sake.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am afraid that we will become, without meaning to, very intelligent machines made of flesh.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This fear is, in the end, why this site exists. Every essay I write, every travelogue, every Monday note, every film I return to, every Gujarati word I help preserve \u2014 all of it is a quiet argument against that future. A small, stubborn insistence that to be human is still a worthwhile thing to be.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

VI. What I Am Trying To Be<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

I am not trying to be successful. I have been fortunate enough to be that already, and I can tell you, from the other side of it, that success is a perfectly fine outcome and a poor destination.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am trying to be wide. To be awake in many rooms of life at once \u2014 the boardroom and the library, the airport and the kitchen, the code and the couplet. I am trying to be warm. To leave every person I meet a little lighter than I found them. I am trying to be useful. To take the small luck of one life and spread it across many.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And I am trying, most of all, to live a sunshine life.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Not a perfect one. Not a polished one. A sunshine one \u2014 with its weather and its weeks of cloud, its grief and its grace, its travel and its tea.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If any of this has moved you, write to me. I read every note.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What I hope, when all of this is done, is that someone who knew me well will be able to say the truest thing a life can earn:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He was a human being who loved and lived well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014 Ash<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This page is an essay, not a biography. For the r\u00e9sum\u00e9 version, see Exec Profile<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-4616","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4616","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4616"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4616\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4683,"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/4616\/revisions\/4683"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ashok-karania-wordpress.staging9.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4616"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}