Tomorrow, the flame lights up again. On September 19, 2026, the Paloma Mizuho Stadium in Nagoya will host the opening ceremony of the XX Asian Games, and for the third time an Indian contingent will walk in carrying not just a flag but the weight of a number: 28. That is how many gold medals India won at Hangzhou in 2023, still the best campaign in the country’s Asiad history. The question every Indian sports fan is asking this week is: can we go past it?
Let me take you through this properly. History first. Then the state of Indian sport walking into Japan. Then, sport by sport, where the medals are actually going to come from, and where they might not. And finally, an honest number.
The Asian Games did not begin in a boardroom in Lausanne or Kuwait City. It began with an Indian. At the 1948 London Olympics, Guru Dutt Sondhi, India’s IOC representative, proposed that Asian nations needed their own continental sporting stage, distinct from the Far Eastern Championship Games and West Asian Games that had come and gone between 1913 and 1938, disrupted by war and geopolitics. Sondhi’s proposal at London 1948 led China and the Philippines to meet on the sidelines, and out of that came a more inclusive competition. By 1949 the Asian Athletic Federation, soon renamed the Asian Games Federation, was formed, and India made the boldest move of all. It was India’s offer to host, made in February 1949, that actually set the wheels in motion.
So on March 4, 1951, at the National Stadium in New Delhi, 489 athletes from 11 nations gathered for what was officially called the First Asian Games, opened by Dr. Rajendra Prasad, India’s first President. Six sports were contested: athletics, aquatics, basketball, cycling, football and weightlifting, across 57 medal events. Boxing, ironically now one of India’s strongest medal sports, was considered but dropped that year. Nehru saw it as more than sport. Coming four years after Partition and independence, a fractured young nation needed a stage to announce itself, and a war-ravaged continent needed a reason to link arms rather than draw lines. That is the emotional DNA of these Games, something worth remembering every time we complain about a scoreline: the Asian Games were built as an act of unity, not just competition.
The administrative story that followed is instructive too. The Asian Games Federation ran the show from 1949 until it was dissolved in November 1982, when it was succeeded by the Olympic Council of Asia. That handover happened, fittingly, in New Delhi, which hosted the Games again in 1982. Since that modest beginning of 11 nations, the Asiad has grown into one of the largest multi-sport events on the planet, second only to the Olympics themselves. Aichi-Nagoya 2026 will host 46 nations and roughly 10,840 athletes across 469 events in 43 sports and 71 disciplines, a staggering leap from where it all started. This edition also marks the 75th anniversary of that original 1951 New Delhi Games. There is something poetic about that. Seventy-five years after India gave Asia this platform, India arrives as a genuine medal superpower on it.
For decades, India’s Asian Games story was one of quiet consistency rather than dominance. India actually finished second overall at the very first Games in 1951, winning 51 medals, 15 gold, 16 silver and 20 bronze, behind only Japan’s 60. It remains India’s best-ever finish in the overall medal table. India briefly touched third place again at Jakarta 1962 with 10 gold, 13 silver and 10 bronze, and that stayed India’s last top-three overall finish until Hangzhou, six decades later.
What followed was a long, unglamorous middle period. India’s medal count crept from 51 in 1951 to 57 in 1982, then 65 at Guangzhou in 2010. The country was competitive in patches, brilliant through individuals like P.T. Usha, who finished with four gold and seven silver medals across her career, and Leander Paes, whose five golds and eight total medals came in tennis, and sprint legend Milkha Singh, who won four Asian Games golds, but never assembled the strength in depth to threaten the continental elite.
Then came the inflection point. Jakarta-Palembang 2018 was the first real step change, with India winning 16 gold and 70 medals in total. And then Hangzhou happened. Delayed a year by COVID and finally staged in 2023, a 655-member Indian contingent turned in a campaign for the ages: 107 medals, 28 gold, 38 silver and 41 bronze, comfortably beating the previous record of 70 from Jakarta. It was only the second time in India’s history, across the Olympics, Commonwealth Games and Asian Games combined, that the country had crossed the 100-medal mark in a major multi-sport event. India finished fourth in the overall standings, behind a dominant China (201 gold), Japan (52) and South Korea (42), and only four nations broke the 100-medal barrier that year.
Look at where those 107 medals came from, because it tells you everything about the engine India is bringing to Japan. Shooting was the standout, delivering an unprecedented 22 medals including seven gold. Athletics remained the single biggest overall contributor with 29 medals, six gold, 14 silver and nine bronze. India topped the medal table outright in archery, cricket, kabaddi and hockey, and history was made in badminton, where Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty won India’s first-ever Asiad gold in the sport, while Jyothi Surekha Vennam and Ojas Deotale each claimed three gold medals apiece in compound archery. Squash, tennis and equestrian rounded out the golden haul. Across the entire history of the Games, athletics remains India’s most decorated sport by a wide margin, with 85 gold, 102 silver and 96 bronze, 283 medals in total, followed by shooting on 80 and wrestling on roughly 65. And in kabaddi, the sport India essentially owns at the Asiad, the country has won eight of the nine editions since it was introduced in 1990, losing only once, to Iran at Jakarta 2018.
That is the mountain India built. Now comes the harder part: climbing it again, from a higher base, with a few pieces missing.
This is the XX Asian Games, officially returning to the traditional four-year cycle after the pandemic pushed Hangzhou from 2022 into 2023. Nagoya becomes the third Japanese city to host after Tokyo in 1958 and Hiroshima in 1994. The motto, “Imagine One Asia,” runs from the opening ceremony on September 19 through closing on October 4, though competition in several disciplines, soft tennis, teqball, women’s cricket, actually started before the ceremony itself. Forty-three sports will be staged across 53 venues, some outside the main host prefecture entirely, making the real competition calendar considerably longer than the official 16-day window.
For India, the numbers on the ground are: this is India’s twentieth appearance at the Games, with a contingent of 503 athletes, competing across 36 sports. Genuinely large squads have gone in shooting, hockey and cricket.
There is also a bigger stake attached to this edition than mere medal count. Both the men’s and women’s hockey tournaments in Aichi-Nagoya double as continental qualification events for the LA 2028 Olympics, with tournament winners securing direct qualification. That turns Harmanpreet Singh’s men and Salima Tete’s women into something more than gold-medal contenders. They are playing for a ticket to Los Angeles.
India’s single biggest, most reliable gold medal of the last two Games will not be available this time. Two-time Olympic medallist and two-time defending Asian Games javelin champion Neeraj Chopra will miss Aichi-Nagoya entirely because of an ankle ligament injury. Chopra had won gold at both Jakarta 2018 and Hangzhou 2023 and was chasing a third straight title; he ended his 2026 season after the ligament tear during training, removing what was arguably India’s single most dependable gold-medal certainty.
This is not a small thing to wave away. Neeraj is not just a medal, he is a guaranteed gold, the kind of banker every ambitious medal tally needs. His absence means athletics has to find that gold elsewhere, and the honest picture is that nobody in the current javelin field, or arguably in Indian track and field as a whole, carries his individual certainty. The strongest remaining gold prospect in athletics is now the long jump, where both Murali Sreeshankar and Ancy Sojan enter as the Asian leaders this season. Beyond that, hopes rest on strong-but-not-certain names: steeplechaser Avinash Sable, 5000m specialist Parul Chaudhary, sprinters and race walkers who can win a medal but the gold is not assured the way Neeraj’s was.
The second uncomfortable truth, is that India’s preparation has been messier than Hangzhou’s. By early September, twelve Indian athletes had failed dope tests or been provisionally suspended since the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, spanning four weightlifters, two judokas, a shooter, a rower, two wrestlers, a distance runner and a wushu competitor. Wrestling took the heaviest direct hit, losing quota places in men’s 86kg freestyle, 130kg Greco-Roman and 67kg Greco-Roman, and shooting lost Gaurav Mansoori from the 10m air pistol event after a failed dope test, forcing a late reshuffle. None of this should overshadow the athletes who have done things right, but it is a real dent in depth, particularly in wrestling, a sport India has traditionally mined for reliable medals.
There is a redemption story buried in this too, and it is worth knowing because it will matter when you watch the mat this month. Aman Sehrawat, India’s brightest current wrestling star, was actually banned by the Wrestling Federation of India for a full year after a weight violation at the 2025 World Championships, a suspension that on paper would have run right through the start of these Games. The federation lifted that ban early in November 2025, and Sehrawat responded by winning his weight category comfortably at the national trials in June 2026 to book his Asiad ticket. That is a genuine comeback story, and it is exactly the kind of narrative that makes these Games worth following as a fan, not just a scoreboard-watcher.
Shooting. Hangzhou’s 22 medals from shooting, seven of them gold, was the single biggest driver of India’s record tally. This time the squad is different in composition but not in ambition. India has sent 30 shooters to Aichi-Nagoya, 12 in shotgun and 18 in rifle and pistol, competing across 27 medal events, headlined by Manu Bhaker, Rudrankksh Patil, Suruchi Singh and Esha Singh. There are notable absences: Hangzhou gold medallist Sift Kaur Samra, Paris 2024 medallists Sarabjot Singh and Swapnil Kusale, and reigning air pistol world champion Samrat Rana are all missing from this squad. The realistic read is that China remains the dominant force, having topped shooting’s medal table at the last twelve editions, and edged India in Hangzhou by seven medals largely because China won eight individual golds to India’s two, Palak Gulia and Sift Kaur Samra. The honest expectation this time is a slightly smaller but still substantial haul, something in the range of 15 to 18 medals rather than the full 22 of Hangzhou, with Manu Bhaker and Esha Singh as the sharpest individual gold prospects.
Athletics. Track and field delivered India’s largest medal haul of any sport at Hangzhou, 29 medals, and remains central to any assault on the century mark this time. Without Neeraj, the gold count here will almost certainly dip from six, but the depth built over the last Olympic cycle, in race walking, middle distance, throws and long jump, should keep the overall medal volume respectable even if the top step is harder to reach.
Archery. Archery produced five golds among India’s nine medals at Hangzhou, built almost entirely on compound dominance. This year the squad has been deliberately, refreshed. Defending champions Ojas Deotale in the men’s compound individual and mixed team missed selection entirely, finishing fifth in the trials, and Olympians Deepika Kumari and Atanu Das were also left out of the Games squad despite remaining in World Cup plans. What remains is still formidable: world No. 3 Jyothi Surekha Vennam leads the women’s compound squad after her triple-gold haul at Hangzhou, and the women’s recurve pairing of Ankita Bhakat and Kumkum Mohod recently upset China for gold at the Shanghai World Cup, a genuine signal of strength. Given India swept compound archery at Hangzhou, expectation is: anything under five golds here would count as falling short of India’s own new standard.
Wrestling. The mat has taken the worst of the pre-Games turbulence, losing three Olympic-weight quota places to doping cases. Yet the headline story is Aman Sehrawat’s return, alongside Asian Games silver medallist Deepak Punia and World No. 1 Sujeet Kalkal leading a squad that is smaller in numbers but still carries real individual quality, particularly on the freestyle side.
