Meet Dushyant Singh: Corporate coach, heritage enthusiast, cultural curator, lover of history, art, and all things sacred by vocation, electronics engineer with an MBA by training. In 2017, after fifteen years of working in different positions in the corporate world, Dushyant decided to change course and transform himself into an independent entrepreneur, pursuing his passions as a corporate coach, heritage walk leader, and educator. I interviewed Dushyant in order to follow his evolution into his current career.
I first met Dushyant in July 2022, when my husband and I joined an Intach Heritage walk he had led to Kashmere Gate, and its surrounding area. July 2022 was when India was still recovering from Covid, the number of foreign tourists was almost nonexistent, and the few foreigners around were expats working in Delhi, as we were at the time. The tour had numerous participants, primarily Indian nationals who took a genuine interest in the country’s heritage. As with most Intach walks, the group consisted of historians, professors, architects, artists – some new to Delhi, and others longtime residents. We learned a lot from Dushyant that day about “The First War of Independence ''; about the Library built by Shah Jahan’s son, Dara Shikoh, to house his books. We also made a stop at St. James’s Church, where Dushyant showed reverence for the sacred and for the artwork within the church.
Since that first walk with Dushyant, we became frequent flyers on his walks, first as he was working with Intach, and later, after December 2022, when he branched out on his own and started his own walking groups. His tours are eclectic and varied, focusing on the trinity of his passions: history, Art, and the spiritual. A sample of those trips included admiring murals in the Lodhi Art District; a tour of the National Museum with a focus on its ancient art; the National Gallery of Modern Art, getting to know some of India’s most renowned artists of the last century. His first walk as an independent guide was to the courtesan havelis spotted all around Old Delhi’s Chawri Bazar.
His ecumenical respect for the sacred of various religions and sects is apparent from the walks he curates and the reverence he shows to the various locations, be it a church, or the Nizamuddin Dargah of the Suffi saint, Dharampura Jain Temples, Jama’ Masjid and the various mosques in Old Delhi, Judah Hyam Synagogue, the Parsi Fire Temple, or the Grand Masonic Lodge in Delhi. His love for India and its culture and history is further manifest in the attire he wears on his walks, as you can see from the photos below. I am sad to say that I did not get to attend all of Dushyant’s tours. But in the year or so I have been following his walks, I have been impressed with the depth and breadth of his offerings. I knew he had started out in the corporate world, and I wanted to dig into his transformation into a full-time entrepreneur and freelancer in the world of art, history, and corporate coaching.
Our interview was over a phone call while Dushyant was navigating his commute from Gurgao to Delhi to visit family. We talked for over an hour and followed Dushyant’s bittersweet journey.
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It is a stereotype that Indian parents prime their children to grow up to be engineers, doctors, lawyers, businessmen or computer scientists. In Dushyant’s family, this stereotype held. He was expected to be an engineer like his father. Embracing the arts, humanities, and social sciences was totally frowned upon. While this may be changing among some strata of society, it was definitely the case for Dushyant. His father made it clear to him that engineering is the expectation. When Dushyant considered going into the arts and humanities as a recent graduate, that idea was rapidly shut down. He comes from a Rajput martial family from Rajasthan; many of his family members were in the armed forces and the family had clear expectations of their progeny. Dushyant’s change of career in 2017 came with growing pains and some family discord.
“Since my father was a traditional person from another generation, he was conservative, he never could accept the leap of faith that I took. He was totally unhappy with this choice until the end. He passed away in 2021. My mother is grudgingly OK with it now. She also is more of a traditional person and since her family has always been in regular 9 to 5 jobs, she equates success with being in a civil service job, or becoming rich or famous. She doesn’t appreciate the fact that her son has taken an extremely risky, courageous, and brave choice in life. It used to cause me heartburn earlier. But now I am OK with it.”
