A spine injury, a diagnosis that arrived more than a decade too late, a classroom of children who changed everything, and an admit to the Harvard Kennedy School. Some stories stay with you. This is one of ours.

In 2011, Sooraj Saxena was in his mid-twenties, only a few months into his first real job at Accenture in Mumbai, and lying in a hospital receiving the kind of news that splits a life into a clear before and after. He had injured his spine, and the MRI was not reassuring. He still remembers the doctor looking up from the scan and telling him, very plainly, to go home and take care of himself so that he did not end up paralysed. Sooraj pushed back the way an ambitious young person does. How could he walk away from everything when he had only just started? The doctor’s answer was gentle and final. He could manage his career later. His health came first.

He was told to stay on bed rest for six to eight months, and that alone would have been enough to stall the beginning of almost any career. What made it heavier was the second piece of news that arrived around the same time. The doctors discovered that Sooraj had hypothyroidism, and that it had gone undiagnosed for more than a decade. The condition slows growth, and once it finally had a name, a great deal of his earlier life suddenly made sense. It explained why his height had stalled through the years it was meant to climb. It explained the speech difficulties he had carried, quietly, all the way through school and college, the kind of thing a young person tends to file away as a personal failing rather than a medical fact that nobody happened to catch in time.

So that was the situation he found himself in. A young engineer at the start of what should have been a long runway, sent back to his hometown of Bhopal, taking on freelance work to stay afloat, turning over the questions you turn over in a season like that. Why had no one, his own family included, seen the signs sooner? Would he get his life and his career back at all? He has been honest, in the years since, about how hard those months were, both in his body and in his head.

The turn, when it finally came, did not arrive in the form of a job offer or a doctor’s all-clear. It arrived in a classroom.

A room full of children, and a change of direction

While he was still finding his feet, Sooraj joined a volunteer organisation called Make a Difference and began teaching underprivileged children. He walked in as the teacher. By his own account, he walked out as the student. Dreams do not wait for permission from your bank balance, your background, or your body. Those children had every reason to believe their circumstances would have the final word, and they refused to believe it for a moment. He says he has not looked back since, and the rest of his story makes that very easy to believe.

He would build a career around making sure that no one else’s potential gets quietly capped by a condition nobody noticed, or by care they simply could not reach. He had lived the cost of that gap in the most personal way a person can, and he was not about to spend his working life on anything smaller than fixing it for others.

The long climb

What came next was not a straight line, and Sooraj would be the first person to tell you so. A year into his recovery, he took a role helping to digitise healthcare delivery in local hospitals, the kind of unglamorous, foundational work that gets systems and records and people to talk to one another so that ordinary patients actually get seen. Somewhere in the middle of it, he made the leap from engineering into management. He cleared CAT, XAT, and IIFT in the ninety-ninth percentile, which is worth pausing on, given that this was the same person who, years before, had taken a drop year after school to chase the IIT entrance exams. He went on to IIM Trichy, spent an exchange semester at EMLyon in France where he finished in the top one percent of a class of a hundred and twenty, and kept moving steadily toward the thing he actually cared about.

Then the work began to match the mission. He joined a United Nations project in New Delhi to digitise India’s vaccine supply chain, a six-person team covering five hundred districts across eighteen states in just three months, and he was the only member in the room from a management rather than a medical or policy background. That same system was later used during India’s COVID-19 vaccination drive, which is one of those sentences that is easy enough to write and almost impossible to fully absorb. At Xiaomi, leading the fitness wearables business, he helped put a blood oxygen sensor onto millions of wrists, a feature that turned out to be an early warning sign for COVID and for lung trouble, so that people caught a problem and sought help sooner than they otherwise would have. At Samsung, where he works today in business strategy for the multi-device experience, he noticed that many women in India skip the gym for reasons that have nothing to do with willingness, and helped bring a guided smart-yoga solution into the living room through the television, real feedback and all.

There is one more thread worth pulling, and it might be the most human one of all. The boy who grew up with speech difficulties became a spoken-word poet. He performs under the name Agastyaspeaks, and he has won a creative-writing competition for his work. The very thing his condition once took from him, his voice, is the thing he reclaimed and now uses on a stage, deliberately and out loud. We did not have to invent a single part of that. It was simply true, and it told us almost everything we needed to know about the person we were working with.

Why Harvard, and how he got there

Sooraj did not come to GyanOne as the candidate a rankings table would have picked first. He had applied to schools before. His scores were solid rather than spectacular. What he had instead was a life that genuinely held together, and a reason for wanting the Harvard Kennedy School MPA that he never had to manufacture. He had spent more than a decade building technology that improves people’s health, and he had run, again and again, into the same wall. He wanted to move from building the products to shaping the conditions that decide whether those products ever reach a village in Ghana or a small town in India.

Our own work with him, if we are being honest, was less about manufacturing a story and far more about helping him stop apologising for the shape of his. The detours were never flaws to be explained away. The detours were the entire point. Once he started to see his path the way an admissions committee would see it, as a single coherent line running from a hospital bed in Mumbai to a clear and serious sense of purpose, the essays very nearly wrote themselves, and the application stopped sounding like a defence and started sounding like a person.

He got into Harvard.

The doctor in that Mumbai hospital told a frightened young man to take care of himself before he took care of anything else. More than a decade later, that same person is on his way to Harvard to spend the rest of his career helping other people get the care, and the chance, that very nearly slipped past him unnoticed. We have had the privilege of working with a great many impressive people over the years. Every so often, one of them reminds us exactly why we do this. Sooraj is one of those people.

Congratulations, Sooraj. Go and say what you came to say.