Boxing. India’s boxers land in Japan fresh off a record-breaking Commonwealth Games campaign, ten medals, seven gold and three silver, with Olympic medallist Lovlina Borgohain and CWG champion Sakshi Chaudhary leading the squad. This is arguably India’s best-form sport walking into the Games and a realistic multi-gold source.
Badminton. The men’s team fields Lakshya Sen, Ayush Shetty, HS Prannoy, Kidambi Srikanth and the reigning Asiad doubles gold medallists Satwiksairaj Rankireddy and Chirag Shetty, while two-time Olympic medallist PV Sindhu headlines the women’s challenge. Satwik-Chirag defending their historic doubles gold is one of the storylines of the Games.
Hockey. Harmanpreet Singh leads the men as defending champions, Salima Tete captains the women, and both are chasing gold not just for the podium but for direct LA 2028 qualification, which raises the intensity considerably.
Kabaddi and cricket. India defends titles in both men’s and women’s kabaddi and both cricket competitions, with Shreyas Iyer leading the men’s cricket team, which includes teenage sensation Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, and Harmanpreet Kaur captaining the women’s side. Barring upsets, these are among the safest gold prospects in the entire contingent.
Weightlifting is anchored by Olympic medallist Mirabai Chanu leading a five-member squad, a smaller but focused unit chasing a podium finish in the 49kg category.
And do not sleep on the fringe sports. Squash, chess and kurash are being flagged as genuine strong medal opportunities, and squash carries a lovely subplot in Anahat Singh, returning after helping India to team and mixed doubles bronze at Hangzhou, now a more mature and dangerous competitor.
The case for optimism is real. India’s shooting, badminton, boxing, hockey, kabaddi and cricket squads are all either as strong as Hangzhou or stronger. The stated official ambition is a second consecutive 100-medal haul, and independent assessments before the Games land in a 95 to 110 medal range as the realistic target. That range straddles the Hangzhou number almost exactly, which tells you the informed consensus is “similar total, harder gold count.”
The case for caution is equally real. Losing Neeraj removes a certain gold. The doping suspensions have quietly cost India entire weight categories in wrestling before a single bout has been fought. The archery squad has deliberately rotated out proven gold medal winners like Deotale, Deepika Kumari and Atanu Das for youth, a bet on the future that may cost golds in the present. And shooting, even at full strength, has never actually beaten China at the top of that particular table.
My projection: crossing 107 total medals is genuinely possible and, given the depth India has built across two Olympic cycles now, arguably more likely than not. Crossing 28 gold is the tougher ask. It requires archery to deliver close to Hangzhou levels despite fielding a newer squad, badminton and boxing to convert their current form into golds rather than minor-medal finishes, and at least one or two of the “second tier” sports, squash, wrestling, weightlifting, to overperform and cover for the certainty Neeraj used to provide alone. It is not a stretch to imagine India matching or nudging past 28 gold. It would be a mistake to assume it happens automatically just because the squad is bigger.
If I had to put a single number on it: somewhere between 100 and 112 total medals, and 24 to 30 gold, is where I expect India to land. Beating 28 gold is a coin flip that tilts slightly in India’s favour because of badminton and boxing’s current form; beating 107 medals is more likely than not because of the sheer breadth of the contingent across 36 sports.
Numbers aside, here is the bigger picture worth sitting with. China will win this medal table by a distance that no other nation, India included, is realistically closing anytime soon; China’s 201 gold at Hangzhou alone was nearly four times Japan’s second-place total. That is not a knock on India, it is a reminder of scale, investment and decades of systemic sporting infrastructure that China has built. India’s real competition is with itself, with the version of India that won 70 medals in 2018 and then blew past 100 in 2023. The question worth asking on October 4, when the flame goes out in Nagoya, is not just “did we beat 28,” but “did the depth we’re building, the young archers replacing legends, the boxers riding Commonwealth Games form, the badminton bench three deep, actually hold up under pressure.” That is the real story of Aichi-Nagoya for India. The scoreline will tell you the result. The performances against expectation, especially in the categories where India walked in without its biggest names, will tell you whether this was a one-off peak or the start of a genuine golden era.
Either way, for the next sixteen days, keep the TV on early mornings IST. This is India’s best generation of multi-sport athletes yet, tested, for the first time in a while, without its most bankable gold medal in the squad.
At some point in your forties, if you have enough friends, WhatsApp groups become a carousel of quiet intimidation.
One school friend just finished a half-marathon in Pune. A college batchmate has trekked to Kedarnath, again. A former colleague is on his third international trip this year, and he is posting reels from a boat somewhere off the coast of Croatia. Another friend, someone I used to share lecture notes with, has just taken up scuba diving “to push his boundaries.” At fifty.
I read all of this while drinking my morning tea at home, in Kolkata, having pushed precisely zero boundaries since breakfast.
And then comes the question. The one nobody actually asks out loud but which floats in the group chat like a ghost:
So… what’s on your bucket list?
I have been asked this in various forms over the years, at dinners, at school reunions, at business networking events where someone always feels the need to make the conversation “meaningful.” And every single time, I have felt a small but unmistakable pang of something. Not quite shame. Not quite envy. More like the feeling of showing up to an exam you forgot was happening.
Because honestly? I don’t have a bucket list.
Not a secret one. Not a half-written one in a forgotten Notes app. Nothing.
For a long time, I thought this was a problem. A personality flaw, almost. Like I had missed some crucial memo that went out to every ambitious person in their thirties, the one that said: write down the things that will make your life meaningful, frame them beautifully, and get to work.
I looked at my colleagues who had these lists, some literal, some just lived out loudly, and felt a low-grade anxiety I could not quite name. They had destinations. I had a cup of tea and a conversation. I would nod along at dinners while someone described their upcoming trip to Patagonia, and somewhere underneath the nodding was this small, persistent voice asking whether I was doing life wrong. Whether contentment at forty-something was actually just a nicer word for having stopped trying.
I tried, once, to make a list. Seriously. I sat down with a notebook and asked myself: what do I actually want to do before I die?
The notebook stared back at me. I wrote “visit Japan” because I had heard good things. Then I scratched it out, because I realized I didn’t actually want to visit Japan, I just wanted to want to visit Japan, which is a very different thing. Then I wrote “write a book,” already done, so that felt like cheating. Then I stopped, made myself another cup of tea, and called a friend instead. We talked for an hour about nothing important and everything interesting, and when I hung up, I felt more alive than I had in days.
That should have told me something. It took me longer than it should have to actually listen to it.
Here is what I have noticed, slowly, over years of watching friends collect experiences like stamps in a passport: the people with the longest bucket lists are not always the most content. Sometimes they are the most restless. They finish one thing and immediately feel the weight of the next unchecked box. The marathon becomes a triathlon. The twenty countries become thirty. The adventure is always just ahead, never quite here. I have watched this up close, in people I genuinely admire, and there is something almost tragic about it. Not the doing. The never arriving.
I don’t say this to judge them. I say it because I recognize the machinery. I have run that machinery myself, just pointed at different targets. Revenue instead of summits. Client wins instead of countries. For years I mistook the next milestone for the finish line, and the finish line kept moving, the way it always does, because that is what finish lines are built to do.
Somewhere in my forties I quietly stopped playing that particular game. Not because I lost the appetite for ambition. Because I noticed that the ambition itself had started pointing inward instead of outward. I no longer wanted to collect things to show people. I wanted to build things that would still matter to me if nobody was watching at all.
Meanwhile, I have been building a company. Reading books that rewire how I think. Having adda sessions that stretch from evening into midnight, the kind where somebody’s opinion on Test cricket turns into a two-hour argument about discipline and patience and what it actually means to build something that lasts. Watching my family in the ordinary, unglamorous rhythms that don’t photograph well but feel, on most days, quietly full.
None of this would make a compelling Instagram reel. There is no summit photo. No finish-line medal. No before-and-after arc. Nobody claps when you close a difficult quarter with your integrity intact, or when you finally have the conversation with your business partner that you had been avoiding for weeks, or when your son tells you something about his own struggle building his own thing and you realize the best thing you can do is listen, not fix.
Just a life, lived mostly in the middle of things.
The extraordinary things I’m doing don’t look extraordinary from the outside. That used to bother me. It doesn’t much anymore. I have made a kind of peace with the fact that the things I actually value don’t compress well into a caption. Thirteen years of building Brainium doesn’t fit in a reel. Neither does the slow, unglamorous work of staying married to the same discipline of thought for decades, showing up at the same desk, asking the same hard questions of myself that I ask of every company I evaluate.
I am not arguing against bucket lists. If running a marathon makes you feel genuinely alive, run one. If standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon is something you have wanted since childhood, go. I am not the ambassador of staying home. I know people for whom the mountain genuinely calls, and chasing it is not performance, it is truth. That is not what I am pushing back against.
What I am saying is this: somewhere between Instagram and the school reunion WhatsApp group, we quietly outsourced the definition of a meaningful life to a crowd. And the crowd, as crowds tend to do, converged on the loudest, most photogenic answer. Meaning became something you had to prove, in pixels, to people who were mostly scrolling past anyway.
The anti-bucket list, the things you consciously decide you do not need, is not laziness dressed up in philosophy. It is something closer to honesty. It is looking at the carousel and asking: which of this is mine, and which of it did I just absorb from everyone around me? Because if I am honest, a good number of my old ambitions were never really mine. They were borrowed. Picked up at some dinner table or LinkedIn feed and mistaken, over time, for something I actually wanted.
I do not need to run a marathon. I do not need to skydive. I do not need to visit fifty countries. I do not need to convert my Saturday afternoon into content.
I need a good book, a long conversation, a problem worth solving, and a life that feels like mine when I am living it rather than only when I am posting it. That distinction, between living something and performing it, is the whole argument, really. Everything else is footnotes.
The WhatsApp group is still going. Someone just posted a photo from Ladakh. The reactions are pouring in, fire emojis, clapping hands, the whole vocabulary of digital appreciation.
I hit the heart button and go back to my tea.
No summit. No reel. No regrets.
What does your invisible list actually look like? I’d love to know, drop it in the comments.
Priya had two quotes on her desk and a decision to make by Friday.
Priya isn’t one person. Like Daniel from last week, she’s a composite of CTOs and product leads I’ve sat across from over the years, built from real conversations so the story holds together. But every beat of what happens to her has happened, in one form or another, to someone real.
She ran product at a fast-growing logistics company, the kind that had outgrown its original booking system two years ago and had been patching it ever since. The business had finally agreed to fund a proper rebuild. Not a huge project by industry standards, but not small either. Six to nine months of real work, the kind of number that gets a line item in the board deck.
She’d sent the same brief to two firms. Same requirements document, same conversations, same three weeks of back and forth answering their questions. And now she had two quotes, and they could not have looked more different.
Firm A wanted 340 hours. Firm B wanted 210 hours.
Same project. Same brief. A gap of 130 hours, which at their blended rates worked out to a difference of just over eleven thousand pounds. Firm B was not just cheaper. Firm B was dramatically, suspiciously cheaper, and Priya’s finance director had already circled that number twice and written “why not this one?” in the margin.
