We were in Nikko today. It’s a small mountain town northwest of Utsunomiya, famous for how beautiful it gets when the trees turn red in fall season. This usually happens around November, and we were in time to catch the early stages of the transition.
From the moment we stepped out of the station, it felt like we were in a hill station in India. The beauty, the climate, everything. It hit different.
The plan had been to visit on the last day of Mama, Mami and Eva’s trip. The schedule had begun feeling too packed, though, and they’d decided to stay in Tokyo an extra day instead.
Mom and I talked about how fun it would’ve been if they’d been here too, and soon the conversation shifted to discussing all the places we’d take dad and Bua, who were about to join us in a few days for the next leg of this trip.
I like to think I’m quite close to my family, and that’s not limited just to my brother and parents. My dad’s sister, who I call Bua, holds a rather special place in my heart, and my brother and I have always seen her more like a sibling than a parental (or aunt-al) figure.
When we got back to Utsunomiya in the evening, we had a long chat with dad and Bua over the phone, discussing the places they wanted to go and the things they wanted to see when they got here.
I also talked to them both separately about a different matter, and it turned out quite intense — not in the best way possible.
Strong family bonds bring with them the freedom to be more expressive, and say what’s on your mind more often.
I don’t hold my opinions back much in general with close friends and family, and even less so with this lot.
So, when Bua consulted my opinion on a new job offer she’d just received, I didn’t hesitate in telling her exactly what I think.
To be precise, it wasn’t about what I thought about the job. There’s a little more context involved.
My dad, who’s been working as a (rather amazing) dermatologist for almost the past three decades has been wanting to retire from medicine for a while now. He’s tried to wean off his private clinic for a while now, but for various reasons including the fact that (a) he’s a micro-celebrity in the field, to be modest, and there’s just too much demand for his consultations (to paint the picture, people from different cities regularly come to Jaipur just to consult him), and (b) he cares a little toooo much about his patients (great for them, shitty for him and his health) and has BIG problems saying no.
Another fact about my dad is that while he isn’t as passionate about his current profession, he has both the skills and the longing to teach English as a second language. Specifically, he’s been planning to launch an institute to teach English for IELTS.
He’s recently made the decision to conduct his last private clinic practice on November 22nd, host introductory workshops for the IELTS course he plans to start on the 23rd and 24th, and then launch batches fully after returning home from Japan.
Mind you, he’s decided to quit medicine a few times already over the past couple of years. This time, he swears he means it.
Bua had also recently become part of the business masterplan, and was going to contribute a Personality Development department to the institute. She’s been working 8-12 hour days online as a business analyst at different companies for the past several years, and this was also a chance for her to start a business of her own — something she’s been wanting to do for a while in the hopes of eventually establishing a passive income source that would allow her to retire in a few years’ time.
She recognized working with dad as a great opportunity, so brother and sister decided to go into it together. Great.
Enter, the problem: an old colleague and good friend of hers just offered her a job.
I heard the news from Mom a couple of days ago. She told me that Bua had gotten this offer but was planning to turn it down. I understood that she wanted to take a chance at building something of her own, and that she didn’t want to be just an employee anymore, but now that there was an opportunity cost involved, something didn’t sit right with me. I called her up to talk about it.
Dad has a lot of great qualities, but he also has some very obvious flaws that Bua might’ve been a little too blinded by the prospect and excitement of a new venture that she didn’t completely consider everything she was signing up for.
I, on the other hand, had a bird’s eye view of the situation — as birds-eye as family can get, that is. The fact that I’d also recently applied to YCombinator, signed up to their co-founder matching platform and in turn read their articles on the importance of a strong founding team pushed me to at least bring the topic up.
I didn’t explicitly tell Bua not to partner with dad. But I did ask her if she’d really thought it through.
The thing is, dad’s commitment to a lot of things is often half-hearted. He gets bored easily, and doesn’t hesitate in giving things up (with his career being the exception out of necessity). He’s talked about side ventures alongside his medical practice before, and even tried a few, only to drop the ideas soon after their birth.
And with Bua, it’s the opposite. She overcommits, turning a 9-5 job into a 9-9. She’s recently been in a stretch of unemployment so until now she had nothing really to lose, going into this venture. It was going to be tough for sure, but that’s true for starting any new business.
But now, suddenly there was an opportunity cost, and I felt that the risk should at least be assessed rather than blindly choosing family just because they were family. Turning another offer down was a sign of commitment that she should think through properly if she’s ready for.
Dad started talking about starting English classes many months before Bua even resigned from her last job. The decision for her to join the team was fairly recent, in the grand scheme of things. And while it’s true that there would’ve been a lot of support on the business side of things with Bua on the founding team (dad has a fair amount of domain expertise, but he is the literal opposite of business-minded), it wasn’t an absolute prerequisite in launching the business.
In theory, dad could still manage it alone, just probably not as well. The amount he’d already procrastinated this thing also raised some concerns about his motivation, and his track record didn’t support him. He’d ‘shut down’ his medical practice ‘for good’ several times and they’d all been false alarms. He always had reasons for it not working out before — too busy, other commitments — but somehow, either by the demand of patients or pressure from the rest of the family, instead of English classes, the clinic would restart.
Given the likelihood of another such outcome, I asked Bua if she’d considered her full commitment to the new business thoroughly, given dad as a business partner, and whether she was sure he wasn’t going to flake this time, before she turned down this new offer to commit to working with him.
