A six-word tragedy, often attributed to Hemingway: “For sale. Children’s shoes. Never worn.”
It’s the unsaid that seeks to haunt us, and our negativity gene draws the most sinister conclusion. The above line could have many endings, the shoes didn’t fit being actually the most obvious, and yet the mind jumps to a baby’s untimely death.
I met her on a flight. Maya, the flight attendant, was on a long flight to New York. I was single in my late 20s and, frankly, never imagined she’d be interested. Time flew; I could make out that we had nothing in common, but she looked stunning. Every so often, she would pass by and slip me another of those miniature vodka bottles! By the time we reached New York, I was totally talli, speaking broken Mumbai language! My cloudy, alcohol-infused mind could only deal with collecting my stuff. My bags, my headphones, my books, and before I knew it, I was packed and in line to exit. Not confident I could speak straight, I didn’t know how to ask for that woman who seemed interested in me.
I couldn’t ask for her number. The words wouldn’t come. I didn’t know then that I was fighting against my father’s dictionary and generations of ‘not good enough’ that lived within me.
That road passed me by, and life moved on: one of countless moments when words stayed trapped while opportunity walked away.
The Silent Ambition
I inherited this ambition without recognising it for decades. My father, an IAS officer who had cracked one of India’s toughest exams in 1958, kept a tattered Oxford dictionary in our bathroom for years. I wondered what it was doing there until he explained: despite his achievement, he felt like a “hillbilly from Nagpur” when surrounded by colleagues from St. Stephen’s and elite colleges. The fear of not being articulate enough was real, so he memorised that dictionary page by page, reading it in the only private space he could find.
That thought of my father using the loo as his only sanctuary to build his command over the language. That image should have been touching. Instead, it became my blueprint. The message was clear: no achievement is enough if you feel inadequate inside. There’s always more work to be done in private to compensate for what you lack.
However, the most profound lesson came during my engineering years, when I was struggling to complete it, finding it hard to make progress, and stumbling through. It was 1987; mobile phones did not exist. One night, my father called the hostel’s standard phone downstairs. No privacy, friends assembled doing timepass around me. He asked if he could speak confidentially. I said yes, though I had no private space to take the call.
He had been summoned to meet Rajiv Gandhi, our Prime Minister. I let out a whoop of excitement, then quieted down as heads turned. The Prime Minister had appointed him to the Board of Directors of the Asian Development Bank in Manila, Philippines. Unlike typical postings for nearly retired officers, Rajiv Gandhi explained that my father was chosen because he was still young and could come back after the stint & still contribute.
Then came the twist that defined my relationship with achievement: my father went on to explain why he felt he was being sidelined, why this apparent honor was actually punishment. In the months that followed, I saw an unhappy man who had time for tennis and golf, but found no satisfaction in them.
The lesson stuck with me: nothing was good enough. Every summit demanded the next one. Even when the Prime Minister of India personally selects you for a prestigious international posting, if it doesn’t feel like the pinnacle you imagined, it becomes evidence of failure.
Yet as I examine this inheritance, I realize I may have been caught in a societal gender play, overlooking my mother’s equally powerful ambition because her stories lacked the male hero worship element. At 86, she remains active, teaching science to school teachers after a full career as an educator. Her ambition fueled all of us children through the daily hurly-burly of life – she was always there while my father was away at the office. But perhaps I focused on his dramatic insecurities precisely because they fit a narrative I could recognize: the accomplished man secretly compensating for inadequacy.
My mother’s steady, persistent drive to educate and improve didn’t have the drama of my father’s life, his dictionary sessions, or disappointment over prestigious postings. Her ambition operated differently – a little less about compensating for wounds, more about expanding what was possible. I’m still discovering how both parents shaped the inheritance, how her daily modeling of “there’s always more to learn and teach” combined with his “nothing is ever quite enough” to create my particular brand of driving leadership.
Two parents, two forms of ambition, one child trying to satisfy both – and succeeding but in his own unique way!