Here is what most people do at this exact moment, and I want to be honest that Priya nearly did it too.
They assume the numbers are telling them something simple. Either Firm A is padding their quote to make more money, or Firm B is hungrier and sharper and has found a cleverer way to build the same thing for less. Both of those stories are comforting, because both of them let you pick the cheaper number with a clear conscience.
Almost nobody stops to ask a third, much less comfortable question: what if the two numbers aren’t actually estimating the same thing at all?
Priya’s first instinct, if I’m honest about how these situations usually go, was to lean toward Firm B. It was tempting. Same brief, but for eleven thousand pounds less, and a board that would nod approvingly at the number. She was two days from picking it when a colleague, someone who’d been burned on a project exactly like this one, said something that changed her Friday.
“Ask them both the same question. Not about the price. About the number itself.”
Here is the question, and it is the entire method, so I want to give it to you plainly rather than making you wait for it.
Ask each firm to break their total into blocks. Not a paragraph justifying the number. Actual blocks. This screen, this many hours. This integration, this many hours. This piece of testing, this many hours. Ask them to show you the arithmetic that adds up to their total.
This sounds like a small, almost bureaucratic request. It is not. It is the single most revealing question you can ask a vendor, because of what it does to the two different kinds of number sitting on your desk.
A real estimate can always be taken apart, because it was built by putting pieces together in the first place. Someone sat down, thought about the actual features, sized each one based on real experience of how long that kind of work takes, and added them up. The total is downstream of the pieces. Ask for the pieces, and they exist, because that is literally how the number was made.
A guess cannot be taken apart the same way, because it was never built from pieces. Someone looked at the brief, felt a number in their gut based on similar projects they’d half-remembered, adjusted it for a bit of safety margin, and wrote it down. The total came first. There were no pieces. Ask for them, and the vendor has to invent a breakdown after the fact, which is a very different and much more uncomfortable exercise than reading one off that already existed.
Priya sent the question to both firms on a Wednesday afternoon.
Firm A’s answer arrived Thursday morning. A spreadsheet, eleven line items, each one named after an actual feature in her brief. The core booking flow, forty-two hours. The driver notification system, twenty-eight hours. Integration with their existing payments provider, thirty-one hours, with a note flagging that this was the riskiest item because the provider’s documentation was known to be incomplete, and the number included time for that discovery. Testing and QA, sixty hours, broken further into unit, integration, and a manual pass on the mobile app.
It wasn’t a beautiful document. It was a working one. And when Priya emailed back asking why the payments integration was quoted higher than she’d expected, she got a two-paragraph answer within the hour, from the actual engineer who’d sized it, explaining exactly which part of that provider’s API had burned them on a previous project.
Firm B’s answer arrived Friday morning, later than promised, and it was one paragraph. It said, in essence, that their 210 hours reflected their team’s efficiency and their experience with similar booking platforms, and that they were confident in the number based on comparable projects they’d delivered. There were no line items. When Priya wrote back asking for a rough split between the booking flow, the notifications, and the payments integration specifically, the reply took two days and offered three very round numbers that added up, suspiciously neatly, to exactly 210.
Priya told me later that the moment she read Firm B’s second reply, she felt something click into place that she hadn’t been able to name on the Wednesday. It wasn’t that Firm B was lying, exactly. It was that Firm B had never actually built the number the way Firm A had. Someone there had looked at the brief, felt that 210 hours sounded competitive, and let the salesperson run with it. The three round numbers in the second reply weren’t a breakdown. They were the breakdown being invented, live, under a bit of polite pressure.
Here is the part that made Priya genuinely angry for about a day, and I think she was right to be.
The 130-hour gap between the two quotes was never really there. It was going to reappear, guaranteed, the moment the project actually started and the payments integration turned out to be exactly as troublesome as Firm A had flagged and priced for. Firm B hadn’t found a cheaper way to do the same work. Firm B simply hadn’t done the thinking yet, and that thinking was going to happen anyway, on the clock, disguised as a change order three months into the build, at a point where Priya’s negotiating position would be far weaker than it was on that Friday with two quotes on her desk.
The cheap quote wasn’t a better deal. It was the same project with the hard part hidden until it was too late to say no to it cheaply.
This is the thing nobody tells buyers, and it’s worth saying plainly. A vendor who guesses low isn’t giving you a discount. They’re deferring the discovery of the real number to a point in the relationship where you have the least power to question it. The padding Priya’s finance director was worried about wasn’t in Firm A’s quote. It was going to arrive later, in Firm B’s invoice, wearing the disguise of an unexpected complexity.
Priya went with Firm A.
Not because it was cheaper. It wasn’t. She went with them because when she asked them to show their working, they had working to show, and when she pushed on the one number that looked high, she got a specific, technical, credible answer from a person who clearly understood the problem, inside an hour.
The project ran eight months. It came in fourteen hours over the original 340, on a single item, the payments integration, exactly the one Firm A had flagged as risky on day one and priced with room to be wrong. Fourteen hours over on a 340-hour quote is not a failure of estimation. It’s what a real estimate looks like when it survives contact with reality, close, explainable, and exactly where the risk was always flagged to be.
She never found out what would have happened with Firm B, because she didn’t run that experiment. But she’d seen enough of that pattern before, on a different project, years earlier, to know roughly how it goes. The number holds for a few weeks. Then something nobody priced turns out to be hard. Then a change order arrives, apologetic and specific in a way the original quote never was, and by the time it’s totalled up, the gap has closed and often reversed, except now you’re three months in and the vendor knows you can’t easily walk away.
If you remember nothing else from this, remember the question, because it’s the whole method and it costs you nothing but an email.
Ask every vendor to break their number into blocks. Not a paragraph. Blocks, tied to real pieces of the work, that add up to the total they’ve given you.
If they can do it quickly and defend any piece you push on, you are looking at an estimate, and the number, whatever it is, deserves to be taken seriously. If they stall, or the breakdown arrives late and suspiciously round, you are looking at a guess wearing an estimate’s clothes, and the real number is still ahead of you, waiting to arrive at the worst possible time.
The cheapest quote on your desk is not the one with the lowest number. It’s the one that’s actually telling you the truth about what the work will take. Sometimes those are the same quote. When they’re not, the gap between them is exactly where you’ll pay later, with interest.
If you’re staring at two quotes right now and the gap between them doesn’t quite make sense, send me both breakdowns. I’ll tell you which one was actually built, and which one is still being invented.
Let me tell you about Daniel.
Daniel isn’t one person. He’s a version of a manager I have sat across from dozens of times over the years, in Kolkata and London and on video calls at odd hours, and I’ve put all of them into one man so the story holds together. But everything that happens to him has happened, more than once, to someone real.
Daniel runs engineering at a mid-sized retail company. Good business, real revenue, the kind of company that isn’t a startup gambling on a dream but isn’t a giant with infinite bench either. About ninety engineers. He’s competent, he’s tired, and it’s the second week of July.
His problem is a date. The company has committed to a major platform launch for the first week of October, tied to peak season, promised to the board, promised to partners, the sort of date that does not move because too many other things have been chained to it. And Daniel is short. He has a senior backend role that has been open since March. Four months. He’s interviewed maybe fifteen people. Two were good and both took offers elsewhere while his own hiring process ground through its third round of approvals. The rest were, to be honest, the one-year-of-experience-repeated-ten-times kind, confident on paper and hollow the moment you pushed.
So here he is in July, ninety days from a launch he cannot miss, carrying a gap he has not been able to close in four months of trying. His team is already doing overtime. Two of his best people have started giving him that look, the one that says they’re updating their own CVs. The board has begun asking, in that gentle way that isn’t gentle at all, whether the date is safe.
Daniel is about to make a decision. And in my experience, at exactly this moment, most managers make one of two mistakes.
The first door is the one marked panic hire.
Daniel goes back into his candidate pool and this time he lowers the bar. That confident backend developer from three weeks ago, the one whose answers sounded fine until you looked closely, the one Daniel passed on because something felt thin. Maybe Daniel was being too fussy. The date is coming. A body in the seat is better than an empty seat. He makes the offer.
I understand this decision completely, and it is almost always a disaster. Because Daniel isn’t actually solving his October problem. Hiring a permanent employee takes weeks to close, weeks of notice period, and then months of ramp before that person is contributing at full weight to a codebase they’ve never seen. Daniel needs velocity in ninety days. A new permanent hire, even a good one, is barely productive in ninety days. And he’s just handed a permanent seat, permanent salary, and permanent presence on his team to someone he settled for under pressure. He has taken a short-term deadline problem and solved it by creating a long-term quality problem that will outlive the launch by years.
The second door is marked just throw bodies at it.
Daniel calls a staffing agency, the cheapest one that answers fast, and says he needs backend developers, now. Within two days a shortlist of twelve CVs lands in his inbox with a covering note: strong senior candidates, available immediately. Daniel is relieved. This is speed. This is the thing he needs.
I understand this decision too, and it fails him for a different reason. We’ll come back to those twelve CVs, because that covering note is hiding something, and it’s the most important part of this whole story.
Both doors feel like decisions. Neither one is. They’re both just ways of making the discomfort stop for an afternoon.
Now here is where the story turns, because someone asks Daniel a question that reframes his entire problem. In the real versions of this story that someone has sometimes been me, sometimes a good peer, sometimes just a quiet hour when the manager finally thought clearly. The question is this.
Daniel, is this a gap you’ll still have in two years?
Sit with that, because it’s the whole thing.
Daniel’s instinct has been to ask “hire or augment,” as if those were the two options and he simply had to pick the cheaper or faster one. But that’s the wrong question, and asking it wrong is why both doors are traps. The right question isn’t which solution to buy. It’s what kind of gap he actually has. Because there are two completely different kinds, and they need opposite answers.
Some gaps are permanent. They are capabilities your business will need every day, for years, woven into what makes you you. The person who owns your core product architecture. The engineer who holds the deep knowledge of the system your whole company runs on. The lead who sets the standard everyone else codes to. These are not seats you rent. These are people you hire, invest in, promote, and build your future around. If you try to solve a permanent gap with temporary people, you spend years renting something you should have owned, and you never build the institutional memory that compounds into a real engineering organisation.
Some gaps are temporary. They are bursts, spikes, specialist needs with a shape and an end. A launch ninety days out. A migration that needs three people for six months and one person forever after. A specialist skill you need deeply for this one project and rarely again. A hole to cover while you take the proper time to hire the permanent person well. These gaps do not want a permanent hire, because when the burst is over you’re left carrying a full-time cost for a need that has passed. These gaps want augmentation. You bring in senior capability fast, exactly sized to the need, and when the need ends, so does the cost.
Look at what this does to Daniel’s problem.
Daniel has been treating his October launch as if it revealed a permanent hole in his team. But it doesn’t. The launch is a spike. It’s ninety days of intense need that will subside once the platform ships and stabilises. Trying to fill a ninety-day spike with a permanent hire is why door one is a trap. He’d be hiring for a shape of work that won’t exist in six months.
