Know the game and play it right!

Brindha Dhanabalan, ECE (1998-2002), talks about her take on how exciting and important it is in life to find and follow one's own interest and much more.

"You will never be able to ask the right questions if you don't know what you want."

“We have been going for walks around the suburbs, but we make sure we don’t create a problem for ourselves or others in this pandemic time. We find ourselves with enough time now, not having to rush the kids to all the classes. Instead, we get to spend more time with the kids, enjoying the evening snacks and talking with them. It has been a new way of looking at life” says Brindha Dhanabalan as we were warming up before the interview.

She founded and is successfully running two US-based businesses, one of which focuses on AI-based solutions for business transactions. Even before the pandemic, Brindha’s day to day life had still been challenging. She says, being the boss, gives her more flexibility. She didn't have to run into the office at 9 in the morning. Instead, she could savor the taste of good homemade coffee with a peaceful mind.

“Every day presents itself with a challenge, it keeps you on your toes, always thinking, finding the best solution, taking it to the next level, things like that. That's the thing about entrepreneurship. You can take as much challenge as you want when you need it and you can lay it back and balance it if you feel so. To me, this is the most interesting part of the job.”

When asked about what she resents about the boss-life, she says that being the boss, she has to think as a decision-maker first, compromising her social life at the workplace with friends and colleagues. But she knows that nothing great comes about without a trade-off.

Brindha started out at home, here at GCT, graduating in Electronics Engineering in 2002. She recollects how she felt initially at GCT. She was among the cream of Tamilnadu’s STEM stream of students. Coping up with that in itself turned out to be a challenge for young Brindha. While attending a placement drive for HCL, Brindha found herself acing the aptitude test which fortunately had questions from the marketing perspective rather than the usual technical nature of the test. She had always been curious about how the management side of the job worked. That curiosity paid off. She landed a marketing job at HCL and worked there for a year before she moved to the US.

“I wanted to do something else beyond my full-time job and taking care of the kids at home.”

It was Brindha’s sister who introduced her to the CFA program (Chartered Financial Analyst). CFA Program is designed to equip you with the kind of expertise and real-world skills in investment analysis. With a little bit of both fear and curiosity, she went ahead and enrolled in the program. I scored on the highest score bracket on almost 9 out of the 10 subjects in CFA Level 1 results. I knew right then that finance was my game.”

“Being a part of NYSSA(New York Society of Security Analysts, which is now CFA Society of New York),” continues Brindha, “I got to meet and interact with the influential leaders of the financial world, the giants from Wall Street. It is a knowledge hub, with everything you got to know handed over to you on a plate. All you gotta do is to be at the right place at the right time.”

She says the knowledge from the CFA program gives her the advantage of knowing the mechanics behind the wheels of fortune. Being well-versed in numbers, she is equipped to assess and validate every step she takes, which she wouldn't have been able to master otherwise.

We asked her what she would change in her life if she could.

“I would have begun at a startup rather than a tech giant like HCL. Then it wouldn’t have taken the 15 long years it took for me to reach where I am now. But then the skills that I had developed during that period are still helpful. No experience or knowledge goes wasted in life”.

Driven by the spirits of the American revolutionists like Rockefeller, J.P Morgan, and Andrew Carnegie, you could say that Brindha was a person driven by the pursuit of knowledge. She stresses how important it is to keep ourselves educated and always on the call to face challenges. She draws an example of Ali Baba’s Jack Ma, who started out as a teacher in his early days. She then goes on to explain in great length how starting out in a startup would prepare us better for an illustrious career than a 9-5 corporate job.

“The risks you take when you are young, like choosing to work in a startup over a corporate job, you cannot afford that later in life when you have a family to care for. So, cherish your youth and take risks. Worst comes to worst, the mistakes you make early on in life will give you ample space for reassessment and implementation in future endeavors.”

Brindha too had been a confused kid at college, often finding herself at crossroads unable to choose what she wanted. “You will never be able to ask the right questions if you don't know what you want. Don’t follow the herd into anything. Ask yourself what you want, what will it take for you to land where you want to, be it the position of a senior engineer or an executive director, groom yourselves for that. Take your time to figure out what excites you. Only the right questions will lead you to the next right question.”

Even when she was home, taking care of the kids for a while before she started out into business, Brindha never failed to keep herself valuable. She found herself reading book after book on finance, discovering Michael Lewis’ ‘The Big Short’, about the 2008 financial crisis, who would later become Brindha’s favorite author. This tenacity is what helped and guided her to where she is now and will continue doing so.

“Keep yourselves valuable. There are ample resources and platforms at this point in time like Coursera and Udemy. They offer specialization courses in almost any field you wish to go to. Back in my time, books were the go-to resource. Books are still as useful as they were before. With technological integration, if you find it hard to read a book, you can always listen to one on platforms like audible. Books lead you to other good books and that endless journey, I personally think, is more interesting than the internet”.

But there is more to Brindha than just being a successful entrepreneur or having figured out what she wanted to do in life, which most of us struggle with. When you take challenges head-on, you are likely to hit a wall sometimes. In such times, it doesn't matter what you have done with your life or how successful you are in your career. Every one of us is likely to end up in one such situation.

“It is important to spend time with family, friends, kids, or your spouse. You'll have time for everything if you prioritize. That image of someone who is like "Oh I have to be successful in my career, I don't have time for this, time for that" that is not true to life, and even if it is, isn't healthy. We do have enough time for people.

Sit down and lean back once in a while and think of all that you have been through. Back in the day, we used to curse ourselves for having to put up with the terrible mess food that was nowhere near home-food. But now, turning back to those days, that has become a beautiful memory. Our lives will be full of such a mundane string of events to look back to. Yes, it is important to be successful, but it is more important to be happy sometimes!”