A week at the Canton Fair is a week of specifications: torque figures, battery life, unit prices, lead times. Every conversation is about a thing, and what it costs.
The last conversation of the trip was about none of that.
At Hong Kong International Airport, waiting for the flight home to Hyderabad, I met Yagneshwara Dasa and Bharatarshabha Dasa of ISKCON, the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, travelling with Mukesh Tiwari, COO of ISKCON, and Sai Kishor, who heads operations in Telangana. What began as an introduction between strangers at a departure gate became one of the best conversations I have had this year.
What we talked about
Everything, more or less. Life and spirituality. The universe, and our small place in it. Society, and what holds it together. Young people, and what they are searching for. Purpose. And they listened to my own story: the companies, the plans, the reasons behind them.
What stayed with me was not any single answer. It was the quality of attention. In a terminal full of people looking at screens, we sat for a long time and simply talked, without anyone checking the time.
Why it mattered after this particular week
I had spent the week looking at machines: robots, exoskeletons, aircraft, factories that can make almost anything. It is easy, after a week like that, to believe that the hard problems are engineering problems.
The conversation was a reminder of the other half. Technology answers how. It does not answer why, or for whom, or what is enough. Those questions decide whether everything we build makes people's lives better or just busier.
I write often that the number I care about is fifty thousand people with a livelihood because something we built exists. A conversation like this asks the next question: a livelihood in service of what kind of life?
On young people and purpose
The part of the conversation I keep returning to is about young people. India has more of them than any country in the world, and more opportunity in front of them than any generation before. Many of the young people I meet are not short of ambition or ability. What they are often short of is a reason that holds when things get hard.
That is not a problem a company can solve on its own. But companies are where most young people spend most of their waking hours, and a founder decides what those hours feel like. I came home with that thought, and with a lot to think about.
Thank you
To Yagneshwara Dasa, Bharatarshabha Dasa, Mukesh Tiwari and Sai Kishor: thank you for your time, your patience and your openness. Journeys are usually remembered for where they went. This one I will remember for a conversation at the gate.
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Back in Hyderabad. More on what I learned in Guangzhou in the coming days.