If I’d said this to someone outside of the family, I would’ve felt like I was betraying my dad. But to his own sister? It was more like pointing out the obvious. I had her best interests at heart too. Not over my dad’s per se, but I felt it was my responsibility to at least bring my very obvious concern to light.
All this was 2 days ago.
It got her thinking, and while she said she was still leaning heavily towards going into the business as ‘it was in her personal interest too and while she knew dad could be difficult to work with, their skills were a good match and the whole prospect looked good in general’. She did become open to at least considering the job opportunity, but I didn’t get the impression she was in any particular favour of it. I got a ‘what-are-you-saying’ stare from mom as she overheard my end of this phone conversation, but we didn’t talk much of it after.
Until today, when Bua called again to tell me she was taking the job.
While she still wanted to retire soon, she’d found reason to work for a few more months at least. It role that perfectly matched her portfolio & interest, unlike her previous jobs. A big, international, reputed company that would make her a lot more employable — if need be — in the future, unlike her previous jobs. A boss she already was compatible with, unlike her previous jobs. The work the company was doing was state-of-the-art, and while she reckoned her current skills would be outdated in a couple of years, if she worked this job for a year or so she’d be in a much better position if she ever needed work again in the future.
I’d been the one who told her to reconsider the opportunity, and now her telling me that she was taking it didn’t sit right with me either.
Mom was quite unhappy to hear this. She obviously didn’t like dad losing his business partner, and naturally she blamed me for it.
Bua mentioned that she had later talked to Onkar too, who had advised her to work both jobs. He himself would’ve been able to do it, and a couple more at the same time too probably, but given Bua’s over-commitment issues, even though she said she’d be happy to work weekends with dad, we both knew inside that if she took the other job, she’d be tied to it.
She talked to dad about the offer too, naturally, but upon hearing that both me and Onkar had in some form dissuaded her from taking up the partnership, he had also encouraged her to take the new job offer, and that was the final push she needed in her decision.
On dad’s end, he just heard that his own children were telling their aunt not to work with him, and figured that it’d be his fault if she regretted not taking the job later. He didn’t actually want her to leave; he was just reducing liability.
But from Bua’s viewpoint, her could-be business partner was clearly telling her to opt for something else.
Dad had been late in a lot of the groundwork that the two of them were currently doing for the intro workshops too — not replying to Bua’s emails, not proofreading her presentation materials, not reaching out to his contacts according to the marketing strategy she’d created — red flags that didn’t help his case.
Dad insisted he was still fully committed, just that with the clinic still going on (he’d set an end date but still needed to go through with the already-scheduled appointments), he was struggling to manage time. I asked if after shutting it down, he was sure he wouldn’t find other things that take up his time, like the last time when ended up working on a dermatology textbook he was editing for 2 weeks before giving in and resuming the practice. He was sure.
I learned all this after talking to both of them, separately. I felt guilty for saying anything to Bua in the first place. If I hadn’t sown the seed of doubt, she wouldn’t have even thought of calling Onkar to seek his opinion. Her mind was pretty much made up already, before I’d interfered.
But if dad under-committed to the business later on and Bua regretted the partnership, I would’ve felt guilty for not saying anything when I felt that I should.
The ideal thing to do would’ve been to consult dad before talking to Bua — if I was already convinced that wouldn’t flake this tie, I wouldn’t have felt the need to say anything to her at all. She knew what she was doing.
But now, even though his determination had come to light, she was still considering her options — as she should, of course, but with a bias against dad that I was responsible for introducing.
I could’ve made it not-my-problem at this point and lived with both her decision and the guilt. Obviously, that’s not what I did.
It helped that Bua was also feeling guilty, as if she’d ditched her brother. It’s debatable whether that’s what really happened, but either way, she had all the facts in the end and still decided on taking the job.
When she gave it more thought, her involvement in the business was far less than dad’s. While he would be teaching English lessons — the main focus of the institute — she was involved in the Personality Development department which dad was also partly taking care of. She was also heading the marketing, but that wasn’t a full time job and she insisted that with a few days of full-time work, she could later sustain the marketing side of things with a much smaller commitment — something she could do alongside her actual full-time job.
In her own words, ‘the feeling was not of happiness’ when she accepted the job offer, and we knew that wasn’t the end of things. We got fixing.
Her ex-colleague and new employer had told her that he needed her to start urgently — as soon as she was back from Japan. But upon hearing (an embellished version of) the whole story, he agreed to push her starting date to January, allowing her the couple of weeks she needed to work on the business wholeheartedly and give it the initial push it needed.
She revised her marketing plan and is now adamant on making sure that classes start before she starts working her new job, to ensure dad doesn’t revert to the clinic again out of frustration or because he doesn’t see progress. Whether it’s motivated by guilt or love, I’ve come to trust this is something Bua will be able to do.
She’s always going to be backstage in the business — sisterhood gives you that responsibility, and it helps that she likes it. She also still plans to join and grow the business in a year or so after working for a while longer and upskilling.
Who knows what’ll happen then, but for now, things seem to be in place. Dad is excited to start, Bua is pumped for both the business and the job and I seem to have patched up what I meddled in. The process might not have gone as smoothly as it should’ve, but the outcome was for the best, and there was no harm done in the end.