I've been a class stopper most of my life. I also went to Wharton, one of the best business schools in the world, and I'm a reasonably young financial services CEO, but today's story is actually about trying to jump off the 19th floor of a building. I was born in a Silvis class family and we were taught that mocks academics were important. They were our way to break that great Indian middle class, but. My father is a member of the Indian Foreign Service, and when my mother was expecting me, he was given this very enviable choice of going to either Pakistan or Switzerland.

Yes. And like all logical people in his position. He picked Pakistan because actually, for an Indian diplomat, Pakistan is a career defining posting. I was born with complications and I was left in this incubator when I was born the nurse and God bless that old lady, whatever she is, she put me into this incubator in a slightly tilted kind of position.

So I was born grossly overweight with this broken neck. And you can see it right here. It's got this weird tilt to one side. No, it actually wasn't very prominent when I was growing up, but as I shake the baby fat, it became a lot more visible. I think I must be the only woman in the world who regretted losing weight at some point in my life a few years later. My father was posted to New York and I went to an American school and I was battling, learning how to speak English because I had been brought up on a diet of Ullman's and Titchmarsh and Mashallah and Inch'Allah now.

Then three years later, he was posted to Delhi, where I went to Delhi public school, a few years later my father was posted to Nigeria and he told me I would be going to an American international school. Now, from my point of view, this was fantastic because from this regimented uniformed environment of DP's, I was going into this free flowing bohemian world. And as I saw it, life could only get good. I was in for a horrible shock.

My classmates were children of CEOs, business tycoons, warlords also. And I was the daughter of a government servant. These are kids who vacationed in London and Paris. And when they came back, the girls would talk about all the wonderful designer clothing that they had bought. And I was wearing clothes designed by my mother and stitched by a local tailor, and he would insist on putting these fake labels on them. It was Nike with two kids and Butchy would Cleese's.

After school, these were kids who went to horse riding classes and swimming classes and we couldn't really afford a hobby, so I went to my parents one day and sure, frustration. And I said, guys, I need a hobby. I just need a hobby. And they looked at me and they looked at each other with a completely straight face and they said, Why don't we play bridge? And I said, Bridge. It's a game that 40 year olds play.

I don't know anyone else who plays this game. And they said, we're going to play bridge. So while my friends had swimming costumes and horses, I had this deck of cards. My 12th standard came around in sort of the Mecca of higher education, was applying to a U.S. university, the college counselors told me then that in order to get into an American university, you needed to be academically good. But you also needed to be like this well-rounded person who was either going to represent India in the Olympics or a star musician or had this great talent.

And I told my parents, guys, what am I going to tell universities? Essentially, I'm overweight. I moved around all my life and I know how to play cards.

So my mother looked at me with another straight face and she said that I just tell them the truth. Sometimes the truth is very refreshing. The truth is what got me into Wharton at Wharton. I decided to spend my time studying, of course, but in order to make some money, I decided to run a restaurant in my free time. Now, if you look at it from my perspective, it made total sense. I was a decent cook and the boys would come to the apartment to eat food, so why not make money out of selling it?

My final year came around and the best thing to do at that point in time was to get a job in management consulting. The kids at Wharton and kids at Wharton have this incredible swagger around themselves at this time, told Radical. You've got it all wrong. Kids who get into consulting firms are special. They've spent years doing investment banking internships. They are experts on financial valuation. And they know how to solve these problems. Like how many ping pong balls can you fit into a Boeing 747, which I still don't have an answer to.

But anyway, undeterred by these kids, I applied to the aid consulting firms that came to campus. The first guy came and he rejected me. The second guy also did the same thing, the third, fourth, fifth, sixth. And then the seventh one came. And it was a perfect interview that night, the questions were perfect, the answers were perfect, and I woke up the next morning to receive that gwon. And I knew this was lucky seven.

And that moment when they rejected me. That was the lowest moment of my life I'm going to think about I was a good kid, I'd studied hard. I had gone to Wharton on a scholarship and there were seven farms who apparently knew something about finding good global talent. And none of them thought I was good enough. So I was sitting in my dorm room on the 19th floor and I was looking out the window and I said out loud, something is wrong with me.

I'm going to jump out of this window. My best friend told me at that point, and he panicked, he called the hostile authorities. Of course, they also panicked and soon I was put on an ambulance and I went to the psychiatric ward for being suicidal and depressed. I finally managed to escape that ward the next day because I told them I had an interview with McKinsey and Boston. I also barely made it to that interview. I was told that I was going to be meeting a very respected senior partner, kind of hard nosed lady called Diane, and I was just stressed before the interview.

What is Diane going to ask me? If she going to ask me finance or is she going to ask me about those ping pong balls or is she going to ask me why I've been rejected seven times because McKinsey doesn't take Regitze. My interview with Diane, we had a 90 minute conversation, eighty five minutes. What about Bridge?

