Building My Empathy Muscle: A Journey of Giving, Growth, and Grace

Building My Empathy Muscle: A Journey of Giving, Growth, and Grace

When people see my involvement in grassroots education, community initiatives, or non-profit governance today, they often see the outcome rather than the slow, quiet conditioning that came before it.

For me, empathy was never a sudden personal epiphany. It has been a muscle built slowly over decades—first through observing quiet sacrifices at home, then through my own small commitments, deepening with philosophical grounding, tested through physical endurance, and finally channeled into collective action.

Looking back, five distinct pillars shaped my path.

1. The Living Blueprint: Growing Up in Interdependence

Long before I understood concepts like social responsibility or philanthropy, I saw them lived out every single day in my own home.

Caption: The living blueprint—grounded in family, humility, and the quiet dignity of caring for one another.

My parents, alongside my grandmother, aunts, and uncles, operated with a profound sense of natural interdependence. None of them had endless material means; our resources were modest. Yet, whenever a neighbor was in distress or extended family faced a shortfall, I watched them stretch themselves without a second thought. Giving was never an afterthought, a moral performance, or a calculated line-item—it was simply the instinctual rhythm of living in community. They taught me through their daily actions that you don’t wait for abundance to be generous. You share what you have because our lives are inextricably linked.

2. My First Personal Step: A Radio Spark in Graduate School

My next major inflection point arrived during my graduate school days in the United States. While driving, I heard a radio commercial for Children International.

Starting out with a modest contribution of around $8 a month to support a child in Southeast Asia, it was my first independent commitment to help a young life break the cycle of poverty. Over the years, that initial step expanded into supporting multiple children.

Caption: Bridging distance through small, steady commitments.

The real turning point for me was receiving their handwritten letters, drawings, and progress reports. That tangible, human connection bridged thousands of miles and showed me firsthand that consistent, small gestures—even on a tight student budget—create genuine ripples of hope.

3. Financial Discipline & Spiritual Anchors: The 5% Rule and Becoming an Instrument

As my career, marriage, and family responsibilities grew, life inevitably became busier. During this period, two key principles crystallized how I approached sustained giving.

First was a practical discipline I learned in the United States: committing at least 5% of my Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) toward philanthropic giving. Leveraging corporate employer matching programs became a massive force multiplier, effectively doubling the impact of every hard-earned dollar I directed to vetted causes.

Second was a profound philosophical anchor I found through Chinmaya Mission, which fundamentally reframed the mindset behind the numbers. The teaching transformed me: "Life is a gift from the Lord, and what we do with the gifts we have is our gift back."

Everything belongs to the Divine. There was no room for the ego of "I am giving to someone less fortunate"—that illusion dissolves when you realize you are merely a custodian and an instrument. Giving ceased to be a mere financial transaction; it became an internal discipline and a continuous practice of gratitude.

4. Sweat Equity: Team Asha and the Endurance of Giving

Around the same time, my giving met physical endurance. Joining Team Asha introduced me to marathon running as a powerful vehicle for social change.

Running 26.2 miles—and logging hundreds of training miles season after season—became my physical metaphor for the long, patient journey of grassroots development. Endurance running demanded discipline, consistency, and pushing through discomfort. Channeling those miles into fundraising for primary education and rural initiatives revealed the power of community: when people saw me put my own sweat on the line, they rallied behind the cause.

5. Coming Full Circle: The Genesis of TAP Charity

All these threads—my family roots, individual child sponsorships, financial leverage, spiritual surrender, and endurance-based fundraising—converged into what eventually became TAP Charity Inc..

During the COVID-19 pandemic, my fellow alumni from the Class of '89 of Thadomal Shahani Engineering College (TSEC) reconnected virtually across the globe. What began as old classmates catching up quickly transformed into a shared, urgent realization: the inequalities and challenges back in our home communities were acute, and we had the collective means and engineering mindset to help.

Caption: From marathon finish lines to community impact: Channeling sweat equity into scholarships, healthcare, and psychosocial care through the volunteer-led TAP Charity.

Founded as a 100% volunteer-led non-profit, we established TAP Charity around the H.E.L.P. framework (Health, Education, Livelihood, and Psychosocial support). From launching need-based engineering scholarships at our alma mater to supporting cancer patients at Tata Memorial Hospital and funding rural mobile libraries, TAP demonstrated to me what happens when trusted personal networks turn collective energy into measurable grassroots impact.

In Retrospect

Stepping into classrooms or working alongside organizations like Apni Shala today isn't a separate chapter for me—it is simply the continuation of a muscle I have exercised over a lifetime. It remains my daily practice of showing up, staying an open instrument, and remembering that every small act of empathy matters.

