I had no grand ambition to become a CEO; I was simply afraid of failing: Avinash Kaul

In his new book The Next Mountain, media leader Avinash Kaul revisits his displacement from Kashmir, years of financial hardship and a demanding corporate journey. In conversation with Ruhail Amin, he explains why resilience is not about simply enduring pressure, why professional success should never be mistaken for permanence, and why he would rather remain a climber than become a “summit dweller”.

Edited excerpts:

The title of your book is The Next Mountain. What does the mountain represent, and why did you choose this title?

The title points to two things. It speaks about the next mountain, but it also acknowledges the mountain that has already been crossed.

The journey in the book begins with the time I left Kashmir amid turmoil in January 1990. Before that, life had been peaceful. As you know, people had fairly conventional ambitions. You might study engineering, join the Public Works Department or the Public Health Engineering Department, work there for the rest of your career and eventually retire. That was the world many of us knew.

My journey was no different. I had no extraordinary ambition. I never imagined that I would do anything outside Kashmir. I had hardly travelled beyond Jammu and, perhaps, Delhi on one occasion. My exposure to the world outside was extremely limited.

Then, one day, life changed dramatically. The exodus happened, and I had to leave my home almost overnight. My father put me on the back of a scooter at around four in the morning and took me to the bus depot. Two buses were leaving. He entrusted me to a driver and made me sit on the engine bonnet inside the bus.

The bonnet was extremely hot, while outside there was the brutal Kashmir winter. I was caught between those two extremes. I knew I was going to Jammu, but I was travelling alone. My parents were not with me, and I had no idea what awaited me.

That was when my mountain appeared.

We were constructing a house in Jammu, but only the plinth had been completed. A neighbour was kind enough to give us a garage to stay in. I lived there by myself for nearly three months. My parents joined me later, after my father was attacked at work and had to escape with whatever could be carried in a Maruti 800.

Initially, I thought the situation would settle down in a few days. I had not taken anything important with me. After my parents left Kashmir, trucks were brought in and our house was emptied. Our possessions, photographs and almost everything that represented the life we had built were gone.

In Kashmir, we had lived in a large, three-storey house in Baghat-i-Barzulla. It had several rooms and some land around it. Overnight, everything that we considered permanent and secure disappeared.

It is difficult for someone leading a normal life in Mumbai or Delhi to fully comprehend what that means. Imagine waking up one night and discovering that your surroundings have become hostile and that you must leave immediately. Most people do not have a Plan B for such a situation.

When something like that happens, you do not restart from where you had stopped. You begin from below ground. For me, that garage in Jammu was the starting point. That was the first mountain.

What were those initial months in Jammu like for you as a student and a young person?

They were not normal teenage years.

I had taken my Class XI examination in Kashmir and was among the students who had failed in English. As a result, I could not secure admission to a school in Jammu. The government subsequently opened a camp school near a water-tanker filling station close to the stadium. Tents were put up there, and that was where I studied for Class XII.

The temperature in Jammu could reach 47 or 48 degrees Celsius. You can imagine what it was like to study inside those tents in that heat.

At the same time, we were trying to complete our house. Five or six displaced families eventually moved into a two-bedroom home. Everybody had lost something. Many had lost their livelihoods completely. My maternal grandparents had owned shops, and suddenly they had no source of income.

I stood in queues at Geeta Bhawan to register myself as a migrant and to receive the ration assistance available at the time. These were the responsibilities occupying my teenage years.

A major opportunity came when the Maharashtra government allocated seats in engineering colleges for Kashmiri Pandit students. I was a beneficiary of that policy and was able to study engineering at a subsidised cost.

My brother was already pursuing engineering in Mysore, and my family did not have enough money to finance both our educations. Without that support, it would have been extremely difficult for me to continue.

That was when the mountain truly stood in front of me. I had no grand career plan. I had never imagined becoming a CEO. I did not even know what I wanted to become. I understood only one thing: I had to climb because there was no other way forward.

