To My Kush and Vagisha — A Father's Heart, Uncontained

 ## To My Kush and Vagisha — A Father's Heart, Uncontained

*June 25, 2026*

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There is a photograph I carry in my mind from 2011. Two young children, wide-eyed, stepping off a plane into a country that did not yet know their names. I had made a decision — perhaps the most consequential of my life — to leave behind everything familiar: my professional standing, my cultural anchors, the warmth of an extended family, and the comfort of being understood without having to explain myself.

I made that decision for you. Both of you.

In India, I watched brilliant young minds funnelled, year after year, into two narrow corridors: engineering or medicine. Not because that was their calling, but because that was the sanctioned path to dignity. I refused to hand you that constraint. I wanted you to have the freedom to choose who you would become — not be assigned it.

What I did not fully anticipate was the cost of that decision to me personally. Canada has its own corridors. Its own invisible walls. The skilled immigrant is welcomed in brochure and conference speech, then quietly steered into a system of body shopping dressed in the language of equal opportunity — a market that trades in human competence the way others trade in commodities. I refused to participate in practices I found unethical. That refusal had a price. Eleven years of it. Eleven years of hardship, of rebuilding from scratch in a country that smiled at the conference and looked past you in the corridor, of holding together a home environment that remained warm, curious, and open to the world — even when the world outside was neither warm nor open to us.

I do not say this for sympathy. I say it because today, standing in the sunlight of your achievements, I want you both to know the full weight of what this moment means to your father.

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**Kushagra** — you graduated from the University of Toronto, and now you are stepping into the world of venture capital in San Francisco, building at the frontier of ideas and capital. You chose a path that did not exist in any guidebook I was given, and you walked it with a confidence that still quietly astonishes me.

**Vagisha** — you have completed not one but two Masters degrees. You are weeks away from your Clinical Social Work Practice certification. You counsel people in their darkest hours. You teach. You research. You have chosen, with full awareness of easier paths, to work with an NGO — to place yourself in service of those the world tends to overlook.

*Together, you have become everything I dared to hope for, and more than I had the imagination to articulate.*

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I want to be honest about something: my pride today has very little to do with Canadian education or American career trajectories. The degrees are fine. The opportunities are real. But what fills me with a quiet, deep, almost spiritual satisfaction is something else entirely.

You have both, in your own distinct ways, become torchbearers of the oldest and most beautiful current in Indian philosophy — **सेवा** and **त्याग** — service and sacrifice. Kush, in the ecosystem you are entering, you will have the power to direct resources toward ideas that can change lives — that is its own form of service, if wielded with conscience. Vagisha, you have made service the very architecture of your vocation.

Neither of you chose the path of least resistance. And in that, you are unmistakably your father's children — for better and for worse, with a smile.

The Rishis called it *Loka Sangraha* — the holding together of the world. You are both doing that work. One through capital and ideas. One through counselling, research, and presence. Different instruments, the same raga.

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I stood at a crossroads in 2011 and chose the harder road — not because I was brave, but because I could not live with myself on the easier one. There were years when I questioned that choice. Years when the gap between what I had left behind and what I had not yet built felt unbridgeable.

Today I do not question it for a single moment.

Every hardship was not merely endured. It was *invested* — in you, in the home we made, in the exposure we gave you to a larger world, in the stubborn refusal to let circumstance shrink your possibilities.

The return on that investment is not a degree on a wall or a job offer in San Francisco.

It is you — the people you have each become.

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**Beta dono** — go forward with the knowledge that you carry within you something no country issued and no institution can revoke: a father's prayers, a mother's endurance, a civilisation's wisdom, and hearts that chose their paths with integrity.

Kush — build things that matter. Stay human in rooms that sometimes forget to be.

Vagisha — go gently into your work. The people you will serve are carrying weights they cannot name. You already know how to listen for what is not being said. That is the rarest of gifts.

And both of you — call home. Your old father is standing more firmly today than he ever has.

Not despite the struggle.

Because of it.

*With all the love a father's heart can hold —*

**Papa** 🙏

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*Kushagra — University of Toronto Graduate, Venture Capital, San Francisco*
*Vagisha — MSW (×2), Clinical Social Work Candidate, Counsellor, Educator, Researcher*
*Both — the finest things I ever had a hand in.*