Somewhere in India right now, a brilliant young person is making a decision that will quietly cost them years.
Not because they lack intelligence. Not because they lack drive. But because nobody in their life has ever walked the road they are trying to walk and the only map they have been given is made of motivational quotes and someone else’s highlight reel.
Rakesh Singh was that young person once. And after 28 years of building a global career from nothing rising from a ₹3,200 a month graphic designer to a senior technology leader at a Fortune 500 company in the United States, he came back to do the one thing he wishes someone had done for him.
He told the truth about how it actually works.
The Advice Nobody Is Giving
India does not have a shortage of inspiration. Switch on your phone and within seconds you will find someone telling you to dream bigger, hustle harder, believe more. The content is endless. The energy is real.
But inspiration without direction is like fuel without a road. It burns fast and leaves you exactly where you started.
What young professionals in India are starving for particularly those from smaller cities and towns, without access to professional networks or experienced mentors is not another motivational speech. It is someone who will sit down with them and say: here is what they do not teach you in college. Here is what the first five years of a career actually feel like. Here is how you handle it when the plan falls apart, as it almost certainly will.
That conversation has been Rakesh Singh’s life’s work. And now it lives between the covers of his book.
“Motivation gets you started. But it is mentorship honest, practical, hard-won mentorship that keeps you moving when starting was the easy part.”
He Learned it the Hard Way So You Don’t Have To
Singh’s own career was not handed to him. It was assembled, piece by uncertain piece, through roles that had nothing to do with where he ended up.
His first ambition was to fly fighter jets for the Indian Air Force. That dream did not survive the selection process. What came next was not a pivot into some equally prestigious alternative. It was graphic design. Then call centre training. Then engineering. Each step modest. Each step essential.
Along the way, he taught himself the lessons that no formal curriculum covers how to read an organization from the inside, how to build relationships that actually open doors, how to take risks when the outcome is genuinely uncertain, and how to recover when those risks do not pay off.
He later added formal credentials from MIT, Cornell, UC Berkeley, and Stanford. But the knowledge he prizes most and the knowledge he most urgently wants to share came from the field, not the classroom.
The Questions Every Young Professional Is Afraid to Ask
How do I know if I’m in the right career? What do I do when my first real job is nothing like I expected? How do I think about money before I have any? When is a risk worth taking, and when is it just reckless?
These are the questions Singh answers in A Road in My Name. Not with generic frameworks or borrowed wisdom, but with the specific, hard-earned perspective of someone who has lived every version of the answer.
The book tackles financial independence not as a distant retirement goal but as an active career strategy. It addresses networking not as a social skill but as a survival skill. It reframes failure not as a stop sign but as the most reliable teacher most of us will ever have.
The Mentor Most People Never Get to Meet
Access to great mentorship has always been unequal. If you grew up in the right city, went to the right school, or happened to know the right people, you got guidance. Everyone else figured it out alone, slowly, and often painfully.
A Road in My Name is Rakesh Singh’s attempt to change that equation to put the kind of mentorship that has historically been reserved for the lucky few into the hands of anyone willing to pick up a book and use it.
You may not have had a mentor who told you how careers really work. You have one now.
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