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By:

Divyaa Advaani 

2 November 2024 at 3:28:38 am

Your Success Is The Problem

He had been doing things his way for decades. A business built from the ground up, a reputation earned over years, a way of showing up so ingrained it had become indistinguishable from identity. When I pointed out what was not working, he listened politely. And then continued exactly as before. He was older than me. More successful than me by most conventional measures. And in the quiet of his reaction, I could sense what he did not say out loud — what could a young woman possibly tell him...

Your Success Is The Problem

He had been doing things his way for decades. A business built from the ground up, a reputation earned over years, a way of showing up so ingrained it had become indistinguishable from identity. When I pointed out what was not working, he listened politely. And then continued exactly as before. He was older than me. More successful than me by most conventional measures. And in the quiet of his reaction, I could sense what he did not say out loud — what could a young woman possibly tell him about how to show up in his own industry. I did not push. I shared my own story instead. I told him I had once been exactly where he was. Unclear in how I presented myself. Inconsistent in how I communicated my value. Holding onto patterns that felt like strength but quietly cost me every opportunity I worked so hard to create. I told him what shifted when I finally chose to change — not overnight, but consistently, one uncomfortable step at a time. The clarity. The leads. The conversations that finally converted. He went quiet. And then something in the room changed. This is the part most founders never examine. Not the website or the pitch. The invisible patterns so habitual they have stopped feeling like choices. The way you dominate a conversation believing it signals confidence, when the room reads it as insecurity. The way you resist being seen differently because the old version of you built everything — so changing it feels like betrayal. The way leads walk away without explanation and you tell yourself it was the market, the timing, the competition. It was none of those things. For accomplished founders this is the most expensive blind spot in existence. The patterns that need to change are not weaknesses — they are the exact behaviours that built the success. Which is why they are the last thing anyone examines and the first thing everyone else notices. Ask yourself honestly. When was the last time you had a significant conversation that should have converted — and did not? When was the last time you walked out of a room that should have remembered you — and did not follow up? When was the last time an opportunity chose someone less qualified, and you genuinely could not understand why? If any of those questions created even a flicker of recognition — that flicker is not coincidence. It is your brand telling you something your revenue has been masking. He called me weeks later. Changes made — small, consistent, uncomfortable. People responded differently. Conversations converted. Someone who had known him for years said he seemed entirely different. He told me — I am so glad I listened. Thank you for not giving up on me. I had not given up on him because I had once needed the same. That is the work that never makes it into a profile or a post — the courage to examine what no longer serves you, even when it built everything you have. The discipline to change when change feels like loss. And the moment, always worth waiting for, when the world reflects back the leader you have been building from the inside out. The founders who do this work stop chasing. The ones who do not keep running harder on a track that quietly leads nowhere. Your next level is not waiting for a better market or a bigger team. It is waiting for you to close the gap between the leader you are and the brand the world currently experiences. A Founder Brand Audit is a focused consultation call — not a free chat, not a discovery exercise, but a direct and honest diagnosis of exactly where your brand is working against you and what it will take to close that gap. Four slots open each week, reserved for founders who have decided this has cost them enough. Book your call here: https://calendly.com/divyaaadvaani/founder-brand-audit (The author is a personal branding expert. She has clients from 14+ countries. Views personal.)

When the Clouds Call the Bluff

Mumbai’s annual monsoon ordeal has become a test of whether governance can keep pace with a changing climate.

Few cities romanticise the monsoon as much as Mumbai. The first showers arrive with nostalgia and Bollywood melodies. Soon enough, however, romance gives way to ritual: flooded roads, submerged railway tracks, fallen trees, gridlocked traffic and stranded commuters.


Governance Audit

This year, the examination has been particularly unforgiving. Between late June and the first week of July, the city recorded some of its heaviest rainfall in recent memory. The Santacruz observatory crossed the 1,000 mm mark within days, while Colaba received nearly 883 mm over the same period. Meteorologists have described the spell as extraordinary, attributing it to the increasingly erratic weather patterns associated with climate change.


But rainfall statistics alone do not determine whether a city succeeds or fails. What matters is whether its infrastructure was designed and its institutions prepared to cope with precisely such extremes.


For Mumbaikars, the true barometer has never been the rain gauge. It has always been the suburban railway.


The sequence has long been familiar. Moderate flooding usually disrupts the Harbour Line first. Heavier rain slows the Central Railway. The Western Railway, traditionally the most resilient corridor, tends to hold out longest. This year, however, even the Western line faltered far earlier than expected, illustrating just how unusual the rainfall had become.


