For six years, Puja Anand was CEO of a learning solutions company in Singapore, earning around SGD 15,000-20,000 a month. Despite her crazy-busy life, she felt “rootless”.
Twelve-hour workdays were normal for Puja. She would wake at 4 a.m., work two hours, take her daughter Aloka to school, swipe into work at 10 and sit in meetings all day. After work, children were taken for skating or movies. Then more work for an hour before bed. She never cooked, never touched her Casio piano, never wrote.
Puja is a single mother, and has her own 77-year-old mother to take care of. Yet, she decided to move to the serenity and gentle pace of life in Dharamshala. Today, she has home-cooked food, plenty of time to play her Casio, long evenings of reading and writing, ice-creams and walks with the family. Her lifelong asthma has improved. “My day tells me what to do, I don’t plan it,” she says. “My friends tell me that at 49, I look a lot younger than I did at 30.”
Puja continues to be an e-learning consultant for four hours a day. After that, she teaches conversational English to adults and has also adopted a school where she teaches children. There is pride in her voice when she speaks of a student who got a scholarship at the Bill Clinton Foundation and is now studying in Bengaluru.
She remembers someone once describing her as a “money generating machine” that suddenly “shut down”. But all that matters to her now is happiness.
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