I also lacked many of the skills I would later need. I had studied in an English-medium school and could write English reasonably well, but spoken English was difficult because people around us did not converse in it. You need others with whom you can practise a language.

In the beginning, it felt as though I would climb two feet and slide three feet backwards. My hands would be hurt, my knees would be bleeding, but there was no option to stop. Giving up would have meant sliding all the way back.

You left your home on a cold night in January 1990. What changed permanently within you that day?

The first thing that changed was my understanding of security.

Security is often only a notion. You can spend your entire life building something you believe is safe and permanent, only to discover that it can be taken away in a single night. That belief was shattered for me.

Since then, I have never operated with only a Plan A. I always have a Plan A, Plan B, Plan C and Plan D because I do not know when the next avalanche may arrive.

That approach has remained with me, and I do not think it will ever change.

The experience also taught me to respect the mountain. I was not climbing for recreation. It was not a picnic or an adventure. Climbing forward was the only way to avoid going back.

I continued climbing through good bosses, bad bosses, helpful bosses and difficult bosses. Many different things happened during my professional journey, but my optimism remained intact.

I do not have a degree from an IIT, an IIM or a foreign university. What I possess is a basic understanding of how to climb a mountain, and that is how I treated my career.

A climber has to keep all his senses focused on the mountain. If you can sense an avalanche approaching, you step aside and allow it to pass. You do not stand there and imagine that it cannot affect you.

I have been fortunate to survive the avalanches I encountered. That is why I am here to tell the story.

How did you find the strength to continue while living in a garage and later studying in a migrant camp?

To be honest, at that age, you do not think of it as strength. You are simply trying to survive.

You are not thinking that one day you will write a book and describe yourself as resilient. I did not feel strong. I cried. I questioned myself repeatedly. There were days when I wondered whether I would be able to do anything with my life.

I had no ambition to become a CEO. I did not even know what I was going to do.

I only wanted to survive and climb one step higher than I had the previous day. I felt that if I stopped moving, I would slip back into the same difficulties. I wanted to create as much distance as possible between myself and the situation from which I had come.

When you continue putting one foot in front of the other, there comes a point when you reach a summit without realising when it arrived.

You then understand that a mountain is rarely alone. It is usually part of an entire mountain range. Reaching one summit does not mean the journey is over.

That is why I would always prefer to be a mountain climber rather than a summit dweller. A summit is a harsh environment. It is not designed for permanent residence, and staying there for too long can change you.

I would like to climb one mountain, reach the summit, come down and then begin climbing another. That is the philosophy with which I want to approach life.

Resilience is a recurring theme in the book. How do you define real resilience?

Resilience, in my view, is not merely the ability to withstand pressure or stand against something.

When these events were occurring, I did not even know the word “resilience”. I was under extreme pressure, and that pressure was changing me as a human being.

Looking back, I can describe it as adaptation. Every time I encountered a difficult situation, avoided a danger or survived a setback, I tried not to repeat the same mistake.

I adapted. I changed under pressure.

The important thing was that I was not so brittle that I broke. I changed, and I tried to change for the better.

That, in my terminology, is resilience. It is not pretending that pressure does not affect you. It is allowing the experience to alter you without letting it destroy you.

You attended high-altitude camps during your school years. Did those experiences later influence your approach to corporate life?

Every year, our school organised high-altitude camps that lasted six or seven days. They were extremely demanding.

At that age, we never understood why we were being made to do those things. We would walk through rain, sleet and snow, often completely drenched. We would curse the teachers and ask why any of it was necessary.

I did not understand then that those experiences were building character. They were developing strength, stamina and resilience, even though I did not have a name for those qualities at the time.

Many years later, the lessons from those camps became useful during my corporate journey.

That is why I describe the book as less of a biography and more of a field guide. It applies the art of mountain climbing to the art of corporate climbing.

A climber has to read the terrain, respect forces larger than himself, prepare for changing weather, recognise danger and continue moving even when progress is painfully slow. The same principles apply to a corporate career.

