Beyond the Street: Shankar Sharma on return on equity in life, markets

'For 40 years, India valued only technical skills. IITs, coding - that became everything. Soft skills were sidelined. But those are the skills that will keep you employable now, not technical skills'

Give a man a problem, and if that man is Shankar Sharma, he will find a solution. “I’ve never been short of solutions,” he tells us as we hop across time, between yesterday and today, and then to what tomorrow might look like.

 

He doesn’t say it pompously. Rather, the belief comes from how he has dealt with life’s blows, starting from when his father suddenly died in 1981. “He went to sleep and never woke up. I was just 17 or 18,” says Sharma.

 

We’re sitting at The Imperial’s 1911 restaurant in New Delhi, overlooking a rainwashed lawn. The