Sai Sethu asked me to sum up my benchmark for India in under a minute. Not GDP, not infrastructure, not a ranking against Singapore or South Korea. I gave him one line: India has a thousand versions of everything except you.
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The country has 22 scheduled languages and easily ten times that many dialects. A single state can carry four distinct cuisines depending on which river you’re standing near. Festivals, scripts, marriage customs, all fractal, all local, all defiantly multiple. Then you get to the question every Indian kid answers by age twelve: what do you want to become? The honest answer key has four entries. Engineer. Doctor. Government job. MBA. Everything else gets filed under hobby, side hustle, or “eventually, after retirement.”
The four-track script comes from scarcity, not culture. A generation raised on limited college seats and a License Raj economy treated stability as survival. Four safe tracks for over a billion people was a coping mechanism, and the caution has outlived the shortage that created it.
I’ve been in branding for 26 years, the last 16 of them running writeclick. I’ve also pulled over 400 snakes out of houses and drains, most of them in the three peak months of monsoon. I photograph raptors, badly some days, well on others. I do stand-up at Malhar Laugh Club. I do close-up card magic, the kind built on misdirection rather than sleight alone. And in the last five months I’ve built eighteen small apps and put them online, on my own, without a team.
None of these are hobbies bolted onto a real job. Each one runs on its own clock, its own risk, its own audience that doesn’t care what I do for a living.
The four-track model assumes skill only moves within a lane. It doesn’t. Bird photography doesn’t teach you to be a better brand consultant by osmosis, but the discipline of sitting still for three hours for a shot that might never come does teach you what patience actually costs, and that shows up everywhere. Stand-up doesn’t transfer as a skill either, but it recalibrates your relationship with rejection, because a room’s silence is data, not judgment, and you learn to read it fast. Handling a cobra a foot from your hand doesn’t teach you anything about a client deck, but it does teach you what your body does under real pressure, which is a different education than what your CV does under pressure.
What transfers isn’t the skill. It’s the operating system underneath it, the way you approach an unfamiliar problem when the manual doesn’t exist yet.
I want to be careful here, because “do many things” is also the alibi of people who never got good at any one thing. Plurality isn’t the same as scatter. Four hundred rescues is not a weekend interest, it’s a discipline with its own hours logged, same as writeclick, same as the apps. The test isn’t how many lanes you’re in. It’s whether you’re actually accountable in each one, whether something breaks if you’re bad at it. A hobby has no downside. A second track does.
The usual argument for staying in one lane is that depth beats breadth, and specialists win. That held when the risk was another human doing your one job cheaper. It doesn’t hold when the risk is a model doing your one job instantly, for the cost of a query. The most replaceable skill right now is the well-defined one: rules, patterns, precedent, a diagnosis from symptoms, a contract from a template, a paragraph from a brief. What’s harder to automate is the judgment that moves sideways, the person who’s sat with enough different systems to recognise a shape from one domain showing up in another. That kind of judgment is turning into the job itself, not the insurance policy behind it.
Ask a kid what they want to become and the country hands them four answers. Ask what India wants to become and it hands out a thousand. I’ve spent 26 years betting on the second answer.