The consequences were immediate. Thousands of commuters remained stranded for hours as tracks submerged, roads became impassable and buses crawled through waist-deep water. Across the Mumbai Metropolitan Region, vehicles lay half-submerged while office-goers walked kilometres through flooded streets simply to reach home. Similar scenes unfolded in Pune, Nashik and several other parts of Maharashtra, underscoring that the challenge extended well beyond the financial capital.


Predictably, attention turned towards the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, India’s wealthiest municipal body, whose annual budget exceeds that of several Indian states. Citizens were entitled to ask an uncomfortable question: after decades of investment in storm-water drains, pumping stations and road improvements, why does the city continue to resemble a shallow lake after every episode of intense rainfall?


Familiar Defence

Municipal officials offered a familiar defence: rainfall exceeded design assumptions, high tides impeded drainage and strong winds felled hundreds of trees.


These explanations are technically sound. But they also reveal the problem. Infrastructure built for yesterday’s climate cannot be expected to perform adequately in tomorrow’s.


Climate resilience no longer means designing for average monsoon conditions. It means preparing for increasingly frequent extremes.


That reality has inevitably entered the political arena. During the Maharashtra Legislative Assembly’s monsoon session, the annual exchange of accusations began almost as quickly as the rains themselves.


Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis argued that the rainfall represented an extraordinary natural event which had tested infrastructure across several parts of India, not merely Maharashtra. Referring to the newly inaugurated Missing Link project on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, he maintained that authorities restored traffic within roughly 18 hours after continuous efforts following a landslide near Tunnel-2. He also cautioned against allowing political criticism to undermine confidence in Maharashtra’s engineering capabilities.


The Missing Link has nevertheless become an emblem of the broader debate. Barely weeks after its inauguration, a landslide triggered by heavy rainfall temporarily disrupted one of the state’s flagship infrastructure projects. The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation described the incident as an “act of God”, emphasising that the tunnel itself remained structurally safe and that exceptional rainfall had triggered the slope failure.


The Opposition was unconvinced. Congress and the Nationalist Congress Party (Sharad Pawar faction) argued that projects involving public investments worth thousands of crores should survive their very first monsoon without requiring emergency interventions. Their criticism reflected a wider public expectation that modern infrastructure should anticipate predictable climatic risks rather than merely react to them.


Reducing the entire debate to political blame would be intellectually lazy.


Climate scientists have repeatedly warned that Indian cities are experiencing a fundamental shift in rainfall patterns. Monsoons are becoming shorter, but individual rainfall events are growing significantly more intense. Urbanisation has covered natural absorption zones with concrete. Wetlands have disappeared. Rivers and natural drains have narrowed under decades of encroachment.


No municipal corporation, however wealthy, can entirely eliminate flooding under such conditions. Equally, no government can hide indefinitely behind the argument that every extreme event is unprecedented.


The real question is whether public policy is evolving as quickly as the climate.


There are encouraging signs. Maharashtra has announced an ambitious Rs. 13,000-crore Integrated Flood Mitigation Master Plan intended to transform Mumbai into a “Sponge City”. Rather than relying solely upon larger drains and additional pumping stations, the proposal combines engineering with nature-based solutions—rainwater absorption zones, improved water retention, enhanced pumping infrastructure and climate-resilient urban planning.


If executed competently, it could represent the most significant rethink of Mumbai’s flood management strategy in decades.


But engineering alone will not restore public confidence.


Citizens judge governance less by master plans than by everyday experience. They expect drains to be desilted before the rains arrive, trees to be scientifically managed rather than reactively trimmed, civic agencies to coordinate seamlessly during emergencies, weather warnings to be timely and accurate, and accountability to be visible when systems fail. These are not extravagant demands. They are the minimum expectations of a global financial capital.


The annual ritual of political point-scoring serves little purpose. Governments must candidly acknowledge operational shortcomings wherever they exist. Opposition parties, meanwhile, should contribute policy alternatives rather than merely amplifying public anger. As climate change accelerates, cooperative governance will prove considerably more valuable than partisan theatrics.


Mumbai has always possessed an extraordinary capacity to recover. After every flood, trains resume, offices reopen and life returns with remarkable speed. That resilience has rightly become part of the city’s mythology.


But resilience is not the same as good governance. The willingness of citizens to endure hardship should never become an excuse for institutions to tolerate avoidable failures.


(The writer is a political observer. Views personal.)

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