Catching up with Manish Kumar after a long gap felt less like a planned meeting and more like a quiet continuation of an old conversation. He is in India for five weeks, visiting from Canada, and we finally managed to find time to meet. The setting was ordinary, but the familiarity was immediate. We go back to our IIM Bangalore days, when we were wingmates, sharing not just corridors and common spaces but also a certain phase of life defined by structure, ambition, and exhaustion. Meeting him now, years later, highlighted how those shared routines still form a reference point, even as our lives have taken very different shapes. It also reminded me how friendships formed in compressed, intense environments tend to survive distance and time with very little effort.
Much of the conversation drifted naturally toward those IIMB years, not in a nostalgic sense, but as a way of grounding where we are now. There was no attempt to relive stories for their own sake. Instead, we spoke about how the habits and ways of thinking from that period continue to influence daily decisions. Being wingmates meant a front-row seat to each other’s stress, optimism, and self-doubt, and that familiarity made the current conversation easier. Manish spoke calmly about his role as a product leader at MasterCard, describing it less as a position of authority and more as a responsibility to make trade-offs that scale well. What stood out was how little his core interests have changed. The context is global, the problems are larger, but the underlying curiosity about systems and people feels consistent with the person I knew back then.
Education came up, almost inevitably. Manish has always had a steady interest in education, not as a side project or a talking point, but as a space where long-term impact still feels possible. We spoke at length about Edzy, and he offered thoughtful input based on his experience building and managing products at scale. The discussion was practical, focused on clarity of outcomes, incentives, and the discipline required to say no to features that feel good but do not serve the core problem. There was no romanticism about education as a sector; instead, there was a grounded belief that progress here is slow, uneven, and still worth pursuing. That perspective felt useful, especially because it came without urgency or pressure, just the quiet confidence of someone who has seen ideas tested in real environments.
His current visit to India has also included time for travel, and he spoke about visiting the Golden Temple in Amritsar. He described the experience simply, without trying to frame it as transformative, but it was clear that the place left an impression. The sense of order, the flow of people, and the calm efficiency of the langar stood out to him. What seemed to matter was not the religious aspect alone, but the scale at which discipline and service coexist without visible friction. Listening to him talk about it made me realize how certain places force a pause, not because they demand reflection, but because they operate on principles that are rare to see executed so consistently. It was one of those observations that stays with you quietly, without needing further analysis.
We also ended up comparing daily life in Vancouver and Gurgaon, especially around something as mundane as outdoor jogging. Manish spoke about how in Vancouver, being outdoors feels built into the city’s rhythm, while in Gurgaon it requires intention and negotiation with traffic, air quality, and time. This was not framed as a critique of either place, just a factual contrast. The conversation reinforced how geography shapes habits in subtle ways, often more than motivation does. As we wrapped up, there was no formal closure to the meeting, just an understanding that this was one checkpoint in a longer arc of shared history. Catching up with Manish felt grounding, a reminder that while careers evolve and cities change, some conversations remain steady, picking up exactly where they were last left.