Soulful

Labels, Silence, and the Story I Was Telling Myself Before you read further, you may want to listen to Episode 2 of Unmuted —   I Thought I Was an Introvert — Then I Learned the Name for My Silence 🎙️ Listen on Spotify:  https://unmuted.short.gy/sptfy-02 This post expands on the reflections shared in the episode and offers space to pause, read, and return whenever you need quiet company. For a long time, I believed my silence had already been explained. Quiet. Shy. Introvert. These words followed me everywhere—spoken gently by some, casually by others. Over time, they settled into my identity, shaping how people saw me and how I learned to see myself. It wasn’t until much later that I realised something important: The label I accepted wasn’t wrong. It just wasn’t complete. And that incompleteness mattered more than I understood. How Labels Shape Us—Quietly Whether we like it or not, we grow up surrounded by labels. Some are familiar: The confident one The emotional one T...

🎧 Listen to the Podcast Episode Before you read further, you may want to listen to Episode 1 of Unmuted — a spoken version of this story, shared in my own voice. 🎙️ Listen on Spotify: This post expands on the reflections shared in the episode and offers space to pause, read, and return whenever you need quiet company.

Hello beautiful souls, Welcome to a new chapter of Soulful , a space that has held bits of my journey over the years — scattered reflections, thoughts, and emotions shared whenever life allowed me to. Until now, this blog was a quiet corner for my random posts. Today, it becomes something more intentional… something closer to my heart.

Sometimes, the most powerful leadership lesson doesn’t come from a keynote — but from one awkward, honest question asked with kindness. I was excited to attend  Leadership School 2025 with the Ministry of Justice, it was a unique experience that I looked forward to attending in person for a long time. During a session led by  Sam Conniff , we were asked to “ask an awkward question to your neighbour.” My group facilitator, Mark Buttanshaw , turned to me and asked, gently: “How does it feel to be the only non-white person in the group?” He seemed to sense a quiet discomfort I hadn’t yet recognised in myself. So, it took me a few moments to even process what he meant. I had noticed my own minority presence and the striking majority in the room, but in my group, I just saw people — their energy — and my own. Only after he asked did I realise that yes… I was the only brown person in that small circle. When I asked him in return how he felt about it, Mark said...

"love the sanctity of wildflowers, hundreds of them sewn together on ground,

 ‘Ram’, I suddenly called my colleague in a group call as I struggled recalling his preferred name. I confess I am poor with remembering names and worse when I am not attentive enough to talk. It's a weakness that keeps people like me much to themselves. I am sure many would relate to this predicament. But that’s not the point here. The point is I called him Ram because out of his full long traditional Indian name which contained several small different names, that’s the only one that stood out for me when I quickly gazed at the screen to help myself out. And the real point of this story is I love the name Ram. Simply because I love Ram.