over were you one of themno ive always felt that we were victims of the caricature the world had of us in fact if anything i felt that we were much more capablewhen we were doing well everybody and everything we did was great and when we are not everything and anything we touched was not goodthe reality is there are a lot of things that are good and a lot of things we need to fix borrowing from nietzsche which is courage in the face of reality what is more important is courage in the face of opportunity both of those have to be there all the time and that i think is one of the challengesyou use the word empathy a lot is that a new lexicon youre trying to bring in are you saying there wasnt empathy earlier or the present world needs more how is it different from the traditional consumer is king argumentthey are all very connected in my mind whats the source of our innovation it comes from our ability as designers or product creators our ability to meet the unmet and unarticulated needs of customers youre not going to do that unless and until you have some deep sense of empathy you cant go into work say youre going to switch on the empathy button and somehow start exhibiting that in my case its not that i was born with it its that life teaches you increasing levels of empathy i fundamentally believe in that concept somebody said anthropology divides us and empathy unites usa few years ago microsoft and empathy would have sounded like an oxymoronits sort of again the caricature versus the reality i didnt drop from the sky i grew up in microsoft in fact its practically the only company i have worked for and having grown up there how did i pick up all of these i didnt from the outsidedoes it bother you that youre not in the gafa google apple facebook amazon brigade would you like to be therei want us to stay true to our identity and i dont want to have any envy for anybody elses success and any other model of innovation take any one of the four companies you mentioned they are very different we are not a luxury goods manufacturer we dont try to put our brand in front of you we are not a twosided market thats trying to extract rent we are a tool maker and that to me is the identity of the company i want us to be proud of us as opposed to defining our success by others successdelhi has played an interesting role in your life you romanced and proposed to your wife anu here what are the recollections from the lodhi gardens daysi have grown up in and around delhi multiple times when i was very young my dad used to work in mussoorie and we used to go through