Watch a child learning to walk. She pulls herself up, takes one step, and falls. Everyone in the room cheers. She gets up, takes two steps, falls again — and the room cheers louder. Nobody frowns. Nobody says at this rate you’ll never walk. And so the child, entirely unafraid of falling, keeps getting up — fail, learn, rise, step — until one day she is running, and nobody remembers the hundred falls it took.
Somewhere between that living room and the examination hall, we stop cheering the fall. Every stumble gets a frown, and with every frown the child retreats a little further into a shell. I have spent years thinking about that change — and my working life has slowly rearranged itself around undoing it.
I am Jansi. I’m in my late forties, a mother of two, and my path here was anything but a straight line.
I trained as an engineer at NIT Tiruchirappalli and spent six years in the software industry. The work kept me engaged — but my toddler daughter and infant son needed me more than any project did. I stepped away to raise them, because their growing years would never come again, and a corporate job always would.
As the children grew, time slowly returned to me, though I had no appetite for handing it to another eight-hour job. Freelancing was just becoming a thing then, and as a lifelong reader of fiction, I found my way into content writing. Within months, my sister-in-law and I had co-founded a content company that grew to sixteen writers. All went well — until a health problem forced me to wind the business down.
After a pause to recover, I was ready to begin again, but differently. I no longer wanted to write for businesses; I wanted a platform of my own, and I knew what it would stand for. I have always believed we should honour what we are given at birth — physically, mentally, emotionally. Even as a schoolgirl I leaned towards the natural: a besan mask over a chemical peel, a hearty meal enjoyed rather than a plate audited for carbs and proteins. Motherhood amplified that instinct — I found myself paying close attention to how my children were growing, not merely how they were scoring. And as the saying goes, what we seek, we find: I met practitioners of Yoga, Ayurveda and Siddha, and began writing about holistic wellness.
The truth is, though, the seed had been planted long before any of this. In my twenties, at a business-school interview, the panel asked where I saw myself in ten years. I heard myself say: I want to run my own school. I never joined that B-school, and I never built that school — but looking back, the answer explains everything. It explains why I gave my children’s growing years precedence over a career. It explains why a wellness writer kept drifting towards children, learning and education. And it explains why now — with my second child entering college next year, and my days finally my own — I trained and certified as a career counsellor.
So yes, I am a certified career counsellor — an International Certified Career Development Professional (ICCDP), credentialed by iikonz, associated with APCDA. But that is a credential, and I’d rather you knew what I intend to do with it. Assessments can tell me what a child is good at; a database can list where each strength might lead. What I most want to give a child is something no assessment measures: the confidence to fail. To fail, learn, get up, and move forward — and never quit. The confidence every one of us had at eleven months old, before anyone taught us to be ashamed of falling.
I should say plainly why you might take that from me, of all people. I am not someone the system defeated, making a philosophy of her wounds. I played the system’s game and won it — a seat at one of India’s top engineering institutions, the summit every coaching class points to. I am telling you from that summit: the view is not what they promise. The marks that carried me there mattered little to everything that came after; what really mattered was the ability to learn, to begin again, and to work with people. When I say a child is more than a rank, it is not consolation. It is a report from the other side.
Careers matter. Earning matters — I will never tell you otherwise. But a career chosen at seventeen is no longer a life sentence, for better and for worse, and the children who thrive in that world will be the ones who know how to fall, learn, and choose again. That is what I hope to nurture — first through everything I write here, and from 2027, walking alongside students and families directly. After all, walking with young minds is how I began this page. It is also, quite literally, the work I’ve chosen.