And Daniel does also have a genuine permanent gap, the senior backend role he’s been failing to fill since March. That one is real, and it deserves a proper, unhurried, high-standard permanent hire. But he has been letting the panic of the launch contaminate that hire, tempting himself to lower the bar and fill a decade-long seat to solve a ninety-day problem.
Two different gaps. Two different answers. The moment Daniel separates them, his impossible situation becomes almost simple.
He augments for the launch. Senior contract engineers, brought in fast, sized to the spike, gone when it’s over. And he keeps hiring, properly and without panic, for the permanent role, now that the launch is no longer holding a gun to that decision. The augmentation buys him the one thing he was missing: the time and the breathing room to make the permanent hire well instead of desperately.
That’s the framework. It isn’t “augmentation is better” or “hiring is better.” Anyone who tells you one of those in the abstract is selling you something. It’s this: hire for the permanent, augment for the temporary, and the expensive mistakes all come from confusing the two.
I run a company that does staff augmentation. So you should be suspicious when I tell you that you need it. Let me earn back some of that suspicion by telling you plainly when you don’t.
If the gap is permanent, augmentation is the wrong tool, and a good partner will tell you that even though it costs them the easier sale. If your core product knowledge would walk out the door every time a contract ends, you don’t have a staffing need, you have a hiring need, and you should hire. If what you actually need is not more hands but a different structure, or a decision nobody’s willing to make, or a product problem dressed up as a capacity problem, then more people of any kind, permanent or contract, will just help you build the wrong thing faster.
I have talked companies out of augmentation more than once. Not out of virtue. Out of self-interest of the longer kind. Because the client I stop from making an expensive mistake becomes the client who trusts me for a decade, and that relationship is worth more than the contract I declined. A partner who will only ever tell you to buy more of what they sell is not a partner. They’re a vendor with a quota.
So before you augment anything, be honest about which gap you have. If it’s permanent, close this tab and go write a proper job description. I mean that.
Let’s say Daniel has done the honest work and he genuinely has a temporary gap. The launch. He’s right to augment. So he calls the agency, and two days later the twelve CVs arrive with that covering note. Strong senior candidates, available immediately.
Here is the thing that note is hiding, and it’s the trap of door two.
That sentence is a claim. Strong senior candidates. And a claim is worth exactly as much as the work that went into it, which you cannot see from the CVs.
You would never accept a prescription from a doctor who named the drug before examining you. But a shortlist is a prescription, and most of them are written without an examination. What usually happens behind that covering note is not assessment. It’s a search. The agency took Daniel’s brief, ran it against a database of available people, filtered on keywords, checked who was free to start, and forwarded whoever matched. No judgement about Daniel’s team. No test of depth. No thought about who would actually survive in his specific environment. The shortlist looks like the output of expertise. It’s often the output of a database query with a covering sentence that claims otherwise.
And if Daniel doesn’t catch that, door two swallows him. He interviews twelve people to discover that maybe two can actually do the work, burns his senior engineers’ scarce time doing it, places someone who looked right on paper, and three weeks into the launch crunch discovers the person is the one-year-repeated-ten-times kind, except now they’re embedded in the most important project of his year.
So how does Daniel tell a real shortlist from a forwarded database? He runs a test that costs him almost nothing.
He gives the exact same brief to two different providers. Same words, same requirements, same day. Then he compares what comes back. If both did real work, the two shortlists will differ in interesting ways. Different people, yes, but more importantly different readings of his brief. One weights the domain experience, another the communication skills, another comes back with a question about a contradiction in his requirements he hadn’t noticed. That variation is the sound of people actually thinking about his problem. If both providers are just forwarding, he gets the same generic senior developers from the same shared talent pools, two lists that look suspiciously alike, because neither was shaped by his brief. Both were shaped by who was available.
The test works because thinking produces difference and forwarding produces sameness. Daniel doesn’t need to be able to judge the candidates himself. He just needs two lists on one desk.
This is the difference between a body shop and a partner. A body shop sends you people who match your keywords. A partner sends you people they have actually assessed against your reality, and can tell you exactly why each one is on the list and who they rejected and why. When you ask a body shop those questions, they stall. When you ask a partner, they were waiting for you to ask.
Daniel separated his two gaps. He augmented for the launch, and he ran the two-brief test, and he noticed that one provider’s shortlist was thoughtful and specific while the other’s was a database dump, which told him everything about which one to work with. He brought in two senior contract engineers who were productive inside a fortnight, because that’s what senior augmentation is for, and because they’d been assessed for exactly his stack and his situation rather than forwarded off a keyword match.
The launch shipped in the first week of October. On time. It was not a miracle. It was the ordinary result of a problem correctly diagnosed.
But here’s the part of the ending I like best, because it’s the part nobody plans for.
One of those contract engineers, in the course of the launch, documented a piece of the system that Daniel’s own team had been quietly terrified of for two years. Wrote it down. Explained it. And when the contract ended and that engineer moved on, the knowledge stayed, because a good augmentation engagement transfers knowledge instead of hoarding it. Daniel’s permanent team came out of the launch stronger than they went in.
And the permanent role? Daniel filled it in November. Properly. No panic, high standard, the right person, because augmentation had bought him the one thing the July version of him was missing. Time to make the decision that mattered without a gun to his head.
That is what winning looks like. Not a heroic scramble. A clear head, an honest diagnosis, and the discipline to treat two different problems as two different problems.
If you are somewhere near where Daniel was in July, ninety days from something that can’t slip and short of the people to do it, I want you to do one thing before you reach for either door.
Ask whether the gap in front of you is permanent or temporary. Whether you’ll still have it in two years. Because a permanent gap wants a hire, patiently and to a high standard, and a temporary gap wants augmentation, fast and exactly sized, and almost every expensive mistake in this whole area comes from solving one with the tool meant for the other.
And when you do augment, remember that the shortlist is a claim, and make them prove it was earned.
That’s the honest guide. It doesn’t tell you to always augment, because I’d be lying, and you’d eventually work out that I was lying, and then I’d have a sale and no relationship, which is the worst trade in business.
If you’re staring at a version of Daniel’s July right now and you’re genuinely not sure which kind of gap you have, that’s exactly the conversation I’m happy to have, including the version where I tell you to hire and not to call me back until you have a different problem. Sometimes that’s the most useful hour we’ll spend together.
A few years ago a man came to us wanting to build a betting portal. He had a clear vision, real capital behind him, and every intention of spending it with us. He was, on paper, the perfect client. The kind you don’t want to slow down.
I asked him one question before we discussed anything else.
Do you have a licence to run a betting business?
He told me he had a business licence. I explained, as gently as I could, that a business licence and a betting licence are two entirely different things, and that in a great many jurisdictions the second one is extraordinarily hard to get, and sometimes simply unavailable. He went quiet. He said he’d come back to us once he had it sorted.
That was nine years ago. I’m still waiting.
I could have taken his money. He was ready to pay. We could have built him a beautiful, well-architected betting platform that he would never have been legally allowed to switch on, and by the time he discovered that, the invoice would have been settled and the problem would have been entirely his. Nothing I did would have been illegal or even, by the loose standards of the industry, unusual. Plenty of firms would have built it.
I’ve never once regretted asking the question instead. And I want to explain why, because the reason is not that I’m a good person. The reason is a business argument, and it’s one I think most technology buyers have completely upside down.
Here is what actually happened when I turned that project away.
That man tells people about me. Not “Brainium built my thing,” because we never built anything. He tells them something far more valuable than that. He says “I went to these people ready to spend a fortune, and instead of taking it, they stopped me making an expensive mistake.”
Do you understand how rare that story is, and how far it travels? In an industry where the default assumption is that every vendor will tell you whatever it takes to win the contract, a firm that talked itself out of one becomes the firm people recommend without being asked. That reputation compounds, quietly, for years. It is worth more than the project would ever have been, and it costs nothing but the discipline to ask an uncomfortable question at the wrong moment.
This is the part buyers get upside down. You are trained to see a vendor’s eagerness as a good sign. It is usually the opposite. A vendor who says yes to everything is not being helpful. They are being a vendor who says yes to everything, and one day the thing they say yes to will be your bad idea, and they will build it perfectly, and you will pay for it.
The most valuable thing a technology partner can do for you is sometimes to tell you not to build.
I’ve watched a lot of software projects fail expensively over twenty-seven years. Almost none of them failed for reasons nobody could have seen. They failed for reasons that were sitting in plain sight on day one, and that everybody in the room agreed, tacitly, not to look at.
A licence nobody checked. An integration everyone assumed would exist and nobody confirmed. A data source that turned out to be locked behind a contract, or a regulator, or a department that had no intention of cooperating. A key third party who was never actually consulted. A regulation that made the whole model illegal in the one market that mattered.
None of these are technical failures. Every one of them is a question that should have been asked before a line of code was written, and wasn’t, because asking it might have slowed down the fun part.
The betting-portal question is not really about betting. It is about the single assumption your entire project rests on, the one thing that has to be true for any of this to work, that nobody has actually confirmed is true. Every project has one. Usually the team can feel it. It’s the thing everyone talks around in the planning meeting. The assumption stated a little too confidently and a little too quickly, that nobody wants to be the person to poke, because poking it might mean the project doesn’t happen.
A good partner pokes it. On day one. Before you’ve spent anything. That is the single most useful thing they will ever do for you, and it will feel, in the moment, like an obstacle.
This is the practical part, and it’s the reason I wrote this down.
When you are choosing who to build with, you are not really evaluating whether they can build. Most competent firms can build. You are evaluating whether they will tell you the truth when the truth is inconvenient to them. And you can test for that before you sign a thing.
Ask them, directly: tell me about a time you talked a client out of a project, or out of a feature they wanted. A firm that has the instinct will have a story ready, because they’re a little proud of it. A firm that doesn’t will stall, or give you a vague non-answer, or quietly reveal that they’ve never once left money on the table for a client’s benefit.
Ask them what they think is riskiest about your idea. Not what’s exciting. What’s riskiest. Watch whether they’ve actually thought about it or whether they reach for reassurance. Reassurance this early is a warning, not a comfort.
Ask them what would have to be true for this to fail. A partner worth having will answer that question with something specific and slightly uncomfortable. A vendor who just wants the contract will tell you it won’t fail.
The answers will tell you almost everything the proposal won’t. A firm that can say no to you before you’re a client is a firm that will tell you the truth when you are one. A firm that agrees with everything in the sales process will agree with everything right up until the project is on fire, at which point they’ll agree that it’s on fire and hand you the invoice.
I’ll be honest about my own position here, because it would be dishonest not to. I run a firm that makes its money by building software. Every project I talk a client out of is revenue I don’t earn. When I ask the betting-portal question, I am, in the short term, arguing against my own P&L.
I do it anyway, and not because I’m a saint. I do it because the alternative, a portfolio full of projects that should never have been built, clients who quietly resent the money they wasted, and a reputation as a firm that will build anything you pay for, is a far worse business than the one I actually want. The short-term revenue is real. The long-term cost of chasing it is much larger and much harder to see, which is exactly why so many firms chase it anyway.