I carried both their silences into my life. Into my leadership. Into every decision about what to say and when to be silent.
The Weight of Leadership Silence
In the work I do with leaders, I explore leadership as the act of claiming the unsaid for others—voicing vision, addressing conflict, or admitting vulnerability to inspire teams. I also explore what successful leaders carry but cannot say publicly—the weight of decisions, the loneliness of responsibility, and the gap between their public persona and private doubts.
Once, I chose silence over voicing my decision when I decided to leave active operations at my company, Cequity. I knew this was the first step towards an eventual exit, but I worried about giving the exit signal to senior colleagues. I didn’t want to jeopardise our work; it had been hard work creating a company from scratch. And yet leaving that truth unsaid is something that still hurts me. I could have shared my thoughts; it would have only strengthened my relations with my colleagues. In reality, what I had helped build was much larger than just me. It wouldn’t have been affected.
And yet, I am also becoming increasingly comfortable with leaving things unsaid.
What We Claim by Not Speaking
The silence isn’t withholding the truth. The silence is what we claim.
The move to Goa forced a reckoning. I could finally hear what the ambition whisper was really saying: my father’s voice, and his father’s before him, all of us compensating for inadequacies we couldn’t name.
Every accomplished leader carries some version of their father’s dictionary in the bathroom: the private work done to compensate for feeling insufficient, the fear that without constant motion, someone will discover they don’t belong.
The fundamental insight isn’t that ambition is wrong, but that unconscious ambition is dangerous because it’s never truly our own. We become servants to our parents’ unmet needs – both spoken and unspoken, both dramatic and daily – running from their fears while thinking we’re chasing our own dreams.
My Daughters’ Dictionary
Now, with daughters at 23 and 29, I face the crucial question: what unspoken ambitions am I transmitting to them? Not through direct pressure, but through what I model about rest, contentment, and self-worth.
The answer came in no uncertain terms from them. We were transmitting all that we had imbued. Even as I thought I was being a different kind of parent, the never-enough pattern had found new ways to express itself. When my daughter moved to Goa, I struggled with the thought that she would not meet ambitious people her age in Goa; she would miss out unless she was in Mumbai, Bangalore, or Delhi. And yet Goa offered me the space & change in pace to make a difference. So I lived with that contradiction.
My daughter’s feedback compelled me to realize that unconscious ambition influences how we respond to others’ achievements and what we consider “good enough.”
My parents’ struggles created the privilege that lets me question their patterns—and that same privilege creates the responsibility to interrupt what doesn’t serve my daughters.
My current journey of finding comfort in slowness was only now beginning to disrupt the inherited pattern. But the real test isn’t in my own relationship with ambition anymore. It’s in how I let my daughters define their own relationship with achievement, their own measures of what’s enough.
This isn’t about abandoning ambition but about making it conscious, chosen rather than inherited. Some moments call for the full force of driving energy—the company-building, vision-casting urgency that creates change. But other moments call for something more radical: the courage to examine what we’re really seeking, the wisdom to question our inherited motivations, the revolutionary act of modeling that who you are without achieving is already sufficient.
The Missing Recipe
I’m still missing something fundamental. I have the freedom to choose when to speak and when to remain silent. For some, this is a luxury; silence isn’t a contemplative practice but a survival strategy. Constant action isn’t ambition but necessity.
What if some tensions are meant to remain unresolved? What if some parts of me are meant to stay in creative conflict rather than a harmonious blend?
It may be wiser not to resolve all the contradictions, but to learn to live with them. Some insights live not in the balance between speaking and silence, but in the beautiful, unresolved tension of never quite knowing which one to choose.
कभी तो सुने गा सन्नाटा, कहानियाँ चुप नहीं रहतीं
जिन्हें कह न सके हम, वक़्त उन्हें खुद बयां करता है
(unknown contributor, possibly contemporary)
“One day, even silence will be heard; stories never stay quiet.
The things we could not say, time itself narrates them.”
