At 19, studying physics at Imperial, a professor I idolised offered me everything I wanted. I took the job, lost my visa, lost £10,000, and ended up back in my parents’ house in India wondering if I’d destroyed my life. This is about what that did to me, and the people who brought me back.
I was 19 and studying physics at Imperial when I first walked into his classroom - a place I technically wasn’t allowed to be. He taught an entrepreneurship module I had no business being in, and I was not a fourth-year student. I asked my department if I could attend and they said no, rules are rules, doesn’t matter how interested you are. So I snuck into every single lecture. Sat near the front, asked questions constantly, probably annoyed half the room. The department found out and told me to stop but I didn’t give a shit - I came to Imperial to learn and paid a hefty fee to grow into who I want to be and they have no right telling me what I can and cannot do (especially when the professor wanted me there).
He was the most impressive person I had ever met at that time. He’d taught at a top university abroad, built companies, had real credentials, and when he spoke about building things, about turning physics into products, something clicked that I couldn’t unfeel. We were going to improve efficiency for clean energy and bring it to market. He told me I reminded him of his grandson, and I believed him. I believed every word out of that man’s mouth because when you’re 19 and someone that accomplished takes an interest in you, it feels like the universe is finally confirming what you secretly hoped about yourself. He offered me a job at his startup and a very good salary to go with it. I had just proposed to my girlfriend, I wanted to build a life, and the physics department had never made me feel the way his classroom did. So I took the job. And I worked there for four months, attended meetings, threw myself into it completely, and when my exams came around I decided to postpone them because I was building something and exams felt super small by comparison. My fiancée, who has always been sharper than me about these things, convinced me to take an interruption of studies rather than quit university entirely. That decision saved my degree and it might have saved my life.
Then my visa was curtailed and I had to go back to India. This should have been a temporary problem as I had signed an employment contract. I arranged a sponsorship license for the company myself, and I paid a couple of thousand quid out of my own pocket because the professor said he’d reimburse me later. By this point he owed me about £10,000 between unpaid salary and the certification I’d gotten for his company. All documented and signed. Before I left London, he sat across from me, looked me in the eye, looked my fiancée in the eye, and told us both he was going to bring me back. I flew to India and I waited. He stopped answering my calls - weeks turned into a month and I started to understand what had happened, except I couldn’t say it out loud because saying it would make it real. The startup dream, my employment contract, the promises, all of it was dissolving, and I was sitting in my parents’ house in India watching it happen from 7,000 kilometres away with no visa, no income, and a debt I had no way to pay.
I want to be honest about what that felt like because I think people gloss over these moments when they tell stories like this. They skip to the comeback. I didn’t have a comeback for a long time because for about two months I barely spoke to anyone. I couldn’t explain what had happened without feeling like I was confessing to my own stupidity. I was 19 years old, I had gambled everything on a man’s word, and I had lost. I genuinely believed I had destroyed my entire life, every opportunity I’d clawed my way toward, and I kept replaying the same thought over and over: you did this to yourself. You were naive and this is what naive people get. You have to understand that none of this had come easily in the first place. My family didn’t have money lying around and getting to Imperial was the achievement of a lifetime, not just for me but for my parents, and now I was back in their house having thrown it all away for a man who called me his grandson and then ran.
You did this to yourself. You were naive and this is what naive people get.
And this is where I need to talk about my dad. My father had already gone out of his way to be able to send me to London the first time, and now, after watching his son come home broken and in debt because of someone else’s lies, he went and found a way to get more money so I could go back and finish my degree. He didn’t lecture me and he never once said I told you so. He just did what needed to be done so that his kid could have another shot. I think about that a lot, what it costs a man to do that without making it about himself, and without turning it into a lesson. He just backed me when I couldn’t back myself and so did my now wife.
I don’t have the vocabulary for what that kind of love means, and I’m not sure I ever will, but I know that I’m sitting in London right now because of it. I spent six months in India before I could return and those six months of rebuilding something inside myself that I didn’t have a name for at the time but which I now understand was trust, not in other people, but in my own ability to survive. I came back to London and finished my degree and started building again, slowly, carefully, with a very different understanding of how the world works.
That professor taught me something no lecture ever could and ever will. People who look you in the eye and call you family are capable of extraordinary cruelty - the quiet kind where someone simply decides you’re not worth the inconvenience anymore and walks away. A signed contract means nothing to a person who never intended to honour it. Warmth and mentorship can be performed just as easily as they can be felt, and when you’re young and hungry and desperate to be seen, you can’t always tell the difference.
I’m not sharing this story because I’ve wrapped it up neatly in my head - I haven’t. I’m sharing it because if you’re young and someone powerful is making you feel special, I want you to know that the feeling itself is not evidence of anything. Trust what people do over time, never what they say across a table. And when it all falls apart anyway, because sometimes it will no matter how careful you are, know that you can come back from it. Because you can and you will.
Aryan