What is the most difficult failure or rejection that you confront in the book?

All of it.

If you look at my LinkedIn profile, you will see my success story. If you read the book, you will see my failure story in full glory.

Writing it was difficult because I had already enjoyed a reasonably successful career. I had spent 16 years as a CEO in the media industry and had achieved several professional milestones.

At that stage, it would have been easy to present the journey as though I had always known what I was doing. People often write memoirs after retirement and make the entire journey appear carefully planned. They can present themselves as stoic individuals who always had the answers.

I did not want to do that.

I wanted to write the book while I was still in the saddle. I climbed my first mountain using certain principles, and I now want to use the same principles to climb my second mountain—in full public view.

If I fail, people should not read the book. If I succeed, perhaps there is something in those principles worth understanding.

I believe those lessons will remain relevant because mountains existed thousands of years before us and will continue to exist thousands of years after us. Industries and platforms will change. Print, television and digital will evolve. Businesses will rise and decline. But the nature of the mountain does not change.

Avalanches will still occur. Bad weather will still arrive. People will still begin journeys without adequate preparation.

These are not complicated management theories or corporate jargon. They are basic life skills.

I wanted to draw the map backwards for someone who may be following in my footsteps—someone without privilege, or someone who once had privilege and suddenly lost it.

I was fortunate to survive the avalanches and storms that came my way. Someone else may not be as fortunate. If a person is feeling defeated or believes life has been exceptionally harsh, I want the book to offer perspective.

Stand up, keep your chin up and climb the mountain.

What does the mountain metaphor teach people who are trying to navigate corporate careers?

The mountain will not become softer because you have studied at an IIT, an IIM or an international university. It remains firm and unchanged. The climber has to respect it.

If you treat the terrain casually and fail to observe the signs around you, you can be thrown off the mountain before you understand what happened.

A climber has to notice the rustle of the wind that may signal an approaching avalanche, the rock shifting beneath his feet or the smell of rain in the air.

Many people move through corporate careers with blinders on and headphones over their ears. They behave as though they are walking through a park and nothing can go wrong.

But things do go wrong. Difficult events happen.

Credentials, titles and past achievements do not give anyone immunity. The responsibility of the climber is to stay alert, remain prepared and continue adapting.

You have experienced considerable professional success. What did that rise cost you personally?

Nothing came easily.

My early jobs paid very little. I first worked for a token amount, then earned ₹3,150 a month and later ₹6,000. I eventually secured a much better-paying position at HTA Fulcrum, but even then, I did not have enough money for my wedding.

I bought second-hand furniture from a scrap dealer outside Indian Oil Nagar. Friends at Discovery were kind enough to give me ₹10,000 so that I could buy cane furniture and set up my home.

Even during engineering college, money was extremely tight. My family sent me ₹450 a month, of which ₹400 went towards the mess. That left ₹50 for everything else.

A ticket to a makeshift VCR hall cost ₹3 and was the cheapest entertainment I could afford. The hall had a tin roof, a basic screen and stones to sit on. Truck drivers travelling along the highway would also stop there to watch films.

On Sundays, the mess would close in the evening. There were occasions when my friends and I pulled onions from the fields and ate them because I had no money for dinner.

My friends were sometimes kind enough to pay for my food. I was the cultural secretary and general secretary at college, and because I did not drink, I would help them return to the hostel safely after they had been out. On some occasions, they would buy me a meal. Without that kindness, I might not have seen the inside of a restaurant until I completed my MBA.

Experiences like these stay with you.

The cardinal rule of mountain climbing is that you do not keep looking back. You do not stop halfway, take selfies and admire how far you have come. If you look down for too long, you may experience vertigo and fall.

I have therefore tried to keep looking forward. Whatever people describe as success probably happened behind my back because I was not consciously chasing it.

I was not looking for medals, posters or public recognition. My measure of success was whether I was doing something better than I had done the previous day. If that happened to create records or bring recognition, so be it.

There was, of course, a personal price.