It actually turns out that Diane was a tournament level bridge player. She had six U.S. victories to her credit, and never in her life had she met a girl who had been playing bridge since the age of 13. So anyway, I walked out of that interview when I was going down the glass elevator of the hotel lobby and I thought to myself, Radhika, nobody gets a job at McKinsey for knowing how to play cards.

And I also thought, this is your last shot at this consulting dream. So our heart was sinking in that whole moment. I walked down and Diane motioned from upstairs, she was calling me, telling me to come up and I went back thinking, I'm sure I've left something in the lady's office. And I walked out of the lift and she was standing there and she said, you know, we would have called to tell you this a few days later.

But just looking at you, I feel like we need to tell you this now. We're hiding you. And in that moment, I broke down completely. Perhaps it was the stress of what had happened in the 24 hours in the ambulance in that ward, or maybe it was seven consecutive rejections, or maybe it was a whole life of living with this broken neck and trying to fit into a perfect world and be a perfect person. And I hugged her and I said, Ben, just tell me why you're hiding me.

And she just laughed and she laughed and she laughed and she said, it's actually very simple, we're hiring you because you're different and we're hiring you because you're unique. McKinsey happened in a few years later, I was working on Wall Street, I had a reasonably good career by then, the financial crisis of 2008 had happened, but I had kept my job and I had kept my visa, which was very important. And yet the bank to do something different, something new hit me.

So myself and two partners of mine decided to move back to India to start a financial services business. Now, everybody I knew or nearly everybody told me this was a horrible idea and I don't blame any of them. I was twenty five. I had no business experience, the financial crisis had just happened and I was trying to give up a perfectly good Goller salary for a life of uncertainty. So I moved back to India and put all my savings into stopping Forefront Capital Management.

Now, when I moved back from the US, I had this belief that a certain degree and Wall Street experience meant that customers would be running to give you money. That was very long. The fun I walked at when I left managed 20 billion US dollars, we started for French capital with two and a half million Indian rupees, about twenty five legs barely put together. And the reality of running a business with no revenue, taking home no salary, and what my parents always call living off your savings, it starts to hit you and you wonder, what if I left behind?

Why did I do this? I remember there was one day we had a client on board and we had to get a document notarized to get him to join and we couldn't afford a pyon. So I said, I'm going to go to Matonga and I'm going to get this document notarized. The notary was an old man and he was getting very, very cranky. So in really Bombay, I was running around Matonga trying to find this notary, begging him to get my document notarized.

And as I was coming back in that cab with the document notarized, because at that moment, that meant the world to me, I thought to myself, logical, what have you given up to get a document notarized? And there were many things that struck me, there was a day I spent half the day managing our pantry because an intern threw somebody on our sink. And I realized that when you run a startup, you are really everything, including the pantry boy or the pantry going.

But I think the roughest times were when my mother would call me in genuine concern and she would just ask me, are you okay? Are you doing all right? And I'd say, yes, and I put down the phone then and she knew and I knew that I probably wasn't doing all right. But I survived, I persisted and so did Forefront Capital, the twenty five lacs that we started that business with became two growers one year later. And they became two hundred crores when we sold the business worldwide financial services.

I did a lot of random things in their journey in that 200 crore journey. I did everything from learning out how to attract a customer to dealing with regulators and lawyers and notaries and managing a Bantry. But but everything I did in building that 200 crore business helps me run the 20000 crore business I done today. And I hope it will help me build this into a two lakh crore business one day. In this whole journey, and it's just started, one thing has stayed the same.

When I was five, I was this girl struggling to get her English right in New York. When I was 15, I was this gawky teenager struggling to fit in in Nigeria when I was twenty five, I was a young businesswoman trying to find my feet in a country I had never lived in. And now I'm 35 and I'm this young woman CEO. That's that's what they call me, trying to make her place in the Indian mutual fund industry.

The other thing that has stayed the same is that I'm still the girl with the broken neck. In fact, I've lost some weight now and I get photographed a lot, so the neck shows up and it shows up very prominently. And sometimes I travel and at the airports, the security woman will ask me about my broken neck. But the one thing that's changed is I don't mind it now. I actually smile about it. And I smile about it because I always remember what Diane told me in that lobby, this broken neck makes me unique and this broken neck makes me different.

And that's the message that I want to leave you guys with today. Each one of us is unique, each one of us is different, and everything that we do makes us who we are. Every individual is a collection of thousands of experiences and they're good experiences and bad experiences and they're happy experiences and sad experiences, but these are experiences that define us and these are experiences that make us who we are. So celebrate all your perfections, celebrate all your imperfections, celebrate everything in the middle, because when this comes together, this is your own story.

And most stories have a happy ending. Thank you.