I’m Mayank Kulshrestha — an HR professional who writes about what actually happens inside organisations.
For 15+ years I’ve worked inside the machine: hiring, firing, building teams, navigating the politics, and sitting in the rooms where careers are quietly decided. I’ve seen how organisations really work versus how they say they work — across high-growth startups and enterprise-scale companies in India.
Today I run HR operations as AGM–HR at Reliance Retail (Clovia) — recruitment, compliance, performance cycles, and the everyday chaos of operating at Indian retail scale.
I’m originally from Agra. I trained as an electronics and communication engineer, then moved into HR — which turned out to be the better fit.
Why I write
Most writing about HR and labour law in India is either a policy PDF nobody finishes or a LinkedIn post that guesses at the details. I try to sit in between: read the actual notification, work out what it means for a payslip, and say plainly what is settled and what isn’t.
The rest is about careers and corporate life — appraisals, promotions, exits, and the things most people only say off the record. A few thousand readers follow along, mostly because it refuses to sound like a policy document.
I also write poetry in Hindi and Hinglish when the mood takes me. That rarely makes it here.
My father
I lost my father last year.
Everything I know about work, I am still measuring against him. Not the job titles. The way he held things.
He was born to Seth Amirchand of Kasganj, after three daughters. The first son. The story I grew up hearing is that my grandfather fed all twelve of his villages that day. Whatever the exact truth of it, that was the scale of the house he was born into, and the scale of the welcome he got.
A boy could have coasted on that for an entire life.
At a time when most men in his circle stopped at graduation, he went and did his Masters in business. Nobody asked him to. He could have simply stayed home and managed what the family already had.
Instead he took a job.
And then he stayed in it for close to thirty-seven years.
Thirty-seven years. One organisation. A man who did not need the salary, showing up for nearly four decades because he had given his word to an employer and that was the end of the discussion.
I work in a field where we change jobs every three years and call it growth. I have sat in exit interviews and heard every version of why people leave. I understand the arguments. I have made some of them myself.
And still, quietly, that is the thing of his I want most. Not the land, not the name. The ability to commit to one place and build something over decades instead of collecting titles.
He was a follower of Ram and a student of Krishna. The Hanuman Chalisa every Tuesday, without fail, for as long as I can remember. The Gita was different. That he did not simply recite. He read it, sat with it, argued with it. Do the work, let go of the result.
I understood that sentence intellectually for years. I only began to understand it after he was gone.
He never told me to be successful. He told me to be steady. It took me a long time to see the difference.
I wrote about the day he died here.
What you’ll find here
- Labour law, explained — the Codes, EPFO, gratuity, wages. What’s notified, what isn’t, and what it does to a payslip.
- HR insider perspectives — what really happens in appraisal rooms, layoffs, and promotions.
- Career strategy — practical advice for navigating the Indian corporate world.
- Storytelling — personal essays, Hinglish musings, and the occasional uncomfortable truth.
Let’s connect
💼 LinkedIn — DMs open
📸 Instagram
🐦 X (Twitter)