A note to the participants of Unstuck by Roshan Abbas, who takes a masterclass during the first session.

Deepak and Utsav asked me to write something to you before our session together.

I have been thinking about what to say. Not what to teach. What to say. Because what we are doing in that room is not a lecture. It is a conversation between people who have chosen, deliberately, to examine how they are living. That is not a small thing. Most people never do it.

So before we meet, I want to share a few moments from my own life. Not as a curriculum. As a way of telling you who I am and how I think. So that when we are in the room together, we are already partway there.

On mindset: the narrow passage

I was on a trip to Vaishno Devi with friends. I am Muslim, non-practicing, traveling for the mountains and the cold and the company. We bathed in a freezing mountain stream before the ascent. And then came the passage.

There is a point on that route where you must squeeze through an impossibly narrow gap between two rocks. The priest said, with ceremony, that only those who truly believe can pass through. There was gentle laughter directed at me. The non-believer. The odd one out.

I stood in the cold and thought: I do not believe in the goddess. But I believe in what is on the other side. I believe there is something worth seeing.

That was enough. I went through.

This is how I have approached most of the significant moments in my life. Not with certainty. Not with a plan. With the belief that something on the other side was worth the passage. The mindset that has served me is not confidence. It is not even courage in the conventional sense. It is the refusal to let the absence of proof become the reason not to move.

You do not need to see the other side clearly. You need to believe it exists.

On values: the conversation I had to have

In class 11, I was studying science. I knew, with the particular clarity that arrives when you have been ignoring something long enough, that I needed to be in the arts.

This was the nineties. In India. A path had been laid, quietly but firmly. Changing your stream was not a form you filled. It was a conversation you had to have with your family, in a home where the expectation sat in the room like a third person.

I had the conversation.

It was awkward. The outcome was not guaranteed. But I had it. And it set me free in a way I only fully understood years later: because the conversation was not really about science or arts. It was about whether I was willing to live by what I actually valued, even when it cost something.

This is what I have found to be true about values: they are not what you say you believe. They are what you choose when choosing is uncomfortable. The stream change was a small thing in the world. In my life it was the first time I chose my own direction over the expected one. Everything that came after that choice has that moment somewhere in its roots.

What are you actually choosing when you choose? That is what we will spend time on together.

On choices: throwing pebbles

After mass communication college, I had no job. Mid-nineties. I needed ten thousand rupees a month to survive. A barsati in South Delhi, food, the ordinary costs of a life being assembled from nothing.

I did not have a plan. What I had was a willingness to throw pebbles into the water and see which ones skimmed.

Theatre work, where at the end of each show the director handed out sealed envelopes and you did not know if five hundred or two thousand rupees was inside. Voiceovers. Jingles. Scripts. Brochures. Anchoring shows. I was not building a career. I was finding out what the water would hold.

Most people who feel stuck are waiting for the right opportunity to arrive fully formed, visible from a distance. The pebble approach is different. Throw something small, cheaply, quickly, and watch what happens. If it sinks, you have learned something real. If it skims, throw again. The skim tells you where the energy is.

One of those pebbles became a radio career. Then television. Then a company. None of that was visible from the barsati in South Delhi. What was visible was just the next pebble, and my own willingness to throw it.

Choices are not always big dramatic forks in the road. Most of the time they are small throws. The question is whether you are making them at all, or whether you are standing at the water’s edge waiting for someone to hand you a stone.

On beginning: carburetor se pehle kachra nikalta hai

My father had a scooter. In Lucknow winters it would not start. He would work the kick starter, gently at first, then with more intent. Sometimes there would be a loud misfire and I, small and easily startled, would jump back.

He would then quietly remove the spark plug, clean the carbon deposits off it, put it back. The scooter would start. Just purring. He would turn to me with quiet satisfaction and say: carburetor se pehle kachra nikalta hai. The carburetor clears its rubbish before it can run clean.

I have lived by this.

Your first attempt at anything will misfire. There will be carbon. It will sound wrong before it sounds right. The mistake people make is to hear the misfire and decide the engine is broken. It is not. It just needs the rubbish cleared out first.

The willingness to make the bad version, to say the clumsy thing, to write the draft that will never be shown to anyone, to start the engine knowing it will cough before it purrs: this is not a compromise. It is the only way through. Every piece of work I am proud of has a terrible first version somewhere behind it. Every version of myself that I value has a worse version in its past.

Begin badly. The good comes after.

What we will do together

These four things, the mindset that moves without proof, the values that show themselves in uncomfortable choices, the willingness to throw pebbles and learn from where they land, and the courage to make the first bad version, are not a system. They are how I have lived. They are what Deepak and Utsav saw when they asked me to open this programme.

In our two hours together I want to go further into all of this with you. The specific moments in my life in media, in business, in building Kommune and Spokenfest, where these things were tested. The people I found who were more of something than I was, and how I approached them. The times I got it wrong and what the getting it wrong taught me.

But more than anything, I want to hear from you. Because Unstuck is not about my life. It is about yours. The choices you have been postponing. The conversation you have not yet had. The pebble you have not yet thrown.

You have signed up for a programme about living intentionally, in service of what you actually value. That is already a choice. It is already a pebble in the water.

I will see you in the room.

Roshan Abbas is the co-founder of Kommune and the creator of Spokenfest, Asia’s largest spoken word festival. He has spent 30 years reinventing himself across radio, television, theatre, film, brand consulting, and the performing arts.