There is a particular kind of silence in a hostel at 4 a.m. — the silence of fifty other lives sleeping through what feels like your defining hour. I found that silence twice: once at five years old in India, dreaming of titles I didn't yet understand, and again three decades later, in a backpackers' hostel in Adelaide, wondering if the plane ticket had been a mistake.
I grew up captivated by the titles my relatives held — Doctor, Engineer, Advocate — and by the idea that a title was the shortest route to being taken seriously. I was, by my own admission, more interested in cricket than school; Sachin Tendulkar and Don Bradman were closer to gods than any professor. That dream ended, quietly, with the death of my grandparents — a loss that pushed me to leave India for the first time, feeling as though I was walking away from the only future I had pictured for myself.
§ I — Dublin and London, 2003 — 2008
Three jobs at once, and a 97% attendance record.
Dublin was where the hustle started in earnest. A Diploma in Business Studies, then a Bachelor's in Management Information Systems — paid for by overnight security work, university by day, an afternoon shift at a petrol station, and food delivery in whatever hours were left. I kept my attendance above 97% because my visa depended on it, and I changed clothes in the car between jobs because there wasn't time to do it any other way.
A Master's in Computer Systems and Software Engineering took me to the University of Greenwich, and from there to my first full-time job — at PC World in Maidstone, Kent. It was ordinary work, and it taught me something I still rely on: that showing up reliably is its own credential, long before anyone hands you a better one.
§ II — The United States, 2014
An H1B visa, a lawsuit, and a lesson in resilience I didn't ask for.
A move to the US on an H1B visa should have been the reward for the previous decade's hustle. Instead, I was duped by the company that had sponsored me — and I sued them. I gave depositions over Skype from India while the case ran its course; I won, the company closed, and I handed over 80% of the settlement to the lawyers who had fought for it. It was not the victory I had imagined, but it was a victory, and it taught me that resilience is mostly just refusing to stop halfway through a fight you didn't start.
Eighty percent of a hard-won settlement is still less satisfying than it sounds. What stayed with me wasn't the money — it was proof that showing up, even by video link from another continent, was enough.
§ III — Adelaide, 2015 — present
A hostel called Blue Galah, 350 applications, and a job from a stranger named Matthew.
Permanent residency in Australia came through faster than I expected — six to nine months. I had written to Dr Peter Sandiford at the University of Adelaide, hoping he would supervise a PhD I hadn't yet earned the right to start. When a year passed without an answer, I flew to Australia for a single day to ask him in person. He told me, kindly, that I needed another Master's degree first. I didn't get the PhD conversation I wanted that day, but I got something else: the beginning of an actual passion for academic life.
I arrived in Adelaide with very little, living in a backpackers' hostel called Blue Galah on King William Street — making beds and cleaning toilets to cover rent, eating a bowl of rice most evenings, and applying for over 350 jobs. Four interviews came out of it. One offer disappeared when I failed my driving test. Then a man named Matthew Giles offered me door-knocking work, and that — not a lecture hall — was where my Australian career actually began.
The PhD came eventually: Business & Management, University of Adelaide, 2017–2021. It was four years of slow, often invisible work, and it produced the paper I am still most often asked about — The Family That Prays Together Stays Together, on religious value transmission in family firms, published in the Journal of Business Ethics in 2020.
"I am, on most days, less interested in being right than in being honest about what I do not yet know."
I gave my first lecture at the University of Adelaide in November 2021 — later than the plan I'd once had for myself, and later than I'd have liked. I supervise PhD students now. I teach. I co-lead work on psychosocial safety. I write.
The podcast, Breaking Mental Models, is the natural consequence of a decade spent writing things in journals that almost nobody outside academia ever reads. The first episode aired this year, with Asher Wright. There will be more.
§ IV — What I'm still trying to learn
The environment is the intervention.
If three decades have taught me one sentence, it is this: change the environment, sustain it, and the transformation follows. Neither the water nor the ice chose to change. They responded to the environment they were placed in, and they stayed in it long enough. I am still learning what that means for how I teach, how I research, and how I show up — in the lecture hall, in front of a microphone, and in the quiet 4 a.m. silence I still occasionally find myself in.
— A. A.
Adelaide · May 2026