I read a story on Monday morning that I kept returning to for the rest of the day.
The kind of story that sounds simple on the surface, a first-generation student who cleared a major competitive examination and is going back to the place he started. But the shape of it was not simple at all. There was something in it that I have been trying to put words to for a long time, about what it looks like when someone truly arrives, not at a rank or a role, but at themselves. The piece below is what I wrote after sitting with it. The question at the end is one I am still sitting with myself.
In the forests of Raipur, a boy grew up picking tendu patta, the leaves used to roll bidis, gathered by families across generations in this part of India.
He did not study the forest. He grew up in it.
Then he left.
A door appeared that he didn't know existed. Someone, somewhere, taught him it could open.
He entered an NIT. He cleared the Indian Forest Service examination. Rank 91.
His name is Ajay Gupta.
He is going back to the forest.
Not as a boy gathering leaves.
As an officer who will protect the tree those leaves grow on.
I read this story this morning and have been sitting with it for hours.
The rank is extraordinary enough. What I keep returning to is the shape of the journey, that he didn't run from the forest to reach somewhere better. He ran toward it, with everything the climb had given him.
There is a question I have spent years watching people answer. Sometimes explicitly. More often through the choices they make without quite noticing they are making them.
What are you actually climbing toward?
In the early years, the answer is usually honest and predictable. The promotion. The title. The package. The recognition. The proof. These are the right things for a long time, the signals that you are moving, that the years of effort are landing, that the mountain is worth climbing.
I understand this. I lived it.
But I have watched what happens when the proof arrives.
For some, and this is more common than anyone admits, the arrival changes nothing. They keep moving, climb faster, reach the next summit and find it too is not the summit. They begin to wonder, quietly, whether they chose the right mountain.
For others, something different happens.
They go back. Not physically, not always. But back to the thing underneath all the earlier things, back to the problem they were drawn to before they knew it could have a career attached to it, back to the room they walked into and felt, without explanation, exactly like themselves.
I have met people who reach the top of a long career and describe a feeling of misalignment they cannot name.
Successful by every external measure. And yet.
When I ask, carefully, because it takes time for this kind of conversation to open, what they were drawn to before the ambition arrived, something different comes out. Something that sounds almost embarrassing to say out loud after decades of climbing the visible mountain.
The misalignment is not between who they are and what they have done. It is between what they have done and what they were originally trying to serve.
The forest they started in.
Ajay Gupta's forest was literal. Most people's is not.
But there is one.
The problem you were trying to solve before anyone told you it was worth solving. The question you kept returning to, in different forms, across different roles and organisations, because it wouldn't leave you alone.
That is the forest.
Most careers, mine included, are built on moving away from it. Not deliberately. Just forward. The way ambition moves.
The forest gives you roots. The climb gives you reach. They're not opposites, they're sequential. But there is a version of the climb that circles back. That uses everything the mountain gave, the skills, the clarity, the hard-won perspective, to serve the thing that was there before any of it.
Less about acquiring. More about returning.
The people who find their way to it tend to carry a stillness that the people still collecting summits haven't found. Not because they achieved less. Because they finally know what they were climbing for.
I have never returned to a literal forest.
But I know what mine is.
All those years in media, building organisations, managing at scale, underneath all of it sat a belief I've held since before I had words for it. That the way information moves through a society shapes that society. That what people watch, read, hear changes how they see themselves and each other.
I didn't plan my career around this. I couldn't have, I was too busy surviving the early years, learning how organisations worked, making the mistakes available to someone of my specific limitations and specific hunger.
But looking back, the belief was always there. The forest was always there. I was heading back to it even when I thought I was heading somewhere else.
This is not a post about following your passion. I have never found that advice useful.
Passions are luxuries in the early climb. You do the work in front of you and you keep moving. But underneath the career, usually, there is something quieter, a current that runs below it. A question the work kept answering, even when you didn't know that was what it was doing.
If you are early in the climb, find the work, do the work. The forest will still be there.
If you are midway up, it is worth sitting with the question, not to abandon what you are building, but to check whether the mountain you are on points toward the thing that actually matters to you.
If you have been climbing for a long time, you already know what the forest is. The only question is whether you are walking back toward it.
Ajay Gupta cleared his exam, earned his rank, went back to the forest he grew up in.
"It was only after entering NIT that I realised I could aim higher. The forest has given me everything."
I have heard versions of that sentence from every person who truly arrived, not just at success, but at themselves. The gratitude is never for the destination. It is for the beginning.
The forest gave him everything. He just needed the climb to understand how to give it back.
What is the forest you started in?
And does the mountain you are climbing today point back toward it?
One thing I have noticed, across years of watching people navigate the climb: the ones who can answer the forest question clearly, even roughly, even imperfectly, tend to make better decisions. About roles, about when to stay and when to move, about what they are willing to sacrifice and what they are not. Not because they have everything figured out. But because they have something to orient toward, something that sits below the noise of the immediate options. If you have ten minutes this week, quietly, away from whatever is urgent, it is worth asking the question.