Dushyant was born in Beawar, Rajasthan, spent his early years in Jodhpur, and moved to Ajmer with his family during his formative years. Rajasthan is known for its culture and history, and Ajmer in particular is famous for housing the Sharif Dargah, shrine of the sufi Saint, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti. Growing up in a state with such a rich heritage, surrounded by the spirituality of the sufi saint’s shrine, had a big impact on Dushyant. He used to visit the shrine often, and even as an adolescent, conducted tours for the numerous visitors his family received, relatives and friends. He loved the spirituality of the shrine, its history, and the values the saint stood for: brotherhood and love. His family visited Pushkar often, where the only temple dedicated to Lord Brahma is located. His maternal grandparents lived in Jodhpur, the Blue City, and he spent most summers there. Amber Fort in Jaipur was also part of his memories. His father was posted in Bikaner for a few years and Dushyant remembers fondly the big bungalow they lived in there. For a lover of history, Rajasthan was young Dushyant’s playground and early informal field work. Dushyant states:
“I have always loved history. My Grandfather was a professor of history, and there were always history books lying around. I became an avid reader.”
Dushyant attended St. Anselm’s in Ajmer, a Catholic school, which further nurtured his spirituality and fed into his open-mindedness towards all religions. At school, he was active in theater despite being an introvert. He participated in a lot of quizzes and competitions, winning many awards. He felt an energy in performative situations and loved being on stage. To him, being a guide is part performative, part storytelling, part educating. He is currently a follower of Shirdi Sai Baba, and he frequents the Sai Baba Temple on Lodhi Road.
He followed his parents’ wishes and trained in electronics engineering at Pune university in Maharashtra. He knew his heart was not in it: “I felt something was missing”. Upon graduation, his family steered him towards business school, and away from art, which was his natural inclination. He did his MBA at T. A. Pai Management Institute on the West coast in Karnataka. His heart may not have been fully drawn to the program, but he loved the location and the surrounding temples. He especially loved the Udupi Sri Krishna temple, and found himself attracted to places of worship. While his peers partied over weekends, “I used to catch the nearest bus and go to the ancient temples dotting the landscape.”
After graduation, he worked for fifteen years in the corporate world, and felt caged in. By that time, he had got married - he met his wife through matrimonial classifieds, and it was a marriage sanctioned by both families. He and his wife have two kids, a son of 18, currently attending college in Delhi, and an 8 year old girl in grammar school. For their honeymoon in Goa, “I dragged my wife to all the churches, until she was fed up.”. He has loved churches ever since his childhood, growing up attending a Catholic school.
“I love reading about the Shrine of Lourdes; I love the Roselynn Chapel in Edinburgh. I read about it in the Davinci Code. Dan Brown is a favorite author, as he sets his books in cities. Angels and Demons is set in Rome and The Vatican. Inferno is set in Constantinople (or Istanbul) and in Venice. Reading his books is almost like a heritage walk in a city.”
His first job after the MBA was with a computer company in Mumbai. He was only there a short while. He came to Delhi and tried to get into the civil service. The UPSC exams are highly rigorous and extremely competitive. Of the 1,000,000 applicants, only 0.2% pass the test. When Dushyant did not make it, he went through a low patch, and then decided to return to the corporate world. He held many posts with the Citibank Group in Jaipur first, and then in Delhi. In between, he got married, and plugged away in the private sector, fully aware that his heart was not in it.
In 2017, he finally took the plunge and decided to branch out on his own as a corporate coach, freelancing in a field adjacent to his previous experiences and training. He felt a release and a freedom he had not experienced before, despite the financial sacrifice that that entailed. His wife is very supportive, both emotionally and financially, as she has scaffolded the family’s finances while Dushyant’s current career choice took off.