So before you commission your next build, ask yourself one question, and then ask it of whoever wants to build it for you.
What is the one thing that has to be true for this to work, that nobody has actually checked?
If you can’t answer it, that’s not a green light. And if the firm you’re about to hire can’t answer it either, or won’t, you’ve learned the most important thing about them before signing a single page.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes on a build you’re weighing up, that’s a conversation I’m always happy to have, including the version where I tell you not to do it. Sometimes that’s the most useful hour we’ll spend.
I keep coming back to a number. 35,000. That’s roughly how many SAP ECC customers exist globally, and by Gartner’s count, less than 40% of them had actually migrated to S/4HANA by the end of 2024. December 31, 2027 is when mainstream maintenance for ECC 6.0 ends. Extended maintenance buys another three years, until 2030, at a premium. After that, you’re running an unsupported ERP that touches finance, procurement, supply chain and manufacturing at some of the largest companies on the planet.
People have started comparing this to Y2K. I understand the instinct, but I’d frame it differently. Y2K was a fixed technical bug with a fixed technical fix. This is a forced re-platforming of enterprise data at a scale most CIOs have never had to think about, on a timeline they don’t fully control, into an architecture that punishes them economically for bringing along everything they’ve accumulated over twenty or thirty years.
That last part is where I think there’s a real, underappreciated business sitting for a company like Solix Technologies. Let me walk through why, and then let me tell you honestly where I think Solix will fumble it if nothing changes.
Do the arithmetic on that 35,000 number. Roughly 14,000 organisations had migrated by end of 2024. Basis Technologies’ own adoption model, built from SAP and Gartner data, projects only about 57% of ECC customers will have completed the move by the time mainstream maintenance ends in 2027. That leaves somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000 enterprises worldwide who still have to move a live, mission-critical ERP system in the next few years, on a services market that is already tight on SAP-certified talent.
Now here’s the thing that most of the coverage misses. Nobody migrating from ECC to S/4HANA is doing a simple lift and shift of their entire database. And that’s not a technical inconvenience, it’s an economic constraint baked into the architecture itself.
SAP HANA runs on in-memory computing. Data that used to sit comfortably on disk now competes for space in RAM, and RAM at enterprise scale is expensive in a way spinning disk never was. So the moment a company decides to move to S/4HANA, someone in finance is going to ask a very reasonable question: why are we paying premium infrastructure cost to keep twenty years of closed purchase orders, settled invoices and completed projects sitting in active memory?
A 30 TB legacy SAP database is not 30 TB of live, operational data. A meaningful chunk of it, often the majority, is dead weight retained mostly because someone, somewhere, is worried about a tax authority or a regulator asking for it seven years from now. Moving all of that into HANA makes no economic sense, and increasingly, CFOs are the ones saying so, not just the IT architects.
This is precisely the gap that application retirement and data archiving exist to close. Identify what’s actually needed for the go-forward system, archive the rest into a compliant, queryable, low-cost repository, and shrink the database that actually needs to move. Smaller database, faster migration, lower infrastructure bill, lower risk. That’s not a nice-to-have step in an S/4HANA project. For any enterprise with a genuinely old SAP footprint, it’s close to a prerequisite.
This is Solix’s home turf, and to be fair to them, they’ve built real product depth here. SOLIXCloud Enterprise Archiving covers database archiving, application retirement, file archiving and email archiving under one roof. Their retirement play doesn’t stop at ECC either, they’ve built out multi-system retirement across SAP satellites like BW, CRM, SRM and GTS, retiring them into a single governed archive with native understanding of SAP’s own archive object semantics through the Archive Development Kit and Information Lifecycle Management framework. That’s not a trivial thing to replicate. Understanding how SAP structures archive objects, and being able to retrieve that data years later in a form that satisfies an auditor, is domain expertise, not generic storage.
Their pitch is straightforward and it’s the right pitch: identify static and rarely used data before migration, archive it to the cloud, shrink the migration footprint, and cut cost, complexity and timeline all at once. If I were running Solix’s SAP go-to-market, I would not change this pitch. I would change how loudly and how often it gets made, and to whom. More on that later.
I’d expect a smart CIO to push back here and ask why they wouldn’t just dump the historical data into Snowflake or Databricks and call it done. It’s a fair question, and the honest answer is that those platforms solve a different problem.
Snowflake and Databricks are built for analytical consumption, structured for querying at scale, optimized for feeding dashboards and machine learning pipelines. What they are not built for, natively, is SAP’s own retention semantics. An SAP archive object carries legal hold logic, country-specific retention rules, ILM-governed deletion schedules, and the ability to reconstruct a business document exactly as it looked inside the SAP transaction it came from, years after the source system is gone. A generic lakehouse can store the bytes. It cannot, out of the box, guarantee an auditor that a purged record was deleted in line with a retention policy tied to a specific SAP archiving object and a specific regulatory clock.
That distinction sounds like a technicality until you’re the general counsel of a company facing a compliance audit or an eDiscovery request, and someone asks you to prove chain of custody on a decommissioned system. At that point, “we moved it to a data lake” is not an answer. “We moved it into a governed archive purpose-built to preserve SAP’s own retention and access semantics” is. That’s the wedge Solix should be driving, hard, in every conversation, because it’s the one place where the hyperscale data platforms genuinely cannot compete on their own terms.
Here’s where I think Solix should be far more ambitious than its current messaging suggests. An application retirement engagement is, by nature, a low-drama, back-office project. Nobody gets promoted for archiving old purchase orders. But it is also the single best Trojan horse into a much bigger enterprise data relationship.
Once Solix is inside an account, holding the retired, governed, compliant historical record of the enterprise, the natural next conversation is: now that this data is unified and accessible, what else can we do with it? Data governance. Sensitive data discovery and masking for privacy compliance. Feeding a genuinely AI-ready data fabric instead of a swamp of undocumented legacy tables. Solix already has products in this direction, Enterprise Content Services, Enterprise Data Governance, and their own Enterprise AI layer sitting on top of the Common Data Platform. The archiving engagement is the low-risk entry point. The governance and AI-readiness layer is where the account actually grows.
The mistake would be treating the S/4HANA cycle as a one-time services windfall. The right way to think about it is as thousands of enterprises opening their door for exactly one reason, cost reduction on a forced migration, and Solix having a limited window to prove enough value inside that door to earn a much larger, much stickier data relationship over the following years.
Enterprises don’t buy archiving because it’s elegant. They buy it because the numbers work, and here the numbers genuinely do work in Solix’s favour. A smaller migration footprint means a shorter, cheaper migration project. Fewer TB in HANA means lower ongoing infrastructure and licensing cost, every single month, for as long as the system runs. Retiring legacy applications outright removes maintenance, support and licensing spend on systems that exist purely to give someone occasional read access to old records, replacing an ongoing cost with a low, fixed archiving fee. And a properly governed archive removes compliance risk that, left unmanaged, shows up eventually as an audit finding or a legal exposure nobody budgeted for.
Stack those four together and you have a genuinely defensible ROI story that doesn’t need embellishment. That’s rare in enterprise software pitches. Use it.
I looked at several market sizing reports for structured data archiving and application retirement software, and I’ll be direct with you, they disagree with each other by an order of magnitude, some pegging the category at under a hundred million dollars globally, others at close to nine billion. That spread itself tells you something useful: this is still an immature, loosely defined category, which is actually good news for a specialist willing to define it clearly for buyers rather than bad news.
Let me build my own back of envelope instead of borrowing someone else’s number. Take the pool of roughly 17,000 to 20,000 SAP ECC customers who still need to migrate before the 2027 to 2030 window closes. Assume a meaningful minority, say 25 to 30%, have legacy databases large and old enough that a pre-migration archiving and retirement engagement is genuinely worth doing, rather than a nice-to-have. That’s somewhere between 4,000 and 6,000 realistic target accounts globally over the next four to five years. Price a typical engagement, software plus services plus the ongoing archive subscription, anywhere from $150,000 to over a million dollars depending on enterprise size. That puts a realistic, serviceable addressable opportunity for SAP-linked archiving and retirement work somewhere in the low single-digit billions of dollars, cumulative, over this cycle. Not the total category TAM you’ll find quoted in a vendor report, but the actual pool of accounts with a genuine, time-boxed reason to buy.
Solix’s own reported revenue is in the range of $7 million, on a base of around 585 to 594 employees. Set that against a multi-billion dollar addressable pool and the gap is not subtle. This is not a company that is short of opportunity. It is a company that has captured a rounding error of the opportunity in front of it.
Let’s put a number on the upside, because I think this is where the opportunity really comes alive.
Take the low single-digit billions cumulative SAM I built above, call it $3 billion over the next four to five years as a round working number, sitting between my own conservative build and the more optimistic estimates floating around. Now ask a much less ambitious question than “can Solix dominate this market.” Ask: what happens if Solix simply captures 3 to 5% of it, nothing heroic, just a credible, well-executed share for a focused specialist going up against much larger incumbents.
Three percent of $3 billion is $90 million, cumulative, over four to five years. Spread that out, and you’re looking at an incremental $15 to 20 million a year layered on top of their existing $7 million base. That alone doubles or triples current revenue. At 5% capture, you’re at $150 million cumulative, roughly $30 million a year in new SAP-linked revenue, which puts Solix at four to five times its current size purely from this one cycle, before counting a single dollar of expansion revenue from governance, masking or Enterprise AI once they’re inside the account.
This is the part I want to underline. Solix does not need to win this market to be transformed by it. It needs to win a small, defensible slice of it, with discipline, and the company changes shape entirely. That is a far more achievable goal than the market-share fantasies most vendors chase, and it should be the number the leadership team is actually managing towards, quarter by quarter, account by account.
OpenText is the incumbent here, and it earns that position honestly, deep, certified integration with SAP ArchiveLink and ILM, decades of enterprise content management pedigree, and the comfort of being SAP’s own recommended archiving and document access partner. If a CIO wants the safest, most conventional choice, OpenText is it, and Solix should never pretend otherwise.
But “safest and most conventional” is also OpenText’s weakness. It’s a large, broad ECM platform where SAP archiving is one product line among many, built for the customer who wants everything from one vendor and is willing to pay for that convenience and that complexity. Solix’s honest USP is focus and speed: a company whose entire founding purpose, since 2002, has been enterprise data lifecycle management, purpose-built for this exact use case, without the weight of a sprawling content management suite around it. That should translate into faster deployment, a simpler commercial model, and pricing that doesn’t carry OpenText’s platform overhead.
Whether it actually does translate into that, in practice, on a real deal, is a different question, and it’s one Solix needs to be able to prove with hard numbers, not adjectives, in front of every CIO who defaults to “let’s just ask our SAP account rep who they recommend.”
Before any of this legacy SAP data becomes fuel for AI, it has to move through a sequence: classify it, clean it, archive it, govern it, secure it, integrate it, analyse it, and only then apply AI to it. Solix’s strongest, most defensible position is squarely in the middle of that chain, archive, govern and secure. Their retirement and archiving products do that work today, at genuine depth, for SAP-specific data structures that generic platforms don’t understand out of the box.
