The Art of Surrender

What love and building a startup taught me about letting go of the outcome.

I fell in love for the first time at 17. I met her at a Dandiya event. It wasn’t love at first sight, but chutzpah. I fell in love anyway, and decided the ending should be marriage. The next few years were filled with so much worry about getting there that I missed being with her. The relationship ended in betrayal. Years later, I fell in love building a company, with another ending in mind: an IPO. It was acquired by CRED. It was a success, but I struggled to feel it as one, because it wasn't the ending I had pictured. Now, I am falling in love yet again, this time with the Krishna from my mother's kitchen. I hope it works, because this time I have kept the ending open, with no expectations. Call it surrender or detached mindfulness, but this love feels beautiful and effortless, maybe because there is no outcome to wait for.

Bravado on the dance floor

I still remember the first day I met her. Let’s call her Paro for privacy's sake. It was the last night of Dandiya. My roommate and I had decided to join the Indian community that organised the festival. My usual aloof self dreaded it: dancing to Indian music, and that too in circles. I still don't understand why men and women dance in circles. But that's not the point. Back to her. She was in the circle, doing her Garba and Dandiya thing. My roommate walked up and asked for her number. She refused quirkily, saying that her mom didn't allow her to give her number to strangers. He came back looking dejected. The Robin Hood in me woke up. Seventeen-year-old Avi wanted revenge for every man who had ever been rejected. I joined the dancing as if I was possessed by Falguni Pathak's dancing moves, introduced myself, and never asked for her number. At the end of the night, she asked how she could stay in touch with me. I said, with a straight face, "I don't think my mom allows me to give my details to strangers." There was a sense of relief, an accomplishment of sorts, for the revenge I had taken on behalf of my roommate. But she was a smart woman. Through mutual friends, she found my number, and the next day there was a "hi" on my phone. That's how my first love started.

What love meant to me

I loved Paro the way I had learned to love growing up. The way you'd expect any human to: with expectations, worries, and an outcome in mind. In this case, marriage. My definition of love came from two places: Bollywood and my parents. Bollywood taught me that every great love story ends in a marriage. The hero gets the girl, the families come around, and the credits roll on the pheras. Anything else is a tragedy.

My parents taught me the rest. For them, love also meant an outcome. If they gave us a good education and got us married in our 20s, that would show they loved us. Worrying was how they showed they cared. Would I get a good job? Would the money last? Love also came with reciprocity: they provided for us, and one day we would take care of them as they got older. So love was practical. It was held together by giving, by what came back, and by worry, because that is how you showed care for another human. But, somewhere along the way, love felt less like love and more like a responsibility: something you worked at, for someone.

I loved her the same way, with effort, worry, and an outcome I had decided on. Every weekend, I travelled three hours from my college town to the city to see her for an hour, and three hours back. My friends went to parties. I was on the road. If you had asked me where the centre of the universe was, I would have said: “wherever she was”.

For four years, I waited for marriage. We never had sex. Marriage wasn’t just something I hoped for. I believed it was how our story was supposed to end. Staying together was the only successful ending I could imagine. I kept worrying about whether we would get there. That worry took my attention away from being with her. I thought I was protecting our love, but I wasn't always present to experience it.

An IPO, and the betrayal

It wasn't just Paro. The second time I fell in love was with CreditVidya. Once again, I had an ending in mind: the IPO. While trying to reach it, I forgot to live the life I was given.

When love has an outcome, you believe you can control it. With enough effort, enough bus rides, enough worry, you can reach the destination that proves you love someone. And the moment you think you can control the outcome, you are at the centre of it. The "I" becomes very important. I loved, and I expected the love to come back to me. It did not.

I didn't end up with Paro. She ended up sleeping with my best friend. And CreditVidya didn't end in an IPO. It ended in an acquisition, a good ending that still felt wrong because it wasn't the one I had pictured.

But the bigger loss wasn't the girl or the IPO. Somewhere between the bus rides and the board meetings, life had happened. I just hadn't been there for it.

Falling in love again

I was introduced to Krishna in a corner of my mother’s kitchen when I was five. For most of my life, I went to him with a request. Get me out of Kathmandu. Get me the job. Get me the exit.

Only recently has that changed. Instead of asking him for things, I try to sit with him every morning. Some of you might call it meditation. He is sneaky. He doesn’t exactly appear. But sometimes, between one thought and the next, I feel him.

Think of thoughts as clouds passing across the sky. Usually, I’m so caught up in them that I forget the sky. Then, for a moment, the chatter stops. There is nothing to ask for, nothing to fix. And I feel held. It’s hard to explain it any other way.

Sometimes my mind still tries to make sense of my lost love. “Toh kya? So what if she didn’t marry you? You wouldn’t have become who you are.”

Another thought. “So what if the company didn’t go public? Maybe you wouldn’t have gone looking for Krishna.”

He doesn’t answer with an explanation. Now I don’t need one. He had been there the whole time. In the background, in a corner of my mother’s kitchen. I had been so busy asking him to change my life that I hadn’t spent much time just being with him. Maybe he never expected anything from me. He let me be. Just being there was enough. I don’t know whether those things happened for my good. I know they no longer have to turn out differently for me to be okay. Whether I married Paro or not, whether there was an IPO or not, I’m beginning to trust that I’ll be okay - because he’ll be there.

Surrender and nonattachment

This is what surrender is beginning to mean to me. In a way, it is nonattachment - not getting fixated on outcomes and not feeling an internal pressure to acquire or hold on to what is dear. But I still care for what I’m building and the people I love. I’m learning to leave the ending with him. And as I do that, the burden of the “I” gets lighter. I don’t have to work out how everything will turn out before I can live, or keep worrying to prove that I care.

For years I blamed Paro. Now I wonder who would want to marry a guy who was physically present, but whose mind was always somewhere in the future. With Krishna, I don't need to be anywhere else. Because now itself is complete.

When we get what we want, we attribute the success entirely to our worth and effort, and when we fail, we personalise the failure by asking, "What did I do wrong?" The habit of treating our loved ones, including God, as transactional vending machines - where input effort guarantees a specific outcome - creates a rigid mental model that collapses when confronted with the complexities of life. I loved Paro, but lost her. I loved CreditVidya, but failed to live the relationship.

In the Bhagavad Gita, karma-yoga joins committed action with relinquishment of possession over its fruits. The same verse rejects attachment to inaction. In Buddhist psychology as well, nonattachment is the quality of not being fixated on ideas or outcomes, and not feeling an internal pressure to acquire, hold, or avoid them. That’s the message. Love unconditionally.

The first time I fell in love, Paro was the centre of my universe. This time, the whole universe is the object of my love, because there is less of me in the way. And I can feel it.

Love feels lighter. I think I’m learning to love again. And to live again.

As Rumi wrote: "Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along."