The builder who bounces back

The second in the series. We had agreed Tuhin would send across, in advance, everything he planned to cover — he is a structured person, and that is how he likes to prepare. Instead we did it impromptu, and he took the open door for what it was: a rare chance to talk freely. "I don't get the option a lot of times, given my responsibilities, to have a free conversation," he said. So we had one.

Tuhin is an engineering leader with close to twenty years behind him — a builder, in his own words, not a leader by chance, but by choice. People first, then process, then technology. He believes deeply in context: "In leadership, everything is context. If you don't have the context, you're absolutely off." And he carries his own translation of the acronym everyone keeps saying: for him, AI stands for authenticity and intent — the two things he tries to bring into every room.

What makes this one land is that it was recorded at an inflection point. A few months ago a restructuring put him, in his phrase, "on the wrong side" of it. He is not hiding it. He is processing it out loud — naming the saboteurs, naming the people who showed up for him, and reframing a hard season as a starting line. If you only take one image away, take the one he gave himself: the cork. Push it under, let go, and it comes straight back up.

One — structure is not the opposite of chaos. It is hidden inside it. Tuhin pushes back on the whole framing. "I don't essentially think there is anything called unstructure," he says. "What we call unstructure is also a structure — we're just not formally able to fit it into a bucket we know." His proof is a fish market, which in Bengali is the very word for chaos. Stand in one long enough and you see the rhythm: the man weighing, the man stacking, the man who can cut a ten-kilo fish into precise, weighed pieces in two minutes. A leader's real job, he says, is the transition — taking something chaotic and making it structured enough that anyone can run it. That requires a mind that is calm, composed, fully attentive, completely in the moment, reading the subtle cues.

Two — you can be pushed under. You cannot be kept under. Tuhin's image for his own resilience is a cork: hold it down in a bottle of water and the moment you let go, it springs back to the surface. He is clear that he still feels it — he absorbs the hit, it lands — but he has built his own mechanics to come back up at the same time. The same equanimity runs through how he holds imposter syndrome. He does not fight it; he reads it as a signal. "Imposter syndrome is good. It just goes to show you care about certain things — it's part of your growth." He even has language, from the mindfulness work he does, for the inner voices that show up in a high-stakes room: the judge, the stickler, the victim, the hyper-achiever who tags your whole worth to an external achievement you don't fully control.

Three — he will be a builder for life. Only the context changes. When I asked the question I keep circling — when do you stop being a builder and become a coach, the way a Dravid stops batting and starts making batsmen? — Tuhin reframed it rather than answered it. He agrees with the move, but not the retirement. Today he might build something hands-on, from the front. Tomorrow he builds leaders, or institutions, or becomes an enabler. Still building. The one discipline he insists on is the pause between contexts, so the momentum of one role doesn't leak into the next and dilute his influence. The deepest leadership lessons, he says, come from the two fields where you cannot hide behind theory or a sixty-minute lecture — the armed forces and professional sport — because there you perform from the front, on the ground, with the stakes real. What carries across to software isn't the intensity; it's the constants: character, truthfulness, and trust. In the senior rooms, he notes, trust matters more than capability — you can be the most skilled person there, but if you can't be trusted, it doesn't count.

The conversation was recorded while he was still in the middle of the hard part — between roles, talking to founders, weighing a co-founder offer, writing a book about the disruption itself so others have a framework when their turn comes. He named the people who carried him through it, and was at pains to credit Sunil, who spent three unhurried hours not telling him it would all be fine, but telling him to accept what is and stop asking why me. When I asked for one closing thought, he went to the simplest, least glamorous place.