Where I’d push them to be honest with themselves is the two ends of that chain. Classification and cleaning, the unglamorous front-end work of figuring out what data actually matters before you archive it, and analysis plus AI application, the glamorous back-end work everyone wants to talk about, are both areas where Solix has product ambition (their Enterprise AI and Common Data Platform pushes are clearly aimed there) but not yet the market credibility that IBM, Databricks or Snowflake carry in AI conversations. The right strategic posture is not to pretend Solix is an end-to-end AI platform. It’s to own the archive-govern-secure middle with total authority, and partner or integrate outward at both ends rather than trying to out-market companies with ten times the AI mindshare.
A few things need saying plainly, because a company this size, chasing a cycle this large, cannot afford polite silence about its own gaps.
Solix is unfunded and has stayed that way since 2002. That’s either admirable discipline or a structural constraint on how fast they can scale sales and marketing to meet a decade-scale opportunity, and honestly it’s probably both. A ~$7 million revenue base against 585-plus employees, most of the headcount concentrated in India through what looks like a services and delivery-heavy model, tells me this is a company organised more for cost-efficient execution than for aggressive market capture. Their competitive set, per their own positioning, includes IBM, OpenText, Veritas, Commvault, Informatica and Precisely, tier-one vendors with sales and marketing budgets that dwarf Solix’s entire revenue. Product depth alone does not close that gap.
I think that’s exactly Solix’s risk right now. The technology is genuinely differentiated for this specific moment in SAP’s history. The economics of the pitch are sound. The timing could not be more favourable, a hard deadline, a forced budget conversation, a CFO already primed to ask why the migration bill is so large. The upside math above is real, not aspirational marketing copy.
None of that matters if the sales motion stays where it currently appears to be, largely inbound, largely content-marketing-led, competing for attention against vendors ten times its size. The best product in the world, sitting quietly on a website waiting to be discovered, loses every single time to a mediocre product with a sales team already in the room. Winning this cycle needs an aggressive, account-based push directly at the 4,000 to 6,000 realistic target enterprises I estimated above, a serious channel and system integrator strategy so Solix rides alongside Accenture, Deloitte, TCS and the other large SI’s who are already inside these accounts running the migration, rather than trying to get discovered independently, and marketing that states the ROI and upside case in numbers a CFO and a board can defend, not adjectives a marketer likes.
The window here is not permanent. By 2030, most of this cycle will have played out, one way or another, for most of these 17,000 to 20,000 accounts. The company that wins isn’t necessarily the one with the best archive engine. It’s the one whose sales team is already in the room, with the CFO, before the CIO has finished writing the migration business case. Solix has the product to earn that seat, and it has a genuinely transformative revenue outcome waiting on the other side of even modest execution. Whether it earns that seat is now entirely a go-to-market question, not a technology question.
If you’re sitting inside Solix, inside a CIO’s office staring down this exact 2027 clock, or you think I’ve got a number wrong somewhere in this piece, I want to hear it. Argue with the math in the comments, or write to me directly. This is exactly the kind of conversation that’s more useful out in the open, before the decisions get made behind closed doors.
Disclosure: I hold shares in TechNVision Ventures, Solix’s parent company.
On the 2nd of January 1988, India beat the West Indies in a one-day international at Eden Gardens for the first time ever on Indian soil. I was there. I was twelve, and I still count it among the best days of my childhood.
But this isn’t a story about the match. It’s a story about my father, and a ticket, and something he understood about panic that took me about thirty years to properly learn.
Let me set it up.
My uncle had managed to get three tickets. One each for me and my two cousins. My father didn’t have one. Getting tickets for a game like that was hard in those days, and there simply wasn’t a fourth.
When we reached the ground it was already packed, and outside the gates there were touts selling tickets at wild prices. My father looked at what they were asking and showed no interest at all. He walked us to the gate, sent the three of us in, and I assumed he was going home.
He didn’t go home.
I only found this out afterwards. He hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d stayed near the gate, and he’d kept one particular tout in the corner of his eye. His reasoning was simple. The moment the match starts, a man holding unsold tickets stops holding an asset and starts holding a problem. Nobody wants a ticket to a game that has already begun.
So he waited. The match started. And exactly as he’d predicted, the tout began to panic, because every passing minute made those tickets worth less. My father let him sweat. Then he walked over and bought his way in for ten rupees over the printed price, roughly 45 minutes after the first ball.
He watched most of the match. He paid almost nothing. And he taught me something without saying a word about it.
Here’s the sentence I wrote about him years later, in my first book. Patience was his virtue.
Now here’s the part I actually want to talk about, because it took me most of my career to connect it to my working life.
My father wasn’t being cheap. He could have bought a tout’s ticket at the inflated price and walked in with us. What he refused to pay wasn’t the money. It was the price of panic. The premium that a seller charges you precisely when you feel you have to decide right now.
Once you start noticing that premium, you see it everywhere.
You see it when you shop online and the site tells you there are “only 3 left” and “12 people are viewing this”. None of that is there to inform you. It’s there to switch off the patient part of your brain and switch on the part that grabs. It’s the tout’s stall, rebuilt in software, and it works on most of us most of the time.
And here is where it stops being a shopping story and starts being about the thing I actually do for a living.
Legacy modernization is sold to you with exactly the same stall.
If you run engineering or technology at a mid-sized company, you already know the pitch, because some version of it lands in your inbox most months. Your stack is a ticking bomb. Your competitors are already AI-native and pulling away. Every month you wait, the migration gets more expensive and more dangerous. Sign now. Start now. There’s no time to assess.
It is the tout, holding a ticket, telling you the match is about to start.
And I want to be honest with you, because I’m in this industry and I benefit from your urgency. Some of that pitch is even true. Some legacy systems genuinely are a growing risk. Some competitors genuinely are moving faster. The urgency isn’t always manufactured.
But notice what the pitch always needs you to skip.
It needs you to skip the assessment.
Because the assessment is the one thing that tells you how much of the panic is real. It’s where you find out whether your system needs a full rebuild or a careful refactor. It’s where you find out which parts of it are genuinely holding you back and which parts are fine and just old. It’s where you often find out that the AI capability you’re being sold can’t even run on your data yet, so the real first job is smaller and cheaper than the thing in the proposal.
A seller who is confident in the work wants you to assess first, because the assessment qualifies the job.
A seller who is selling you panic needs you not to, because the assessment is where the panic evaporates.
My father’s move at that gate wasn’t to refuse the ticket. He wanted to watch the match as much as I did. His move was to refuse the price of the ticket while the seller was using urgency to inflate it. He separated the thing he wanted from the pressure he was being sold, and he waited for the pressure to burn off.
That is exactly what a scoped assessment is, in our world. It is not saying no to modernization. It is saying: I’ll find out where I actually stand before I commit to anything, and I’ll make the big decision from knowledge instead of from fear.
You walk out of it with a roadmap and a business case. Then, and only then, you decide how big the job is. Sometimes it’s the full rebuild after all. Often it’s a great deal less than you were about to sign for.
So if there’s a modernization decision in front of you right now, and it comes wrapped in urgency, ask yourself my father’s question before you reach for your wallet.
Is the match really about to start? Or is somebody just holding a ticket they need me to buy in a hurry?
You can find out. That’s what an assessment is for. It costs you a fraction of the decision it protects, and it turns a leap of faith into a piece of arithmetic.
Be a buyer or be a seller. You only really win when you have the patience to find out what something is actually worth.
If you’d like us to look at where your systems actually stand before you commit to anything, that’s precisely what our Modernization and AI Readiness Assessment is for. It’s scoped, it’s fast, and it ends with a roadmap and a business case you own, whatever you decide to do next.
Last week I gave a talk to a hall full of computer science students at Brainware University, and I opened it by telling them that most of what their degree is optimised for is getting cheaper by the month. Not the obvious way to begin a talk you have been invited to give, I know. But I did not travel there to reassure anyone, and reassurance is not what that generation needs from people my age.
I want to set out here the argument I made to them, because it is not really an argument about students. It is about all of us who work in and around technology, and it is about a shift I think we are collectively misreading.
The thing that first made me sit up was not a headline or a research report. It was my own P&L.
A few years ago we built a document processing system for a client. Four engineers, eleven weeks. Recently another client asked us for something functionally similar. Two engineers, under three weeks. Same company, better engineers, higher salaries, and a smaller invoice at the end of it.
Sit with that for a second, because the interesting part is not the speed. The interesting part is that the client did not get poorer and we did not get worse. What happened is that the price of writing software fell, and it fell faster than anyone in my industry has been willing to admit out loud.
I have spent twenty-seven years in sales. My whole working life has been spent watching what people are willing to pay for, and watching that list quietly change underneath everyone. And I will tell you, as the person who reads the bank statement on a Monday morning, that the list is changing right now faster than at any point since I started.
So the question I put to the students that afternoon is the one I want to put to you. It is not “will AI take my job.” That question is beneath all of us and it leads nowhere useful. The real question is this. When the making of software gets cheap, what gets expensive? Because whatever gets expensive is where you want to be standing three years from now.
For most of my career, in this industry and in this city especially, the bottleneck was hands. If you wanted more software, you hired more engineers. That was the entire model of the Indian IT industry for thirty years. Bodies in, billing out. It was a good model and it made this country a great deal of money, and I have nothing but respect for what it built.
But when your bottleneck is hands, whoever can supply hands wins. And the bottleneck is no longer hands.
I told the students I have watched this happen four times before, which is why I am not panicking and why they should not either. The internet arrived and the bottleneck moved from distribution to attention. Offshoring matured and it moved from cost to coordination. Cloud arrived and it moved from infrastructure to architecture. Mobile arrived and it moved back to attention, sharper this time. And now AI arrives, and the bottleneck moves from production to judgment.
Every single time, the same thing happened. The people who mourned the old bottleneck lost. The people who ran at the new one won. And here is the part worth noticing, the part I lingered on with them. In every case the new bottleneck was less technical than the old one, not more. That should tell us something about where this is heading, and it is not where most of the anxious commentary assumes.
I spend a fair amount of my time reading annual reports, because I research and invest in small companies, and you develop a nose for the gap between what a firm says it is doing and what it is actually shipping. On the subject of digital transformation, that gap is enormous. Most of these programmes fail, and almost none of them fail for the reason people expect.
They do not fail because the technology did not work. They fail for reasons that have nothing to do with code, and this was the part of the talk I asked the students to pay the most attention to, because their syllabus will never cover it.
They fail because a proof of concept has no owner, no budget line, and nobody whose promotion depends on it, so it sits in a demo folder forever. A demo, I have learned the hard way, is not a product. A demo is a request for permission.
They fail because the organisation’s data is a disgrace, and AI is a magnifier. Point it at a mess and you get a faster, more confident mess.
They fail because the people running the programme measure themselves on uptime and accuracy, while the person who actually decides whether it lives measures herself on revenue, and nobody has ever shown her the connection between the two.
