The Purpose Became Bigger Than Me

Before I recorded with Arun Rathod, we had a short conversation in a car. I was driving him to his accommodation during a Yi visit to Noida, and something he said stayed with me for weeks. When I got home, I remember wishing I had a camera running. This episode is my attempt to capture what I heard that night.

Arun runs a global manufacturing company, the Flosil Group, that exports to fifty-two countries. He is Stanford-educated. He had every reason to stay in his lane and build. Instead, he walked into a youth chapter in Chennai that was barely alive, with almost no members willing to lead, no momentum, and no obvious reason to believe it would work. And he stayed.

What happened after that is not really a leadership story. It is a human one.

[EMBED: Instagram Reel or YouTube Short. Cold open, "prove not who I am, prove what we can do”]

Version 3.0, and a one-way ticket to Dubai

Arun describes his life in versions. In 2014, version three began with a plan to leave the country.

The plan was clean. Step away from every organisation he was part of, move to Dubai, and build the thing he had always dreamed of: multiple factories across the world. The Middle East was the natural first base. He had five multinational joint ventures and was ready to set up in Dubai, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and the US. He would go first, and the rest would follow.

Then Yi found him almost by accident. He went to a retreat in Kashmir knowing no one and came back with twenty or thirty people who had become close. Leadership noticed. A call came asking him to chair the Chennai chapter. His honest reply was that he knew almost nothing about Yi. Their answer was simple. We know who you are. He walked in without much idea of what he was signing up for.

A broken room

Here is the part I keep returning to. When he took over Chennai in 2016, not a single member was ready to step into an executive role. Not one.

So he and a friend, Dilip, sat down and built it person by person. One by one, he kept saying. By the end of the year, they had close to fifteen people. He knew he had exactly one year to prove something, and he was clear about what. “Prove not who I am. Prove what we can do.”

He has a way of explaining pace that I loved. You can get from Chennai to Pondicherry in three hours, or two, or one, or fifteen minutes. What matters is the vehicle you choose and knowing the direction you are going. Everything else is detail.

[EMBED: YouTube Short or Instagram Reel. The "one by one" and vehicle and direction clip]

The loss that changed everything

In 2021, Arun lost his younger daughter. She was twelve.

He spoke about it with an openness I did not expect. It broke him, and it broke his whole family. He had seen people lose parents, but he had never known parents who lost a child. He says he still feels her with him, not in the physical space but in the spiritual one.

In his grief, he decided to go to Dubai again. And again, within a month, a call came, this time to take on a national leadership role. What moved him to say yes was a realisation that is hard to sit with. When his daughter was gone, everything he had built for his children, the savings, the insurance, the wealth, was still there in her name. But not a single rupee of it could ever be used by her, for her.

That truth reframed everything. If all he did was build for himself and the three or four people in his family, it would end where it started. So he chose to give three years of his life to a purpose that would outlast him. In his words, the purpose became bigger than the individual. Yi did not replace what he lost. But it gave the space she left a reason to keep meaning something.

[EMBED: Instagram Reel or LinkedIn native video. "The purpose became bigger than the individual"]

Why the youth, and why now

When Arun talks about why this work is urgent, he does not reach for statistics from a report. He reaches for his own home.

His elder daughter is in college. In her class alone, a few students use drugs, around thirty know exactly where to source them, and the rest know whom to ask. He talked about five-rupee drug-coated candies reaching sixth- and seventh-graders in a government school in Tamil Nadu. Five rupees.

His point lands hard. You might be certain your own child is safe. Fine. But if not your child, then your grandchild, or your great-grandchild. Working with youth is neither charity nor optional. There is no other option.

[EMBED: YouTube Short or Instagram Reel. The five-rupee candies, “if not your kid, your grandkid” clip]

Wipe it, say thank you, move on

Arun is a firm believer in karma. Even on a bad day, he treats it as something to work through rather than rage against.

The line I will not forget is this. Somebody is going to spit on your face, and you just have to wipe it, say thank you, and move on. He said that was true for him in 2016 when he started with an empty room, and it is just as true in 2026, now that he leads the whole movement.

What I keep thinking about

What stayed with me most was something simple he said about leadership. The real work is not getting people to follow you. It is making them believe in something bigger than both of you.

A man who was ready to leave it all for a quiet life abroad. A room with no one willing to lead. A grief no parent should know. And a decision, made from inside that grief, to serve millions of young people he will never meet.

That is the story behind Arun Rathod.

If this meant something to you, share it with someone stepping into a hard season of their own. And if you are a leader with a story worth telling, reach out. We would love to have you.

I'm Ravneet Oberoi. This is The Story Behind.