Running For, Running to this internship with ApniShala.org

Running For, Running To

In 2019, Ganesh, Sachin and I wanted to run the Mumbai Marathon together. What I didn't expect was that the run would quietly hand me the ending of a story I hadn't finished telling.

The marathon came first; the cause came second. To run, we needed bibs — and they were surprisingly hard to come by, until Karon connected us to Apni Shala. (The same Karon whose phone call two years later would set so much else in motion.) So we ran FOR Apni Shala before we truly knew them. That order of things — commitment first, understanding after — turned out to be fitting, because what I learned about them has stayed with me ever since.

When I met the founding team of — Amrita, Sangeeta, Rohit — the whole impression landed at once. Here were people who had chosen to make this their mission, who spoke about the children they served with a closeness and conviction that you cannot manufacture. I came away feeling I had met people doing something real, and doing it for the right reasons.

And what they were doing was something I hadn't encountered framed quite this way before: social emotional learning. SEL, at its foundation.

Apni Shala builds emotional literacy in children — a vocabulary for what they feel, a language for their own inner lives. Through Khoj, their SEL-aligned school in Govandi and Mankhurd, they centre a child's psychological wellbeing alongside academics, working not just with the child but with the whole ecosystem of teachers and caregivers around them.

Here is what drew me in. When you give a child the language to understand their circumstance, you offer them a truth that can change everything: poverty is not a disease. It is not something wrong with you. It is not your fault. It is a circumstance — and circumstances can change, and you are not defined by the one you were born into.

That reframing is quiet and enormous at the same time. It is the difference between a child who believes they are broken and a child who understands they are simply somewhere difficult, for now.

This is the kind-work I want to be close to — not to teach it, but to learn it.

And that desire to learn has only grown more acute with time. As I wrote in When Caring Became a Craft, the causes I've come to know through TAP have kept raising the same question — not just how do I give, but where and how does one actually begin to make a difference? Due diligence taught me how much I didn't know about the work itself. Every organisation I've helped support has sharpened that question rather than answered it. This internship is part of that ongoing quest — a chance to stop asking from a distance and start learning from the inside.

The seed was planted in 2017, when Appa and Amma moved to Ashraya. It found form at Snehalaya in 2019, where, as I wrote in When Feeling Found a Form, Dr. Girish first told me that to really understand this work, I would need to be immersed in it. It found purpose through TAP in 2021. It waited through two years that weren't. And now it has found its destination — back where it quietly began, with the organisation whose bib I wore before I understood what I was running for.

In 2019, I ran for Apni Shala.

In 2026, I am running to them — to learn.

The internship begins.

When the Door Opened and I Didn't Walk Through

 When the Door Opened and I Didn't Walk Through

Some years you defer to circumstance. Other years, if you're honest, circumstance defers to you.

By 2020 I had the intention clearly enough — an internship at Snehalaya, a chance to finally be close to Appa, to immerse myself in the work the way Girish had suggested. Nothing had been formally arranged. No dates confirmed, no conversations started with the organisation. It was still an intention living in the near future, waiting to become a plan.

Then the pandemic arrived and made the decision for me. The world closed. The intention went back into its drawer. There was, if I'm honest, a certain ease in that — the deferral came from outside, so it cost nothing to accept it.

2024 was different.

By then Mummy was gone — a year had passed since her death — and the desire to be near Appa had become sharper, heavier, more layered. This time the intention had become a plan. Time at Snehalaya was booked. Flights were arranged. The years of waiting had finally moved into action.

But Appa was anxious. He had raised me in Mumbai — a city where the train takes you anywhere, where the infrastructure of daily life is always within reach. Ahmednagar was something else: a small town without public transport, unfamiliar rhythms, no metro instincts to fall back on. His worry wasn't about the work. It was about his city-bred son navigating a world he hadn't grown up in. A very particular kind of parental love, the kind that knows exactly what it built and worries about what it didn't.

And then a colleague went on medical leave. The timing was difficult. The team needed covering. I said I would stay.

Looking back, I know what the honest account is: the colleague's medical leave was real, but Appa's anxiety was the bigger weight on the other side of the scale. The leave gave me a reason I could say out loud. Appa's worry gave me permission I hadn't quite admitted I was looking for.

That is not a comfortable thing to write. But it is true.

Two deferrals. One taken from me, one handed back. The question that had followed me since 2017 — what would it look like to actually be close at hand? — was still waiting, more patient than I deserved.