Strong opinions, loosely held.

Rajesh and I met in 2018, at a moment in my career when we were building software the way you build a bullock cart — frugally, by force of will, without good product practice or good engineering practice. It worked, in the loosest sense of the word. It did not scale. He walked in with foundations, and a lot of what I am able to do today at Travelopia traces back to the layers we built together over those years. This conversation was long overdue.

The story I wanted him to tell first was from fifth standard. His small school had two factions — the studious Jaymohan group and the mischief Kamalesh group — and a boy who refused to join either. Why can't I start my own? The same streak showed up a decade later, in the first English class of engineering college, when a professor announced he would teach differently and Rajesh — a first-year, in a fairly traditional Indian classroom — put his hand up and asked why he thought any of them would actually change. The professor called him Prophet for the next three years. Part rebel, part rule-follower. He still carries it.

The phrase he keeps coming back to is the one I borrowed for this title — strong opinions, loosely held. It gets thrown around in tech circles to license stubbornness; Rajesh actually means it. He arrives with opinions because every conversation needs a starting point, but he treats the opinion as a way to open the question space, not close it. That is what made Equal Experts the right home for him, and it is what I needed when I called him in. Within the first week, when I showed him an Excel backlog of five hundred items, he said: let's not even look at it. Tell me the biggest problem. Let's start building.

The most quotable moment in the conversation, though, is from earlier — three months into his first real product role at Recruiter Box. He called the two founders, both deep thinkers, both very capable, and told them this isn't going to work. You two go off, think hard, come back with the answers, and then ask me to execute — which means I am not getting the space to own anything. I did not join to document your thoughts. They heard him. The founders separated. One started talking directly to him. The product matured. I think of this story as the consultant's lesson disguised as a job complaint: you have to demand the space to own a problem, or you will spend a career converting other people's thoughts into JIRA tickets.

Toward the end I asked him about something I have observed in him since the Enchanting days — a kind of fearlessness, but not the projected sort. There is a Sanskrit word, abhaya, often loosely translated as fearlessness. The translation is wrong. Fearlessness is the acknowledgement that fear was once present. Abhaya is the absence of fear altogether — a state where the question simply does not arise. He pushed back, gently. He has fears, he said; the day he caught himself thinking what will Ragu think? about a product decision, he made it go away because what mattered was the user, not the founder's opinion of him. So perhaps it isn't abhaya. Perhaps it is the practice of seeing fear and watching it leave. Either way, I have watched it operate.

There is a Part 2 we promised each other — on Infosys, the company that shaped his professional ethics during his first seven years. Worth waiting for. For today, this is enough: the mosaic of a career, and the principles a thoughtful person carries through it.

— SREE