Letter 156. There is no wrong door.

Dear friend,

Years ago I ran a small program for young people, ages seventeen to twenty one. Every session, every week, for five years. It never made a rupee. From the outside it looked like a hobby that had gotten a little out of hand. A few people who cared about me asked, gently, when I was going to do something serious.

I didn't have a good answer then. I have one now.

Those five unpaid years are the reason I can do what I do today. Everything I understand about how a young person actually learns, when to push and when to wait, how to hold a room full of restless seventeen year olds, none of it came from a book. It came from doing it badly, then less badly, then well. And that work, the work that looked like nothing, became the ground I'm now building on: a new category in Indian higher education, the country's first working BBA.

I'm not telling you this to talk about me. I'm telling you because of what those years taught me about where capability actually comes from. And because it's June, and somewhere very close to you, a family is losing sleep over the wrong question.

It's the season of the college decision. Cut-offs, forms, lists, that one uncle with the strong opinion. Almost every family I've met this fortnight is asking the same thing: which college? As though the name on the gate is a verdict on the child's whole life.

Let me take some weight off that question. Not by answering it. By showing you how small it actually is.

Three years of college is about 1,095 days. Take away sleep and you are left with roughly 17,520 waking hours.

Now look at how many of those hours the college actually fills. A full three year degree in India is about 1,800 hours of class. That is it. Around sixteen hours a week when college is in session. Ten to twelve percent of your child's waking life.

The decision the whole family is agonising over, college A versus college B, decides one tenth of the time.

So where do the other seventeen thousand hours go? Right now, mostly here. Indian eighteen to twenty five year olds spend close to seven hours a day on their screens. Over three years, that is around 7,400 hours. More than four times the classroom. The real competition for your child's degree was never the college down the road. It is the 7,400 hours of scrolling that nobody plans and nobody notices.

And here is the part that should change the question altogether. When McKinsey studied a million Indian working lives, they found that in India, work experience, not the degree, accounts for 58 percent of a person's lifetime earnings. For those climbing from where they started toward something better, it goes as high as 80 percent. What you do shapes your life far more than where you studied.

The employers already know this. Four out of five Indian executives now say they hire for demonstrated skill over pedigree. Campus placements account for only about a tenth of how India actually hires. And the skills those employers rank highest, analytical thinking, resilience, leadership, creativity, are exactly the ones no lecture hall can hand you. You build them by doing real things that carry real consequences.

So the marksheet is quietly losing its power as a signal. The door, the college name, is worth less than it has ever been. And those seventeen thousand unclaimed hours are worth more than they have ever been.

There is a series out right now about Alakh Pandey, the Physics Wallah teacher who has probably pointed more Indian children toward IIT and AIIMS than almost anyone alive. One scene has stayed with me. In the finale he stands in a hall packed with students who have defied a police order just to hear him, and he tells them the one thing you would never expect the country's most famous exam coach to say. That cracking IIT or AIIMS, for the respect and the money it is supposed to buy, should not be the only ambition of a young person's life.

Sit with that for a second. The man who sells the door, standing in front of a stadium of children, telling them the door was never the point.

This is why I have stopped believing there is a wrong door.

Pick a reasonable college your family can afford, and get on with it. Behind every one of those doors is the same thing waiting: three years, and seventeen thousand hours that belong to nobody until your child claims them. The wrong choice was never college A over college B. The only wrong choice is to walk through the door and hand those three years back, untouched, to the screen.

A degree is not a destiny. It is a door. What your child does behind it is the actual decision.

So here is something you can do this week, with the young person in your house. Not a pep talk. A plan for the hours.

Sit down and do the simple maths together. Seventeen thousand five hundred waking hours over three years. Subtract the 1,800 for class. Subtract a generous slice for rest, for friends, for simply being twenty. You will still find around eight thousand hours sitting there, unclaimed.

Now claim one block of it. Just two hours a day. Over three years that is roughly two thousand hours, pointed at one real thing they make, and keep making, out in the open.

Let me tell you why the open part matters. Years ago I set myself a challenge to draw one caricature a day. I am not a trained artist. There were days I was travelling, tired, not in the mood. I posted anyway. A hundred and fifty days later I had a body of work. A woman in Vienna who had been quietly watching the pile grow asked me to illustrate her book. I did not get that work from a CV. I got it because the work was visible, stacked up where the world could walk past it.

That is what two thousand deliberate hours can build that a degree cannot. A visible body of work. The college decides ten percent of the time. This decides the rest.

If you know a family deep in the college search right now, the ones with the lists and the late night worry, forward them this letter. It will not tell them which college to choose. It will do something more useful. It will lift the pressure off the wrong question, and set it back down on the one that matters. Not which door, but what gets built in the three years behind it.

And if this letter was forwarded to you, welcome. You can get one of your own every Sunday. Subscribe here: https://qrto.to/66f8cc1e

I made poha this week. The everyday kind, the one nobody ever wrote down.

Flattened rice rinsed just until it softens, never soaked into mush. In a little oil, mustard seeds, a pinch of hing, curry leaves, a slit green chilli, then onion cooked until it turns glassy. A boiled potato cube if there is one, a fistful of peanuts for the crunch, turmeric, salt, half a spoon of sugar. The poha folded in gently and left to steam under a lid for two minutes. Lemon squeezed at the very end, never before. Coriander on top, and sev if the house has any.

Here is the thing about poha. There is no correct one. In one home they add potato, in another only peanuts, in another a fistful of peas. Some like it sweet, some sour, some fiery. Every version is right. The only wrong poha is the one you were too unsure to make.

That is the whole letter, really. There is no wrong door, and there is no wrong poha. There is only the pan you commit to, and what you choose to put in it over the hours. Pick a reasonable pan. Then spend the time.

If anything here found you, write back, and tell me what the young person in your life is quietly building. I read every reply.

In fratitude (friendship and gratitude),

Adi

P.S. If you are watching a restless young person who can't sit still in the classroom but lights up the moment they are building something real, I wrote a whole book about putting exactly that energy to work. It is called Restless to Remarkable. You can find it here.

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