And they fail because the org chart eats the idea. The new system quietly makes someone’s job disappear, and that someone has been at the company nineteen years and knows exactly which meetings to be unhelpful in. I do not blame them. They are protecting their families. But if you design a transformation that asks people to volunteer for their own obsolescence, you have not designed a transformation. You have designed a conflict.
I told the students this next part on myself, because I think you earn the right to diagnose failure only after you have admitted your own. A while back we tried to move Brainium from a services business toward more platform work, and we picked an open source ERP as our way in. Sensible plan. We ran the pilot on ourselves first and gave every department a month to adopt it. Every department did, eventually, except one. Six months in, our accounts team still had not moved. They were happy with what they had and saw no reason to change. In the end we scrapped the whole programme.
Notice what failed there. Not the software. We had no vendor problem, no integration problem, no budget problem. We had one team that saw no reason to change, and this was inside my own company, where I could in theory just give the instruction. Now imagine that same dynamic inside a client with four thousand employees. Technology fails last. It fails only after ownership, data, incentives and politics have already failed, and then it takes the blame for all of them.
The phrase everyone reaches for is “ahead of the curve,” and most people use it to mean adopting new tools early. I think that is close to worthless. I know people who have tried every new AI tool within a week of launch for three years running and are no better off for it. Early adoption of tools is a hobby, not a strategy.
Being ahead of the curve means being positioned where value is going to accumulate, before it accumulates there, and staying put while it does. That is a positioning question, not a tooling question. And here is the uncomfortable part I made the students sit with. The curve is an adoption curve, which by definition means most people are on the wrong part of it, which means being genuinely ahead of it will feel wrong. It will feel like you are working on something slightly embarrassing that your friends do not understand yet. If it feels comfortable and validated, you are not ahead. You are in the middle.
So what actually gets precious as the making gets cheap? I gave them a few candidates, and I stand behind each of them here.
Taste, for one. When you can generate a hundred options in an hour, the scarce act is choosing. The ability to look at eight plausible outputs and know which one is right, and say why, is now worth more than the ability to produce any single one of them. Taste has quietly become a technical skill.
Accountability, for another. Somebody has to sign. When a system makes a decision that harms a customer, “the model did it” is not an answer that survives a regulator, a court, or a board. The person who can put their name under a system’s behaviour and defend it becomes structurally valuable, and that role cannot be automated, because the whole point of it is that a human is liable.
And deep domain knowledge. Not general knowledge, which is now abundant and nearly free. The specific, ugly, hard-won knowledge of how one industry actually works. How a jeweller really hedges gold. How a hospital actually schedules a theatre, as opposed to how the manual says it does. That knowledge lives in people’s heads and in badly written internal documents, and it is the last mile, and the last mile is where the money has always been.
I closed the talk with the honest version of career advice. Ship something real to a stranger, not another college project. Pick one industry and learn how the money moves in it. Learn to write, because muddled thinking now scales into confident nonsense at machine speed. Learn to say what your work does to someone’s number. And do not wait for clarity, because there is no year in which this becomes settled and calm. Every senior person you meet is also improvising. The ones who look composed have simply been improvising for longer.
Then something happened that was not in my notes, and it has stayed with me more than anything I said from the stage.
After the talk, a small group of students came up to me. Not the software engineering crowd, as I might have expected. The cybersecurity students. They wanted to talk about their career path specifically, where to point themselves, what was worth betting on.
I had spent a line or two during the talk telling that particular group that the attack surface is now expanding faster than any defence budget, because every organisation is shipping systems it does not fully understand, built partly with tools it does not fully control, on data it cannot fully account for. I had framed it as an opportunity rather than a crisis. And here they were, the ones who had heard that as an invitation rather than a threat.
That is the whole argument, and it walked up to me in a corridor. The people who will do well are not the ones waiting to be told their field is safe. They are the ones who hear “this is unstable and nobody has it figured out” and lean toward it instead of away.
So let me put the argument to you plainly, now that the students have gone home. AI has collapsed the cost of producing things. It has not touched the cost of knowing what is worth producing, and it has arguably raised it. Our education, and frankly a good deal of our industry, is still built almost entirely around the half that got cheap. The other half, judgment, domain depth, the nerve to own a decision, nobody is going to hand to us. But nobody is stopping us from building it either, and that is a far better position than most generations have been handed.
The students who walked up to me afterwards already understood that. I suspect they will be fine.
There are people who tell you their story and there are people who let you sit inside it. Siddhartha Bose is the second kind.
We met over coffee, which is the only correct way to meet him. The man loves his coffee the way some people love their first car. He holds the cup, he settles into the chair, and then the stories start coming. Not the polished conference-stage versions. The real ones, with the dates slightly worn at the edges and the pain still intact in the middle.
I’ll be honest about something before I go further. Before I sat down to write this, I was carrying a half-remembered version of his story in my head. I had the name of his first restaurant wrong. I had the number of outlets wrong. I had the years jumbled. It took some digging, and it took listening to him properly, to get the story straight. So what follows is the straightened version, and frankly it’s better than the one I was carrying.
Siddhartha Bose graduated from St. Xavier’s College, Kolkata, in 1982, cut his teeth at a shipping company, and then spent seventeen years in administration with the Tata Group.
Now here’s the thing about administration in a house like the Tatas. It’s not a department. It’s a finishing school for judgement. You learn how organisations actually run, not how they say they run. You learn people. You learn detail. You learn that the small things are the big things wearing a disguise.
He told me two stories from his working years and I haven’t been able to shake either of them.
The first one goes back further than Tata, to his very first job, with a shipping company. Picture a rookie, barely out of college, and a problem nobody wanted: a Greek cargo ship stranded in Kolkata, bleeding port dues, needing to be sold off as scrap so the money could be recovered. His employers didn’t hand it to a veteran. They handed it to him, put him on a train to Mumbai, and he stayed there for weeks finding a way through. The deal was eventually worked out with Seahorse Shipping & Ship Management, a company that counted Amitabh Bachchan among its investors. A first-job kid, a stranded Greek freighter, and the Big B’s shipping outfit closing the loop. You couldn’t script it.
What stayed with him from that episode wasn’t the deal. It was the trust. Somebody senior looked at a rookie and handed him the wheel before he’d earned the certainty. I’ve spent my life building businesses and I can tell you that is the single rarest thing in corporate life. Most organisations give you responsibility only after you’ve proven you don’t need the growth it would give you. The good ones bet on you slightly before the evidence is in. That first bet, made on a young man with a stranded ship, is quietly present in everything he built afterwards.
The second story comes from the Tata years. A group of candidates came in for interviews, and his boss gave him an instruction that no HR manual would ever print. Take them out for lunch. Watch how they handle the table. The ones with proper table etiquette, call them for the next round.
Sit with that for a moment. Long before anyone was writing LinkedIn posts about “hiring for culture fit,” a Tata manager in Calcutta had understood that how a person treats a fork, a waiter and a shared table tells you more about them than an hour of rehearsed answers. Etiquette isn’t snobbery in that framework. It’s evidence. It shows whether a person notices the people around them.
Around the turn of the millennium, after seventeen years, he left. And he didn’t leave to do something safe.
In 2000 he launched Jewel of the East at 6 Loudon Street, and walking in beside him was Rajeev Neogi, the partner whose name will keep returning in this story, because the two of them have travelled the entire hospitality road together from that first day. If you know Kolkata, you know what that address meant. This wasn’t a canteen with ambition. It was an upscale, multicuisine destination, two to three cuisines under one roof, coastal among them, playing in the same league as the city’s most premium names. The old restaurant directories of that era list it in the upmarket tier alongside Zaranj and Blue Fox, which tells you exactly where they had aimed.
Upscale restaurants are capital-intensive today. In the Kolkata of 2000 they were brutally so. Imported fittings, serious kitchens, trained staff, a premium lease. A man who had drawn a Tata salary for seventeen years put his chips on the finest table in town.
And then the floor gave way, and not for any of the reasons the business books warn you about.
The food wasn’t the problem. The customers weren’t the problem. The problem was a signature. He had taken the premises on lease from a man he didn’t background-check. It later emerged that the property belonged to someone else entirely. The rightful owner went to court, and the matter went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court granted an eviction order.
Just like that, the finest multicuisine setup in the city had no address. Everything sunk into that space, the fit-out, the kitchen, the brand he was building around a location, stood on land he never truly had.
He described that period to me plainly. It was a terrible time. A good life became a very average life almost overnight. And to be fair, that’s the sanitised summary of what it must actually have felt like, because upscale F&B doesn’t fail politely. It fails with creditors, with staff you can’t pay, with a city that watches.
Now here’s the thing I want every founder reading this to sit with. Jewel of the East wasn’t killed by the market. It was killed by a due diligence gap. One unverified counterparty. As an entrepreneur I have watched more businesses die of paperwork than of competition, and this story is the sharpest version of that truth I have ever heard from someone who lived it.
He didn’t stop, though. Even in that stretch he set up Porto Rio, which he’ll tell you was the first dedicated Indian coastal cuisine restaurant in Kolkata, and he took on the revival of a lounge bar in the heart of the city. The instinct to build didn’t die on Loudon Street. Only the illusion that a premium address is the same thing as a foundation.
What happened next is the part of the story Kolkata knows, though almost nobody knows it as an answer to what came before.
In March 2003, with a starting stake of twenty-five thousand rupees per partner and everything Loudon Street had taught him, Bose and his friends took over a struggling little Chinese restaurant running out of a garage space in Ekdalia. About a hundred and eighty square feet. A family who needed a way out, a man who needed a way back in.
And here I have to correct myself in public, because when Siddhartha Da read an early version of this piece, this is the part he pushed back on. I had framed the rebuild as essentially his. He wouldn’t accept it. Nothing of what I’ve been has ever been alone, he told me. I always made sure I belonged to a team. Not every subject is anyone’s forte, and everyone in the group contributed something vital. Then he named the name he insisted must be mentioned: Rajeev Neogi, the partner who had walked with him from the first day at Jewel of the East, through Porto Rio, and into the garage at Ekdalia. Frankly, the correction tells you more about the man than any anecdote I could write. Most founders quietly enjoy being made the hero of the story. This one read a flattering draft and asked for the credit to be shared.
Look at the architecture of that decision against the wreckage of the previous one. No premium address. No stranger’s lease. A takeover from a family who wanted the deal, not a signature from a man nobody had checked. Minimum capital, so no single failure could take anyone down. The model built on the old Kolkata pice hotel, honest home-style food at honest prices, rather than on imported chandeliers. Every single choice was the inverse of Jewel of the East. People call Bhojohori Manna a comeback. I’d call it something more precise. It was a correction. They rebuilt around the exact wound.
The name came from the Manna Dey song, “Ami Sri Sri Bhojohori Manna,” the one about the wandering cook who returns home with a style all his own. You could not invent a more fitting name for what they were actually doing.