Early in my career, my friends would leave work at six in the evening and go out to socialise. My approach was different. I would tell them to go and enjoy themselves while I completed the work.

I worked on distribution and sales, prepared presentations late into the night, returned home to change my daughter’s diapers, took an early-morning flight, made presentations to clients and came back.

I never complained because I was grateful for the opportunity to learn.

I learnt how a television signal is uplinked and downlinked. I learnt distribution, finance, legal processes and human resources. When you develop working knowledge across different functions, your decision-making becomes faster.

You no longer have to wait for someone else to explain whether an idea will work. You understand enough about each function to take an informed decision.

That breadth of learning probably accelerated my professional rise.

Priya Kumar played a central role in shaping the book. Did she push you to confront or reveal anything you would have preferred not to write about?

Our conversations were always candid.

Priya would sometimes ask whether I was certain that I wanted to reveal particular experiences. My response was that there was nothing wrong with telling readers that I am like them and that luck also played a role in my journey.

I did not want to create the impression that I was somehow different or that I had always been destined for success.

If anything, Priya occasionally felt that the book was too harsh and suggested that we soften certain parts. I resisted because a softened version would not accurately represent my life.

A mountain is not soft. It is hard.

Priya’s command over language and her choice of words helped bring the material into its final form. Her craft played an important role in shaping the book.

I had never written a book before and had never seriously imagined writing one. The initial response, therefore, came as a surprise. Within days of its release, the book performed strongly on Amazon India across several categories and went into a reprint.

Those were outcomes I had never anticipated.

Let us talk about the ‘media mountain’. How does Avinash Kaul the author understand it differently from Avinash Kaul the young executive?

The media mountain has been fabulous because it is constantly changing. It is also an extremely tricky mountain.

It is different from entering an industry in which regulation or the operating environment may remain relatively stable for several years. In media, the landscape can change very quickly.

When I entered the industry, television reached around 32 million households and audience measurement relied on a diary-based people-meter system. Today, we are looking at roughly 210 million television households and a far more advanced measurement system.

Every measurement system will have limitations, but look at the scale of the evolution.

At one point, media was regarded as one of India’s sunrise sectors. Then came the rapid proliferation of news channels, changes in distribution, digitisation and several other disruptions.

It has been a mountain capable of keeping every climber on his toes.

There are an enormous number of climbers on the same mountain, and the space narrows as you approach the top. Imagine around 200 news channels, each supported by large teams, all attempting to climb the same mountain.

To remain ahead of the pack, you have to be razor-sharp. You have to keep moving and adjusting.

That produces sleepless nights. It can also create a degree of paranoia. From the outside, the results of that vigilance may be described as success. But from the inside, you are simply trying not to lose your footing.

You spent 16 years as a CEO in the media industry. What enabled you to remain on course for so long?

Choice, mainly.

You stay on the mountain, and you keep climbing. The media mountain continually changes its shape, which means you have very little time to become complacent or obsess over where you stand.

That is one of the distinctive qualities of the news business. It keeps you so intensely occupied that you have little time to ask whether you are being paid more or less, whether somebody else has a better title or whether you should be somewhere else.

The terrain keeps changing. Digitisation happens. Distribution changes. New channels emerge. Regulation evolves. Litigation occurs. Competition intensifies.

Each development is a smaller avalanche in its own way.

Remaining on course requires keeping your attention on the mountain rather than becoming fixated on titles, compensation or public recognition.

After climbing so far, what is the next mountain for Avinash Kaul?

The next mountain is not necessarily a designation or a conventional professional milestone. It is the willingness to begin climbing again.

The danger after achieving success is that you begin to believe the summit belongs to you. It does not. A summit is temporary. You reach it, acknowledge it and come down.

I have climbed one mountain using the principles described in the book. The next challenge is to apply those principles again, under different conditions and in full public view.

I do not want to spend my life protecting a summit. I want to remain curious, alert and willing to climb.

That is why the book is called The Next Mountain. There must always be another climb.