The long innings.

I met Venky four years ago, on the fourth floor of the Travelopia India office, around the time Travelopia India was being stood up. We sat for about an hour. From that hour to this morning, both of us have grown — professionally, and into a friendship I cherish dearly. I had been nudging him toward a podcast for a while; he is, in his own words, a creature of habit, fluent with rituals he knows well, and quietly reluctant about firsts. Over breakfast today I asked again. Forty-five minutes later we were recording.

The first thing he wanted to talk about wasn't the resume. It was the t-shirt — an AC Milan jersey his son Kabir gifted him for his birthday, with Paolo Maldini's name engraved on it. Maldini is one of football's great defenders. Venky pointed out that most people love the forwards. He loves the defenders. The selfless ones. The backbone. The ones who enable without claiming credit. He is not pitying them — it is who he is. I take my time, but once I decide on a journey, I give it a long rope. A life of long innings, in test-cricket time.

The mosaic is wide. A temple town in Madurai. A father who told him, at twelve, that he had to choose between cricket and school because the family could afford one — and treated him like an adult while saying it. The same father who drove him to BITS Pilani at eighteen, dropped him in the campus, said it's your journey now, and left without lingering. An Infosys interview in 1999 he was not even prepared for — woken up at noon by friends, no resume, no tie; he wrote his resume by hand on a hotel A4 in the lobby of Centre Point, and the interviewer — a man named Sreekanth — told him it was one of the most well-written resumes he had seen.

Then the pivot most people don't know. A wedding in Hyderabad got postponed because the biryani master fell sick — and Venky decided that being able to influence the course of a wedding was a kind of wizardry he wanted to learn. He took a sabbatical from Infosys, interned at Paparazzi at the Royal Orchid in Bangalore (his nails wore off peeling garlic the night before an outdoor wedding), then moved to Naples, lived in Sorrento, worked as a traineee at Il Buco, a Michelin star restaurant. He came back and ran restaurants, cafes, pubs, bars for over a decade — until COVID. Then back to technology.

The other shift in there is from fitness to health. Fitness was about looking good, having a center of attraction, the ego play any teenager carries. Health came later: body and mind, treated as one. No drink. No smoke. Five years. And — quietly — five years at Travelopia without a single sick leave. He doesn't say that to boast. He says it as an invitation: it's such a fabulous feel of being healthy in mind and body that I want everyone to know what it is to be in this space.

I asked him, near the end, what he would tell his younger self if he could time-travel. He answered without hesitation. I wouldn't tell him anything. That was the best version of him at that moment. Tampering with it would tamper with this one. For all you know, I would never have been the second of two same-sounding names in his life — Sreekanth in Nagpur in 1999, who hired him into Infosys; Sreekandh in Bangalore twenty-two years later, who hired him into Travelopia. Two different people. Two different spellings. Same name to the ear.

On AI he said something I have been thinking about since. Imagine a partner who is very smart, has no judgement about you, openly tells you to use them to better yourself. You can be honest. You can be vulnerable. You don't have to fake it. He told me about a moment when his parents moved to Mahabalipuram and he found himself emotional — about the role reversal of being a provider, of being told gently by them that we are sorted, you can carry on. He wrote some of it down, asked Claude for its version, and when he read the response, he cried. AI as a force of good, used by a person willing to be vulnerable in front of it. That is the part I keep coming back to.

There is a Part 2 we already promised each other — on AI delivery, the practice that is bread and butter for both of us, and what we are reimagining together. For today, this is enough: a defender's life, on the record, told the way he tells it. Slow. Honest. With a long rope.

— SREE