The Capitalist Monk
On wanting a great deal, pursuing it seriously, and still recognising yourself afterwards.
Most writing about ambition offers a choice between two positions. The first says the cost is the point: sleep less, want more, and treat exhaustion as evidence that something is working. The second says the whole pursuit is a trap, and that the way out is to step back and want less. Both are coherent. Neither describes what building something actually feels like from the inside.
There is a third position, and it is the one almost nobody writes about because it resists a slogan. It is possible to want a great deal, to chase it without apology, and to remain someone your family recognises at the end of it. The monk half of the title is not about renunciation. It is about attention — knowing what is being done, and why, and what it is costing, rather than running on momentum and calling that commitment. The capitalist half is not an apology either. Ambition is not the problem. Ambition that has stopped asking questions is.
Tushar Tayal has been running a company since he was seventeen. The writing comes out of that rather than out of a theory: what it is like to be responsible for a payroll, to want something badly enough to reorganise a life around it, and to notice, at intervals, that the person doing the wanting has quietly changed shape. A book of the same name is in progress. It does not have a date, and it will not have one until the writing is finished.
Ambition is not the problem. Ambition that has stopped asking questions is.
What he could write about
These are directions the writing is likely to take, not published pieces.
What a visa desk teaches about ambition
Watching other people's plans stall for administrative reasons changes what a person thinks they are owed.
Seventy people
On the distance between wanting to build something and being answerable to everyone inside it.
The discipline nobody praises
Refusing work is harder than accepting it, and the refusals are what make the rest possible.
Staying in Tezpur
On what a small city holds onto that ambition tends to spend first.