It started by selling fish fry and cutlets. Within weeks the demand for proper home-style Bengali food pushed them into main courses, and that tiny kitchen quietly turned into a base kitchen, a hub feeding what would become the spokes. By May 2003, two months in, there were crowds waiting outside the garage on weekends. Kolkata had been starving for its own food served without apology, and nobody had noticed until a team with no formal F&B training served it.
From there the story compounds. Across Kolkata first. Then Bangalore in July 2008, of all times, right into the teeth of a global recession, because homesick Bengalis in Koramangala don’t check the Sensex before craving kosha mangsho. Then Mumbai, Siliguri, Puri. A partnership became a private limited company in 2009 and then a public limited one. The brand fed film stars and politicians and the working middle class at adjacent tables, which in Kolkata is the truest certificate of arrival.
My favourite proof of what the brand became isn’t a revenue number. In 2017, when FIFA’s international delegates came to the refurbished Salt Lake Stadium ahead of the Under-17 World Cup, it was Bhojohori Manna that laid out the classic Bengali feast for them, and the word that came back was that delegates from seventy-odd countries loved it. A garage in Ekdalia to FIFA’s table in fourteen years.
And here’s where my own story quietly folds into his. When it comes to World Cup football I’ve always been a France man. When France lifted the cup in 2018, my college mates came collecting the treat I owed them, and I didn’t have to think for even a second about the venue. Bhojohori Manna, Esplanade. Where else does a Kolkata boy celebrate a World Cup? What I didn’t know that evening, passing plates around a loud and happy table, was that eight years later, in 2026, I’d be sitting across from the man who started it all, coffee going warm between us, listening to how the whole thing was built. Life folds itself in strange and generous ways sometimes.
And Bose’s fingerprints are all over the machinery underneath the nostalgia. The administration. The sales and marketing. The customer relationship systems. The in-house training and front office teams. The home delivery operation across every unit, set up long before delivery apps made it table stakes. The outdoor catering business with its corporate and celebrity client list. The relationships with media and the F&B community that kept the brand warm in the city’s imagination for two decades. I notice these things because I’ve built businesses myself. Everybody sees the daab chingri. A founder sees the CRM behind it.
Along the way he also co-founded Machhli Baba Fries, judged a regional Shark Tank style show on Hotstar, and in 2023 joined the National Restaurant Association of India as a mentor. The man collects second acts the way the rest of us collect excuses.
Less than a year ago, Siddhartha Bose sold Bhojohori Manna. The next generation wasn’t ready to carry the business, and rather than let a beloved brand drift, he let it pass into new hands. That takes a clarity most founders never find. Plenty of Indian family businesses have been slowly strangled by the sentiment that selling is defeat.
Some time after the sale, I noticed his LinkedIn described him as the ex-founder of Bhojohori Manna. I told him to change it, and I’ll tell you what I told him.
Ownership is a transaction. Founding is history. You can sell shares. You cannot sell the fact that in March 2003 you stood in a garage in Ekdalia and started something. Nobody says Phil Knight is the ex-founder of Nike. The brand may belong to someone else now. The founding belongs to him forever.
He changed it. Founder of Bhojohori Manna. As it should read till the end of time.
So what does a man do after Tata, after Loudon Street, after building and selling the most loved Bengali food brand of his generation?
He orders another coffee and starts again.
Today he runs Globe & Garnish, an F&B consulting practice where he advises entrepreneurs setting up cafes and restaurants. Project setups, kitchens, interiors, operations, the works, drawn from more than two decades of doing it with his own money on the line.
And I want you to see the poetry in this, because it’s the reason I wrote this piece. The man who once signed a lease without checking who really owned the building now spends his days making sure young founders never make that mistake, or the hundred quieter ones that follow it. His scar tissue has become other people’s syllabus. That is the best possible use of a wound.
When we meet, he doesn’t lead with the triumphs. He leads with the stories, the stranded Greek ship, the Tata lunches, the garage, the queues, and he tells them with warmth rather than bitterness, including the ones that cost him everything. Years of building businesses have taught me to read people quickly, and here’s my honest read. Siddhartha Bose is a lovely human being who happens to have built great businesses, and not the other way around. In this industry, in any industry, that ordering is rarer than the success.
Somewhere in Kolkata right now, a first-time cafe founder is sitting across a table from him, coffee going cold, listening to a story about a building on Loudon Street. If that founder is paying attention, they’re receiving twenty-five years of tuition for the price of a cup.
A shipping company once trusted a rookie with a stranded Greek freighter before he believed in himself. He’s spending his fourth act extending that same trust to strangers.
That’s not a career. That’s a life well built.
If you’re an entrepreneur looking to enter the F&B space, Siddhartha Bose consults through Globe & Garnish. Find him on LinkedIn. Order the coffee. Ask about Loudon Street.
It has been a wretched few weeks to be an Indian cricket fan. The kind of stretch where you stop opening the score updates because you already know what they’ll say. And then, right at the bottom of it, a group of women walked out at the home of cricket and reminded me why I keep opening those updates in the first place.
Let me start with the pain, because there was plenty of it.
First it was the women’s T20 World Cup. India went in as one of the favourites and walked out at the group stage, undone by South Africa and then by Australia in the final league game. That last match was at Lord’s, of all places. Harmanpreet Kaur smashed 56 off 27 and dragged India to 170, the highest total anyone had managed against Australia at a women’s T20 World Cup, and it still wasn’t enough. Ellyse Perry and Ash Gardner knocked off 171 without much fuss and knocked India out. Second World Cup running that we didn’t make the knockouts. For a side that lifted the fifty-over World Cup only last November, going home early in the shortest format has become a familiar wound. We are champions over fifty overs and strangers over twenty. That gap refuses to close.
While that was unfolding, the men were away in Ireland and England, and somehow they made the women’s exit look like a good day.
Ireland was meant to be the warm-up. The soft part of the tour. It turned into the opposite. India lost 2-0. Not just a series defeat after a long unbeaten run, but the first time in history that Ireland have beaten India in a T20I series. Debutant seamers most of us had never heard of ran through a batting line-up fresh off the flat, forgiving pitches of the IPL and suddenly clueless on a surface that moved. That was the first crack.
And there was a subplot the media had been building for weeks. Vaibhav Suryavanshi was supposed to be the story of this tour. Fifteen years old, the youngest player ever called up to a senior India side, Orange Cap and MVP at IPL 2026 with 776 runs at a strike rate most players can only dream of. This was billed as his coronation. Instead he carried the drinks through both Ireland games, then carried them through the first England match too, and by the time he finally got his debut at Bristol he lasted 15 off 10 before an Archer bouncer did him in. The most anticipated debutant in years, and India managed to make even that feel like an afterthought.
If Ireland was a crack, England was the collapse. A 4-0 drubbing. It wasn’t 5-0 only because rain washed out the opener, which is a strange thing to feel grateful for. Six completed matches on this tour, six defeats in a row, the longest losing streak the Men in Blue have ever put together in this format. And remember, this is the reigning T20 World Cup side. The same group hailed a few months ago as one of the finest T20 units ever assembled.
The management dropped Suryakumar Yadav, the man who lifted the World Cup, and handed the reins to Shreyas Iyer. Iyer has now won the toss again and again and won nothing else. Not one match under his captaincy. A new captain, a new plan, and a lot of questions that Gautam Gambhir and the selectors are going to have to answer, because you don’t dismantle a world-champion set-up and then lose to Ireland without owing everyone an explanation.
The salt in the wound came the day the England series ended. England climbed to the top of the ICC T20I rankings and pushed India down to second, ending a run at number one that had lasted more than 1,600 days, all the way back to February 2022. We were the best team in the world on paper for four and a half years. We ended this fortnight as the second-best team getting bowled out for 76 at Trent Bridge.
That was the ledger. All red ink. And then eleven women picked up a pen and started writing in a different colour.
Here is the part that gives me goosebumps. The ground where India’s women were knocked out of the World Cup on the 28th of June was Lord’s. And the ground where they made history two weeks later was Lord’s. Same turf. Same dressing room. Same long walk out through the Long Room. The place that broke their hearts became the place where they became immortal.
For the first time ever, a women’s Test match was played at Lord’s. Fifty years, almost to the week, since Rachael Heyhoe Flint first led an England women’s side out at the ground, and it took half a century for the red-ball game to arrive at cricket’s most sacred address. England versus India. Test number 153 in the history of women’s cricket, and the first at the home of the sport.
The mood around India going in was gloomy, and I understood why. After everything the men had served up, and after the women’s own World Cup heartbreak, who was going to back this side? But I’ll be honest, I wasn’t as worried as most. This India team has always been better over the long format than the short one. The last time they played a Test in England, back in 2021, they held on for a draw. I thought they could compete. What I did not expect was that they would not just compete but demolish.
India batted first and put up 285, with Smriti Mandhana anchoring it on 83, Harmanpreet chipping in 58 and Deepti Sharma 57. A good total, not a great one. Then Kranti Gaud took over.
Gaud is 22, she bowls genuine pace, and on the second morning she ran through England’s top order to finish with 5 for 37. When she got her fifth, she became the first woman ever to have her name go up on the Test honours board at Lord’s. Think about that. A century of men’s names on those boards, and a young fast bowler from India got there first for the women. England folded for 170, with only Amy Jones offering resistance.
India could have enforced the follow-on and didn’t need to, because the second innings turned a strong position into an unassailable one. Mandhana made 70 to go with her 83, Richa Ghosh finished unbeaten on 50, and then Yastika Bhatia produced the innings of her life, a century, 113 runs, the first ever Test hundred by a woman at Lord’s. Two Indians on the honours board in the same match, one for the ball and one for the bat, at a ground that had never seen a woman’s name up there before. India declared on 341 for 7 and set England 457 to win.
Four hundred and fifty-seven. On this ground, in the fourth innings, that was never a chase. It was a sentence.
England had one flicker of defiance. Sophie Ecclestone, who had bowled her heart out for a eight-wicket match haul, then went and made a maiden half-century with the bat. A eight-for and a fifty in the same Test, and she still finished on the losing side, which tells you exactly how one-sided this was. On the fourth morning Sneh Rana wrapped it up, four wickets in the innings and six in the match, and India had won by 270 runs inside 95 minutes of play. The fourth-largest victory by runs in the history of women’s Test cricket.
Kranti Gaud took the player of the match award. Mandhana never got on the honours board, but her 83 and 70 were the spine of both innings, and she’ll know how much they mattered.
Where the men were found wanting, the women stood tall. A frustrated fan needed this. I needed this.
So here is where I land after this fortnight. The men have a reckoning coming, and they’ve earned it. You cannot drop a World Cup-winning captain, lose to Ireland, get swept by England, surrender your number one ranking, and expect the questions to go away. They shouldn’t go away. Accountability is the price of wearing that shirt.
But the same country that produced that collapse also produced the group of women who turned the very ground of their World Cup exit into the ground of their greatest triumph. That is the story I’ll remember from these weeks. Not the 76 all out. The 270-run win. Not the ranking we lost. The honours board we finally reached.
The men will get their chance to answer. The women already have.
Way to go, girls. You carried Indian cricket when it needed carrying the most.