I have been dancing for more than 15 years. I have grown through Sankhya and under my guru, Sri Vaibhav Hirekar, who has given me much more than dance. He has given me perspective on life, art, discipline and what is needed in the arts space. But somewhere along the way, I became an arts manager, and then an entrepreneur, and that came with a completely different kind of difficulty.

I sometimes describe myself as having four sets of legs: one for the dancer, one for the arts manager, one for the founder, and one for the human being underneath all of it. The funny thing is that all four sets of legs want to walk in different directions. Sometimes dance enables management. Sometimes management enables dance. And sometimes they completely disable each other.

For a long time, I thought overthinking was one of my flaws. Now I think it has become one of my tools. The same brain that can obsess over a choreography can obsess over a budget, a timeline, a contract or a strategy. The challenge is learning when that kind of thinking is useful and when it is simply noise.

Dance taught me delayed gratification long before entrepreneurship did. You rehearse for months for a few minutes on stage. You repeat the same movement until your body understands what your mind is asking of it. You work without knowing exactly when the result will come. Entrepreneurship is strangely similar. You put in work today for something that may only become visible much later.

I think you need both hope and pessimism to survive that kind of delayed gratification. You need optimism to believe something can exist before it does. You need pessimism to ask what can go wrong and prepare for it. I don’t think one cancels the other. I think you need both at the same time.

One of the things I understand differently now is labour. Dance is labour. Management is labour. Founding a company is labour. And labour needs nourishment, care, rest and support. We often romanticise the work because it is creative, but that does not make the work any less physical, mental or emotional.

Doing two things at once is often described as indecision. For me, it has sometimes simply been survival. I did not stop being a dancer because I became a manager. I did not stop being a manager because I became a founder. I have had to learn how these identities can exist together without constantly fighting for space.

There is a Marathi word I love: myan. It means the sheath of a sword. I think about it often because I am still trying to find my own myan. Maybe I need more than one. Maybe eventually I will have an entire arsenal of them.

The strange thing is that having multiple identities can actually make you more stable once you learn how to balance them. They give you different ways of looking at the world, different kinds of strength and different places to return to when one part of your life feels uncertain.

For now, I am learning how to live with four sets of legs. Not effortlessly. Fluidly. And there is a difference.

In January 2024, after working independently as an arts manager for about a year and a half, I realised that I needed more people around me. I needed interns. I needed people who could execute clear instructions. I needed capacity. I also realised that there was a market gap and that what I was doing could become scalable. That was probably the beginning of the idea of Vyom as a company rather than just my work.

My husband, Namish, named it. He explained Vyom to me as ether, the element that holds creative elements together. I loved that idea because it felt like what I was trying to do anyway: create a space where different people, ideas and forms of work could exist and connect.

I decided to launch Vyom publicly with a cocktail party. I come from an Army background, so I understand both celebration and hardship, but that did not make me any less nervous about this one. There were probably 50 to 75 people. It was on my tab. I remember holding my drink because I was too nervous to actually drink it. I was thinking about the cake, the size of the cake, how much I was spending, whether the catering was enough, whether everything looked right.

And then everyone got drunk. People laughed. They talked about art. They took photographs. They congratulated me. There was a lot of noise and a lot of warmth. At some point, I exchanged one of those quiet, contented smiles with Namish. It was the kind of smile where you don’t need to say anything because both of you know exactly what you are thinking.

It was out. Something had been etched. Something had started.

That night, I also understood something else. Becoming a founder is not just about giving your work a name. It means becoming responsible for something that other people can begin to depend on. The moment there are people working with you, trusting you, waiting for you to make decisions and expecting you to create opportunities, the weight changes.

Sometimes the weight of responsibility is actually a sign of growth.

I still think about what the future version of that party might look like. I want to have another success party one day, with people I genuinely like, people I care about and people who care about me. I want to look around the room and know that we made something that did not exist before.

And I want to be able to say: Look. We built this.

I have often chosen not to tell people everything I was doing. Not because I had nothing to say, but because I wanted the work to speak. Sometimes I also knew that people simply weren’t ready to believe me.

Once, I applied for an internship at an organisation I admired. I didn’t get it. I remember the experience as a kind of cold shoulder. Those same people eventually became competitors. Looking back now, I think: pretty fucking good growth.

In 2024, I did a UAL course while continuing to work, rehearse, travel and run my life. There were months when I was waking up at 4 a.m. to study, then rehearsing, working, travelling between Pune, Mumbai, Bengaluru and Delhi, and still coming home to cook and clean. I kept the education relatively private. I didn’t want to announce every new thing I was doing. I wanted to accumulate evidence.

