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Guest column by Humans Of Bombay founder Karishma Mehta: Lessons in ambition
One business magazine was all it took to give a 14-year-old girl the drive to be what she wanted to be
A 21-year-old woman recently asked me a question that made me look back at the years gone by and really ‘think.’
She told me she was from a conservative family in a tier-2 city. She had big dreams, she said, but was constantly being nudged to marry and ‘settle down.’ She finally asked this question: ‘How do I explain ambition to my parents?’
My brain began working in overdrive as I wondered how I could possibly put into words a sentiment that drives me and fuels me, and fills my cup like nothing else. I felt an overpowering need to tell her and millions of other young women like her about ambition and what it means to have it, to live it, to love it.
I remember the day I tasted ‘ambition’ for the first time. It was a fleeting moment, brisk and unassuming, and yet I can never forget the way it made me feel. I was 14 years old and had stumbled across a business magazine for the first time. I devoured page after page, consumed by the achievements of greater men and women. By the end of what felt like an out of body experience, I whispered to myself, ‘I’m going to be here someday’. These six words changed my life in a way I could have never imagined at the time.
The next time I felt that rush of emotion was seven years later when, at the age of 21, I cruised Marine Drive for the first shoot for my website, Humans of Bombay. Like muscle memory, I recognised the feeling instinctively. When the gut takes over your being in the flow of ambition, work doesn’t feel like ‘work.’
The sense of purpose I felt on that first shoot drives me even now.
From that first Marine Drive shoot to being the CEO of my website today, from being a ‘played every role myself’ entrepreneur to growing to a 20-person team, from working out of literally every coffee shop in the city to moving to an office that makes my Pinterest boards look shoddy, from chasing interviews to being invited to interview a person with the highest office in the country, the singular reason that makes me spring out of bed every single day, 365 days a year, is ambition.
It’s that ambition that’s given me financial independence; that’s pushed me into having unwavering faith that no dream is too big for me, that as a woman in business in India, ‘I CAN’.
And 15 years after uttering the words, ‘I’m going to be here someday’, when I saw a full page write up of myself and my website in the business magazine I first read at the age of 14, I knew that ‘that’ day had arrived like an inevitable, frenzied force that just couldn’t be stopped.
So, that’s the most important thing ambition can give you—freedom. The freedom to dream, to choose, to live, to just be you. And in a world that’s constantly telling you who to be or what to do, the freedom to be fiercely and unrelentingly you is priceless.
Having ambition is priceless.
Karishma Mehta is a writer, photographer and founder & CEO at Humans of Bombay.
From HT Brunch, November 7, 2021
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