Live India, Love Football

--> --> It’s February 2017 and I am trying to decide whether or not I should travel from Pune to Mumbai to attend The Football Movement Conference organized by India On Track.   As I   had attended the previous two editions and was impressed with the profile of speakers and quality of content, I made the last second decision to attend the second day of the event. Upon arriving, I run into a sea of friends and spend the rest of the afternoon catching up on football industry news and gossip.   By evening, networking drinks are flowing on the St. Regis Hotel terrace patio and eventually a group of us choose to head out to enjoy some of Mumbai’s nightlife. As I’m leaving the hotel, I see FC Pune City CEO and India On Track Chairman, Gaurav Model, waiting for his car. Gaurav was someone who I had met a few times before and I had always appreciated the fact that he was intelligent and enterprising. At that moment my gut was pushing me to walk over to him to d

A few months ago I received an email from someone inviting me to speak at TEDx Vashi.   While I was over the moon that I was being offered the opportunity to speak at my second TEDx forum, I tried to mask my excitement by writing a cold, formal response of, “Yes, I accept your invitation” to the organizer and then proceeded to call my wife and parents so that I could remind them how lucky they are to have me as a husband and son, respectively.      The invitation was sent September   5,   2018 and the date of the talk was January 19, 2019 so I happily penciled it into my calendar and didn’t spend a minute to think about what I would actually talk about. As a self-proclaimed ‘seasoned public speaker,’ I honestly thought that I would be fine working on my script in December or possibly even in January a few weeks before the talk.   The TEDx Vashi organizers had other plans for me. It was around November that the first set of calls from the organizers starting comi