Over time, that evidence became a body of work. I learned project management, funding, budgets, partnerships, marketing, social media, finance, people management, P&Ls, salaries, taxes, performance metrics, contracts, hiring and firing, reviews, difficult conversations and client boundaries. The founder title makes all of this look like one word, but there are thousands of decisions sitting underneath it.

Curiosity has probably been one of the most important skills I have developed. I will learn a P&L if I don’t understand it. I will look up salary benchmarks. I will learn a technology. I will try to understand AI. I will ask questions about management. I don’t think you can build something if you decide that certain things are beneath you because they are not part of your original discipline.

One thing that still annoys me is when people say, or imply, that maybe I am not dancing anymore. I am. I am a dancer. I am a founder. I am an arts manager. Visibility is not the same thing as existence.

And I have learned that gratitude does not pay an invoice. Every role has value. Invisible work is still work.

Sometimes I have to stop and tell myself: I did a good job. Not because everything was perfect, and certainly not because I did everything right, but because I know what went into getting here. I know what nobody saw.

I started thinking about this while reading about Ikigai. For me, purpose is not some grand philosophical answer. It is getting up and knowing there is somewhere to go, something to build, something to do, and knowing that the day has a purpose. Dance gives me that. Vyom gives me that.

I have always been a little bit of a mama bear. I love taking care of people. There is something deeply satisfying to me about enabling other people to do what they are good at. Today I work with and enable more than ten artists and have a team of around five people. A lot of my joy comes from watching other people grow because I helped create the conditions for them to do it.

But I have also realised that care has infrastructure.

Care is paying people on time. Care is creating a workplace where people have the tools they need. Care is giving someone some leeway when they are sick. Care is investing in someone’s learning. Care is listening. Care is celebrating people. And sometimes, care is telling someone that their work is not good enough and helping them understand what needs to change.

Care does not mean there is no accountability. In fact, I think real care requires accountability. I don’t want an employee-versus-employer culture. I want reciprocity. I understand that the power is not equal, and that as an employer I have responsibilities, but I also believe that a healthy organisation is one where people understand that they are contributing to something together.

A salary is not just a line on a spreadsheet. It is someone’s rent. It is someone’s family. It is someone’s lunch, commute and sleep. I cannot always give people everything they want, but I can be honest. I can be fair. I can build systems. I can create opportunities. I can celebrate people when they do well and have difficult conversations when they don’t.

You don’t have to choose between being kind and being rigorous.

Maybe that is what Ikigai means to me now. Not just finding the thing that gives my own life purpose, but helping make somebody else’s tomorrow slightly better.

This one may get me into trouble.

One of the things that makes me angry about the arts is, sometimes, the artists. I say that with affection and frustration because I am one of them.

Artists often begin because they feel something deeply. It might be hurt, joy, anger, politics, love or something deeply personal. That emotional sensitivity is part of what makes art possible. But being emotionally sensitive does not excuse bad behaviour, and being brilliant at your art does not automatically mean you are good at money, audiences, people, timelines, contracts or institutions.

Artists need to have each other’s backs. But “you scratch my back, I scratch yours” is not an ecosystem.

An ecosystem requires structure. It requires audiences, money, producers, venues, managers, technicians, curators, designers, funders, writers, technology, archivists, communications and artists. The artist is essential, but the artist is not the entire ecosystem.

I get frustrated when artists complain about audiences without asking why a new audience should come. Is the work accessible? Is the language accessible? Is the location accessible? Is the ticket price accessible? Is the timing possible? Is there enough context for someone who has never encountered this form before to understand why they might want to engage with it?

I believe art should be accessible. And once it is accessible, people should have the choice to engage with it or not. I also believe Indian traditional arts can be elevating. They do not have to be reduced to entertainment simply because we want more people to attend.

At some point, we have to stop whining and start building agency. That means understanding private sector opportunities, funding models, audience development, collaboration, finance and sustainability. It also means being honest about the ways funding and patronage can affect artistic independence.

Creative delusion is beautiful. I think it is probably necessary. You need a certain kind of delusion to believe in a piece of work before anyone else can see it. But it becomes dangerous when it prevents you from seeing reality.

At some point, the artist has to look at the spreadsheet. The contract. The empty seats. The budget. The audience data. The payment. The way people are being treated. The question of whether the work can actually continue.

You have to come back to earth.

And then you have to ask a harder question: what am I doing to make the ecosystem work?

Because I am not only an artist. I am also a manager, a producer, a technician in some ways, a curator, a venue user, a funder when I can be, an email writer, a ticket seller and sometimes the person sweeping the stage.

The ecosystem works when all of us take responsibility for our part of it.