The Luck You Acknowledge

Here's a thing I think about sometimes: my grandmother was born in rural colonial India in the 1930s. She was the eldest of roughly six siblings — I don't know the exact number, the family history is not well-documented — and due to circumstances I won't fully unpack here, she basically raised them. Then as a single mother, she raised my mother. She scraped every dollar she had to send my mother to a good school. And then, when my parents immigrated to Canada and later to the United States, and couldn't afford to care for a child while doing the immigrant grind, she raised me from birth until age five.

I grew up in Gwalior, India for my first five years, raised by my single grandmother, alongside my brother. Then at five I joined my parents in Canada — a suburb outside Vancouver, lower middle class. My parents worked their butts off. No luxuries. No vacations until I was in my thirties. Everything they had went into my brother and me. Time, money, love. We didn't have fancy cars. We had an unlimited budget for books and sports and education. I had a personal library of over three hundred books, ranging from children's novels like Redwall to a science encyclopedia set we bought at a garage sale — twelve volumes, dense, technical, the kind of thing a kid could disappear into for years.

The Move to the US

In 2005, I moved to the United States for college, alone, hopping on a flight to Boston, a city I couldn't even point out on a map. Dartmouth, then Harvard Business School. A career in finance. All of it enabled by an uncoordinated, but deeply ingrained, system of sacrifice and investment made across three generations. My grandmother did not look ahead 90 years to the future - but her present tense was always about giving to her family, all the way through raising me. This continued on with my parents, my father working night shifts as a janitor while my mother worked long days - so we could have 24/7 childcare coverage. Those are small sacrifices, but they create enormous advantages over decades.

I want to be precise about this, because precision is the thing that matters when you're talking about luck versus earned outcome. I did the work. I showed up, I studied hard. But - absent the decades of investment that both preceded my birth and proceeded in parallel - all that would have been necessary, but insufficient. I didn't earn that investment my family put in, it was a gift. And gifts are not earned, they are just given.

The Accounting

None of this is exceptional. This is the immigrant story, told in different directions across every immigrant family I know. The three-generation plan. The sacrifice at one end that creates possibility at the other. The timing of being born into a family that moved, or a country that had space for movement, or a system that allowed a particular kind of accumulation. These are not personal achievements. They are circumstantial advantages.

I write about systemic problems. I write about policy failures, about funding structures, about the way cities allocate resources and who those allocations serve. In that work, I'm often arguing that outcomes are not the product of individual merit alone — that systems shape possibilities in ways that have nothing to do with how hard someone works. This essay is the personal version of that argument. My success was not purely my own achievement. It was the outcome of a multigenerational coordinated investment that I benefited from without earning.

I say this not to perform humility but because I think the accounting matters. It's too easy to believe you earned what you mostly received. And that belief — the one that says the system rewarded your merit and therefore the system is just — is the belief that makes it hard to see why other people, people without that same circumstantial support, might have a different experience of the same system.

What This Is and Isn't

This is not guilt. I'm not writing this to apologize for my success or to perform the kind of false modesty that actually functions as a humblebrag — look how aware I am, look how grateful I am. I'm writing it because I think accuracy matters, and the accurate story is more complicated than the merit story.

I also don't think this makes me less responsible for what I do with what I have. If anything, the acknowledgment of luck increases the obligation. If my position is partially circumstantial, then the circumstantial part is a resource, and what I do with that resource is the interesting question. Not whether I deserved it, but what I'm doing with it.

As a single woman in colonial India, my grandmother had few options; becoming a nurse was a good one. She did not have the option to immigrate, but could support a daughter who chose to, by agreeing to raise her daughter's children in a country far, far away - again as a single woman.

These are the investments, sacrifices and people that stand behind me, driven by luck and circumstance, unearned. I believe in American individualism and capitalism - but, as you might notice throughout my blog, there is a running acknowledgement that circumstances can uplift people or hobble them.

There is a quote from Newton along the lines of "If I have seen farther, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants". My own variation is, "If I stand tall, it is only because giants carry me."