What’s Your Life About?

You were born in Delhi, India, and you were the first in your family to earn a business degree. You went on to work in global financial services in India and the U.S., but then at the age of 40 in the year 2000, you decided to leave all that behind and embark on humanitarian work. You decided to join World Vision. And then from there, you went on to United Way. You had your own company for a while, Tandon Institute. And now you're CEO of Opportunity International. What made you decide to make such a huge change from banking to humanitarian work? I mean, they couldn't be any more different.

Well, they are different and yet the same. So why did I decide on with this? You could call it the Y2K effect or my mid-life crisis at 40 years of old age. But the reason I frankly decided I'd grown up in India and I'd seen poverty all around me. I had the great blessing and the gift of doing well in life. You know, my friends and family is what I would say contributed to my own career. And here I am at a big skyscraper in New York City. And I just get a sense of a personal call to go back and help the poor. And that's what it was - simple. It was that sense of wanting to give back. And it comes to most of us at some point in our life. And, you know, at that time, my wife and I just had the courage to say, yeah, we want to do it. And that led to a departure from Wall Street to, in so many ways, Main Street, except that the main street is the byways and alleys of, you know, slums around the world. And the small roads and shantytowns and in villages. So it's been a fun journey.