The sharp turning point occurred in 2019, when he started participating in heritage walks with Sohail Hashmi, a renowned historian and a big name in the field. He also met Dr. Swapna Liddle, a history professor, founder of the Delhi Chapter of INTACH, and author of various books on the history of Delhi. After participating in walks with these two professionals, he felt that is something he would love to do. Given his passion for history, he thought, ‘why don’t I make this my job?’ Hashmi encouraged him.
“I told Sohail that this really attracts me, and I feel I can easily do it. I am naturally inclined to it. He kindly guided me and said ‘ you don’t have to be a historian. All you need is passion, a fair amount of knowledge, and good storytelling skills.’ I will forever be grateful to him for encouraging me at the time when I needed it most. And I always tell him that.”
Sohail advised him to join INTACH as a guide in order to get his feet wet; so Dushyant approached Dr. Liddle, who was head of INTACH at the time. She gave him a “little practical test” before signing him on. They went together on a two-hour walk at Purana Qila, and Dushyant bedazzled her with his “passion, his knowledge, and his storytelling skills”. She hired him on the spot, and said: “Where have you been all these years!”. Dushyant’s walks with INTACH were soon very popular and he quickly developed a reputation, conducting various walks around Delhi.
“Once I started conducting walks, my name spread. In December 2022, I was ready to be a ‘lone wolf’ and venture on my own. The Courtesans Havelis walk was my first one on my own, and there was no turning back after that.”
The Covid years gave him the chance to focus on personal development. He made a conscious effort not to binge-watch TV series, but to work on some goals.
“I decided to do something creative; I started drawing donkeys and camels with my daughter, who was five-years-old at the time, and I continued teaching myself via Youtube.”
He dabbled with many languages on Duo Lingo, learning the basics of Urdu, Spanish, German, and French. Learning languages comes easy for him, especially Spanish and German. He has continued this effort and is currently working on Swedish and Danish. He continues working on his self-growth; the highlight of 2023 for him was taking theater classes at Triveni Kala Sangam, under the guidance of theater guru Shri Arvind Gaur. This brought him back to the performing arts after a 30 year hiatus, and strengthened his skills as a storyteller; it has also renewed his desire to get back into the habit of reading. One of his goals for 2024 is to read more in Hindi. Another is to strengthen his work with the corporate walks.
Dushyant has had a busy year since branching out on his own in Dec. 2022. Apart from the multiple public group walks he has done to various sacred spaces, art venues, and historical monuments, he has also found a niche, conducting group tours for private sector companies, NGOs, international and diplomatic organizations. He also enjoys conducting tours for students and educators. He has done field trips leading over one hundred middle schoolers to Red Fort, another group to Qutub Minar, and has also led teacher training groups, focusing on making history education more engaging.
Delhi, India, and Dushyant’s career are recovering from the Covid slump and are on the rise. Looking back over the last seven years, Dushyant reports that he feels no regrets and that “there is no turning back”.
“My Life’s journey has been full of challenges and rejections from my parents.” He had suffered looking for validation from others, until he decided to live life on his own terms and follow his passion. He had followed his parents' wishes “like a lamb” and finally, in 2017, he put his foot down and started a new chapter in his life. Running Marathons has kept him sane during difficult times; as well as the strength of his faith in Sai Baba. His current family’s support and understanding is a great source of stability for him.
His son, who is in his first year of college, majoring in English, is proud of his dad and accompanies him on heritage walks sometimes. His college friends see Dushyant as “the cool dad” because of his profession. His daughter, who is 8 years old now, is still too young, but she knows that her dad is a dad who goes on his “walks”, and does not go to a regular office any more. His wife is fully supportive, and is doing her part to provide stability to the household. As for Dushyant:
“I love this feeling of freedom. I feel like a bird. A free bird in the sky. In those 15 years (in the private sector), I have seen how one feels caged. Caged is the word I felt, and free is the word I feel now.”
Dushyant’s status on social media says: “Effortlessly confident”. Reaching this point of feeling empowered and content has been an uphill battle for him, taken some soul searching, and has involved seven half-marathons!
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