If you ask me what I do, I could say "I'm an academic, a consultant, and a researcher." But that's a job title, not an answer. The honest answer is longer, messier, and — if I'm being sentimental for a second — it's basically the story of my life.
Research, to me, isn't a chapter in a thesis or a line item in a proposal. It's the thing I've built my whole career chasing, from three very different rooms: the classroom, the boardroom, and the field. Each one taught me a different version of the same truth — that research, done right, is really just a very disciplined form of caring.
Let me take you through all three.
Academic in Me: Research as a Love Letter to Curiosity
My PhD years were, without exaggeration, the most sleep-deprived, over-caffeinated, spreadsheet-haunted years of my life. Somewhere between the 47th round of literature review and the 3 a.m. arguments with SPSS output that refused to make sense, I fell in love — not with the answers, but with the questions.
Academic research taught me patience I didn't know I had. It taught me that a well-designed questionnaire is basically a love letter you send to the truth, hoping it writes back. It humbled me — 48 publications later, I still remember the sting of my very first rejected paper, and honestly, I'm grateful for it. Every "revise and resubmit" was the universe gently saying, "Not bad, kid. Now go deeper."
As a professor now, I get to pass that obsession on — watching a student's eyes light up when their hypothesis actually holds up in the data is, without competition, one of the purest highs of academic life. It's not about the ISSN numbers (though I won't pretend those don't feel good too). It's about raising a generation of people who ask "why" before they accept "because."
Consultant in Me: Research as a Promise You Keep
Then there's the other me — the one who's sat across the table from CRISIL and NITI Aayog stakeholders, where research stops being an intellectual exercise and starts being a responsibility.
When you're studying MSME resilience across Tamil Nadu, or feeding into a national policy assignment, there's no room for "interesting but inconclusive." Real people, real livelihoods, real policy decisions sit on the other side of your data. That changes you. It teaches you to write findings that a policymaker can act on before their coffee gets cold, not paragraphs a peer reviewer will admire six months later.
Consulting research also taught me humility of a different kind — the humility of deadlines. Academia lets you fall in love with a question for four years. Consulting gives you five months and expects love at first sight. I've learned to do both, and honestly? The urgency made me sharper. There's a strange, quiet poetry in taking a messy, real-world problem and handing back something clean, useful, and true — on time.
Industry Researcher in Me: Research as Listening, Loudly
Before the PhD, before the professorship, there was a younger, hungrier version of me knocking on doors as a freelance market research associate — clipboard in hand, learning that research doesn't begin in a lab or a library. It begins with listening.
Industry research stripped away all my academic jargon and handed me something more valuable: the ability to sit with a shopkeeper, a farmer, or a factory worker and actually hear what they're saying, not what my hypothesis wanted them to say. It's easy to fall in love with your own framework. Real people, real markets — they don't care about your framework. They just want to be heard, and it's your job to translate that honestly.
That grounding never left me. Every time I design a survey today — academic or consulting — a part of me is still that twenty-something with a clipboard, reminding myself: the data has a face. Don't forget it.
The Thread That Ties It All Together
Strip away the labels — professor, consultant, researcher — and what's left is someone who never stopped being curious, never stopped caring what happens after the data is collected, and never quite grew out of the excitement of a question worth chasing.
Research, for me, isn't three different jobs. It's one long conversation — with students, with policymakers, with strangers on doorsteps — about the same question, asked a thousand different ways:
What's really going on here, and how can we make it a little better?
I'm still asking. I hope I never stop.