Dr. Vijayakumar Parameswaran Unnithan
I arrived at his doorstep carrying the heavy weight of the modern world — my mind a buzzing hive of “what’s next” and “how do I survive the machines?” I expected a strategy lecture, a roadmap for certifications, personal branding and enhancing executive presence, or perhaps a clinical autopsy of my CV. Instead, I found a man who seemed to have stepped out of time itself.
I — THE SILVER HOUR
Finding the space
The sun was still a bruised purple against the horizon when my Career Architect beckoned me toward the edge of a tangled garden. He did not ask about my career. He asked me to kneel.
“Look at this,” he whispered, pointing to a spray of Mimosa pudica — the Touch-Me-Not. I reached out, and as my finger brushed the leaflets, they folded inward in a delicate, rhythmic surrender.
“Most people see a weed in a hurry to hide. But look at the architecture of that response. It is not hiding — it is sensing a boundary. We are told to be ‘on’ at all times, to be loud, to be visible. But true discernment begins in the retraction. If you cannot sense the life in this soil, how will you sense the soul of an organisation?”
His camera shutter clicked with the precision of a heartbeat as he spoke. In that moment, the skills I had been so desperate to acquire felt like the dust on my shoes — present, incidental, barely worth naming. He was not teaching me about work. He was showing me the sky.
II — HIGH NOON
The architecture of the invisible
By midday, the heat had settled over us like a heavy blanket. We retreated to his study room- journals, papers, amber light, and the low hum of a world frantically digitising itself. I started to talk about AI, about the particular dread of being replaced by a line of code.
He poured green tea. The steam curled between us. He offered no rebuttal — only a different lens.
“The machine can trace the map, but it cannot feel the wind. It can calculate a career trajectory, but it cannot sense the unsaid fears, the buried possibilities, the quiet rhythms that actually move a human system.”
He slid a photograph across the table, revealing a slow-motion rebellion- a thick web of roots slitting the concrete, moving with patience that was as relentless as it was quiet. “We spend our lives trying to be the concrete,” he said quietly. “Hard, unyielding, credentialled. But the future belongs to the root. The root has no job description. It has a capacity to find water where others see only stone.”
He let that sit and uttered, “We are not building a career today, my friend. We are rewilding your mind.”
III — TWILIGHT
The map of the unknown
As the shadows grew thin, the conversation drifted deeper into my life — into the silences and second-guesses I had never named aloud. He was not merely a mentor. He was a curator of wonder, and he kept pointing the lens back at me.
He spoke of knowledge not as a bucket to be filled, but as a capacity to be awakened — slowly, unevenly, in moments that cannot be scheduled.
“You think you came here for a three-hour session. But the orientation never truly ends. It continues every time you read past the first page of a summary. Every time you choose to see a person instead of a resource. You are learning to be a maker of sense in a world that has lost its bearings.”
The first fireflies were flashing their unique patterns in the tall grass when I finally stood to leave.
I emerged into a velvet night endowed with stars, feeling as though the whole galaxy had finally aligned to bring me to this moment with them. This evening, I have no plans for new certificates, no five-year plan, no optimised LinkedIn headline waiting to be posted. But for the first time in years, the uncertain world did not feel like a threat pushing in from all sides. It felt like a garden that is complex, wild, alive and patiently waiting for me to finally learn how to experience it.
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About the Author Dr. Vijayakumar Parameswaran Unnithan is a scholar- practitioner working at the intersection of career theory, employability, and organisation development. He is the originator of the Post-Skill Professional (PSP) Framework and Career Architect at CareerTotus Consultants Pvt Ltd. He is the President of Asia Organisation Development Network (AODN) and publishes in leading management journals. Views are Personal.
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