Hindsight

My favourite toy ever arrived on my eighth birthday: a Mechanix set. A box of metal strips, nuts, bolts, pulleys and tiny spanners - and, for the next several years, the centre of my universe.

I was not a careful child. I was the kind of kid who once managed to leave for school without his schoolbag. And yet, in all the years I owned that set, I never lost a single piece. Not one bolt, not one washer. Every part went back into the box, every time.

Except one. The instruction manual.

I lost it early, and I never went looking for it. Because the manual was the one thing I didn't need. The whole point - though I couldn't have articulated it then - was to figure it out myself. To build a crane that collapsed, and ask why. To build it again, slightly differently, and watch it hold. The joy was never in the finished model. It was in the floundering.

I have come to believe that this is the only way I know how to learn. Building things from the ground up - on your own, without the manual - guarantees you a certain amount of failing and struggling along the way. It hands you moments of frustration, self-doubt and genuine hardship, and it makes no apology for them. But the joy waiting at the end of that tunnel of uncertainty is, in my experience, unparalleled.

My physics teacher in the twelfth grade had a line he never tired of: "Why are you worried about the outcome? Success is short-lived - enjoy the journey!" It has taken me years to understand how much he packed into that one sentence. It is the journey that makes the success worth achieving. It is the journey you learn from, far more than you ever learn from the success. And it is the struggle - the steepest stretch of any journey - that teaches you the most about the one thing no manual covers: yourself. There is no better way to learn than to do. The only set that's truly wasted is the one that stays in its box.

Somewhere along the way, this hardened into a quiet operating principle for my life. Call it an idea; call it a hope. Things have a way of making sense in hindsight. The detours, the failures, the collapsed cranes - none of it looks like progress while you're in it. But look back far enough, and the pieces arrange themselves into a path. They always have, for me. So far.

It's why, eventually, I walked away from the most coveted job I'd ever held - in a world I still can't fully look away from - to build something from a box of loose parts again. No manual. Just the conviction, earned over a lifetime, that the floundering is the point.

But there is one piece of hindsight I've been carrying for fifteen years that never resolved itself into a tidy lesson. Maidan Play is my attempt to finally make sense of it.

Growing up, I was good at sport. Genuinely good, or so I believed. I performed well at every school sports event. In the apartment complex where I grew up, I was first at every game we played - cricket, football, whatever the season demanded. I carried that identity lightly and confidently, the way only a child who has never been seriously tested can.

Then I got to college, and discovered how out of my depth I was.

There's a Pink Floyd song I keep coming back to when I think about that period - the one that asks whether you traded your part in the real war for the lead role in a cage. That was me. I had spent my childhood as the star of a very small, very safe stage, when what I actually wanted - what every young athlete actually needs - was to be a bit player in something real. To be tested. To lose to people better than me, and find out what that demands of you. To see if I have what it takes to do it. And if not, why?

And when I asked myself why it had taken until college for that reckoning to arrive, the answer was uncomfortable in its simplicity. I never had the opportunity. My school had no playing facilities. The area I lived in had no playgrounds. There was no coaching available, no structured competition, no pathway - nothing between the apartment-complex game and the cold plunge of college trials. It wasn't that I lacked the will to compete. The arena simply didn't exist.

That is the hindsight I've carried for a decade and a half. Not bitterness - I've had a fortunate life, and the lessons of that humbling served me well in arenas far more brutal than any college ground. But a persistent, nagging awareness: I never found out how good I could have been. And neither do millions of kids in this country, every single year. Defeat, I could have made peace with. It's the never finding out that lingers.

It was this hunger to be tested that years later became the sole reason I moved to New York. Not the money, not the title. The question. A macro sales seat on Wall Street puts you in one of the most ruthlessly competitive arenas on earth, full of the sharpest people the world's best institutions can find, and I wanted to know, once and for all, whether I was good enough to belong. This time, the arena existed. What I had to do was earn my way into it. And when the chance came, I knew better than most what it would cost to let it pass.

Four years on that trading floor answered the question. And not just for me - the mentors I trusted most, people who, for whatever reason, kept faith that I was good enough, and who had watched me through every cycle and every hard day, answered it with a yes. The strange thing about finally getting your answer, though, is what it sets free. Once you know you can, the question loses its grip on you. I no longer felt like I had anything to prove in New York. What I had, instead, was a choice: keep working on a question I had already answered, or come home to India and take on a harder, far more meaningful problem - so that the kids growing up today never have to wait fifteen years, or cross oceans, to find their own answer.

I chose, once again, to build.

And this is what we are building at Maidan Play. Real grounds, where there were none for me. Structured coaching and a serious curriculum, where there was only the apartment-complex game. Tournaments and competition, so that children today don't have to wait until college to discover where they truly stand - and improve. A system that gives every kid the thing I never had: the chance to see how far they can go - and then to go further. So that one day, they can tell themselves the struggle was worth it.

I don't know exactly how this story ends. We're a young company, building without a manual, and I'd be lying if I said there was no floundering involved. There is. Daily. But failure has never been the thing I fear. Call it delusion, call it self-belief - I've always trusted that I can figure it out as I go. The only fear I've ever carried is the other one: not trying. The set left unopened in its box. Standing at the edge of deeper waters and never wading in, never finding out if I could. That fear took me to New York. It brought me home. The struggle is where the learning lives, and I've bet my whole life on the idea that it's worth it.

Besides, I already know how this will look one day, when I turn around and trace the path backwards - from a Mechanix set with a missing manual, through a small stage I outgrew too late, to a maidan full of kids who will never have to wonder what they might have been.