Working in a Room That Was Not Built for Me Made Me Build My Own

I had joined an investment advisory firm in Mumbai at 24 that was, in the specific demographic of its client-facing professionals, composed almost entirely of people from backgrounds that were not mine - English medium from the beginning, certain colleges, certain social networks, a particular shorthand of reference and assumption that operated as both currency and filter.

I had a different background and had arrived through a different route and for the first six months experienced the specific exhaustion of navigating a professional culture that had not been designed with my presence in mind. I want to be precise about what I mean: nobody was unkind.

The exclusion was structural rather than personal - the product of a culture assembled over decades by people who resembled each other and who had not needed to build for anyone who did not.

I was competent and I was also consistently translating - between my idiom and the room's idiom, between my instincts and the expectations, between what I knew and what counted as knowing in the specific terms that culture valued. The translation cost energy that my colleagues were not spending.

By 26, I had become skilled enough at the translation that the cost had reduced. I had also, in the process, developed something that the people who had not needed to translate had not developed: a very clear understanding of the structural assumptions a professional culture carries and the specific people they exclude.

At 29 I was building a team and made deliberate decisions about how I wanted that team to function that were informed by every moment of translation the previous five years had required. The culture I have built is one that costs people less to navigate.

That it produces better work is, I believe, not coincidental.