CELEBRATING THE POWER WOMEN OF INDIAN REAL ESTATE

Leadership lessons do not always come from boardrooms. Sometimes, they arrive all at once, wrapped in grief, uncertainty and the quiet fear of not knowing what comes next. For Anshu, one October changed everything. The airline she worked for stopped paying salaries. Her beloved Lhasa Apso, Sloppy, died in her arms. Financial commitments mounted, she was unable to secure a bank loan, and the life she had carefully built began to unravel. Looking back, Anshu says that difficult chapter reshaped not only her relationship with money but also her understanding of leadership. "Make numbers your friend; they are not the opposite of meaning, they are how meaning survives a winter," she says. It also taught her that asking for help is not a weakness, that difficult decisions only become costlier when delayed, and that resilience should never be mistaken for stubbornness. Those experiences continue to shape the way she leads. She believes the leaders who endure are not those who try to fit into existing moulds but those who remain unapologetically themselves. Pointing to leaders such as Falguni Nayar, Kiran Realty Mazumdar-Shaw, Michelle Obama and Indra Nooyi, she argues that what makes them remarkable is not a shared "female perspective" but the courage to lead in their own way.