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Marrow Minded
Kashika Madaan’s first attempt to answer her calling ended in a moment of somatic betrayal. Her ambition was to become a doctor, walking the path of one chosen to heal others. Yet, during her internship in a hematology department, she fainted. The sight of a patient's suffering during a bone marrow test hit her unexpectedly. In this moment, she faced a devastating diagnosis of her own condition. She was a healer who couldn't bear to feel the pain of others. She could not become a physician allergic to the very symptoms she sought to treat. Her empathy was immediate. Her symptoms were a visceral, physiological force so powerful it could shut her body down. The hospital, a place she associated with healing, became the “scariest place” for her, a pitfall of unbearable suffering.
This established the central conflict that would shape her professional life. Her subsequent career pivots, from medicine to biotechnology and eventually to the social sector, were not random leaps or signs of indecision. She was determined to find a way to endure the suffering of others. She was searching for the vessel that could hold her empathy without breaking. Her calling was not a clear destination but a fundamental, often painful, contradiction she had to solve. Her empathy was so acute it threatened to incapacitate her, but it didn’t. She prevailed. Nonetheless, this raises a fundamental question about the nature of a calling. What happens when your greatest gift is also the source of your greatest vulnerability? How does someone who is unable to witness pain find their place in a field that confronts suffering head-on?
"I cannot see anybody in pain, it just shakes me".
Bearing Limits
A calling deferred does not dissolve. It shifts, seeking a new channel for expression. Kashika Madaan’s departure from the medical field was not an abandonment of her desire to heal, but a strategic retreat from a battlefield she was not yet equipped to bear. The hospital had revealed a critical vulnerability. Her empathy was not a detached, professional asset but an absolute force that could overwhelm her if not carefully proportioned. This withdrawal was conditioned by a deeper history. The trauma of molestation, which had happened twice in her youth, had shaped her into what she describes as a "very docile kind of person". It was a trauma that left her vulnerable, eroding the psychological armor necessary to stand in the presence of others' suffering without being consumed by it.
Her pivot to biotechnology was a logical maneuver. It was an attempt to answer her calling at a distance. It was safe and proportioned. If she could not operate on the wound, she could help build the instruments that would. Biotechnology offered a path to healing that was intellectual, systemic, and removed from the immediate, visceral reality of a patient's suffering. This was the calculated strategy of someone who clearly knew their own limits. She was still trying to alleviate suffering while re-engineering her approach to account for her vulnerabilities. Her early career depicts a map of this search, a series of thoughtful attempts to find a solution that kept her empathy at bay.
This period of her life was governed by an antagonizing conflict between her destined sense of delivering purpose and the inability to get past her physical realities. The "docile" person, shaped by a trauma that taught her to retreat, could not yet become the assertive healer she aspired to be. She was a healer in exile, a leader whose primary battle was still an internal one. The foundation for her future leadership was being laid not in public strength, but in these quiet, strategic acts of self-preservation.
"Initially, it happened twice, the molestation, and I was more of a very docile kind of person".
Sonagachi’s Witness
Distance is an auxiliary aid that can only protect a person for so long. Kashika Madaan's advance into the intellectual world of biotechnology was a successful attempt to keep her empathy manageable. However, a project for her corporate social responsibility team bridged the distance without further ado. The assignment was to work with the children of commercial sex workers in Sonagachi, one of Asia's largest red-light districts. It was a professional task that hit Madaan hard, on an intimate level. The moment she entered Sonagachi, all her defenses collapsed. "I actually got… I mean, I started to shiver," she recalls. That night, she did not sleep. She "just cried". This was not the contained, individual suffering of a hospital, a single point of pain she could turn away from. This was an oozing societal abscess, spilling over an entire habitat of trauma, impossible to ignore.
Her isolation in this experience was striking. When she tried to articulate the horror to her friends and family, they could not understand. To them, Sonagachi was an abstract concept, a "filthy place" for fulfilling unspeakable personal needs, not a human tragedy of cosmic proportions. But Kashika was no longer at a distance. She was a witness, standing in the centre of all of it. She had seen the claustrophobic rooms and the horrifying living conditions. The worst was the reality for the children. Clients often gave them drugs to keep them from waking up and disturbing the transaction, the sexual act. This was the detail that obliterated her wall of proportion forever. It was the moment their suffering became an unbearable immersion. The neat separation between her professional work and her personal vulnerability died.
This experience transformed her. The pain of Sonagachi was not something she could leave behind or analyze from a distance. It was a direct, overwhelming confrontation that forced a reckoning. She had spent her career trying to find a way to heal. In Sonagachi, she found herself standing in the epicenter of a sore so vast it reshaped her worldview. Her method of keeping empathy at bay had failed. It was time to confront her demons.
"The children were sleeping in the same room while the client was there".
The Alchemy of Confidence
The decision to confront one's demons begins an alchemical process. Sonagachi did not break Kashika Madaan's resolution. It became the crucible in which her personal trauma transformed into a public mandate. The suffering she witnessed in the red-light district created an undeniable resonance with her past. The experience of her own molestation had left her feeling "docile," unable to stand up for herself. She recognized a similar paralysis in the systemic exploitation of the women and children of Sonagachi. In their story, she saw the reflection of her own despair. This resonance was the catalyst she needed. It recontextualized her private suffering, turning it from a source of personal shame and fear into a shared, systemic injustice that demanded a response she was willing to fight for.
Her vulnerability became an active moving force. The logic of this transformation was simple. She connected her past inability to act with a new resolve. "I couldn't do anything for myself, and this was painful," she reflects, "so I thought, why not do it this way? Why not become stronger in this social field, you know?". This is alchemy. Fighting for others became how to fight for the version of herself who could not. Her professional purpose was born from her personal need to answer an old injustice with a new strength.
This process resulted in a fundamental re-engineering of her own operating system. The "docile" person, shaped by a trauma that taught her to retreat, vanished. In her place stood a leader who "cannot bear injustice". Her empathy, once a source of incapacitating pain, was now channeled into a fierce intolerance for inequity. It compelled her to "raise her voice" where she had once been silent. It was the inevitable outcome of an internal shift. Her work in the social sector ceased to be a job. It became the necessary antidote to her own history, the battlefield where she could finally excel.
"I couldn't do anything for myself, and it was painful, so I thought, why not do it this way? Why not become stronger in this social field, you know? So that’s why, I think I became more vocal".
Demons at Work
Confidence forged in the fire of experience is not brittle. Kashika Madaan's alchemy transformed her vulnerability into a formidable asset. Her empathy now serves as the core of her leadership philosophy. Corporate sustainability as a career became the necessary channel for her personal mandate to "stand for justice". This new operating system requires an internal shift and the right toolkit. The "docile" person had to learn the language of assertiveness, a skill she consciously cultivated through the guidance of professionals and mentors. This was a deliberate act of self-reconstruction, the practical work of building the psychological armor she had once lacked.
This transformation is most visible in her conscious choice to be a "mentor" rather than a "boss," a distinction that embodies her redirected empathy. A boss manages tasks and can become agitated when work is not understood. A mentor, as a colleague advised her, grooms people. This advice reframed her leadership approach. It allowed her to see a junior colleague's struggles not as a source of frustration, but as an opportunity to guide them through their struggles." It required her to channel her empathy not into feeling their stress, but into igniting their potential. This philosophy was tested in a conflict with a Gen Z colleague. After an initial managerial clash, she chose the mentor's path. Over months, she built a relationship of trust that turned a difficult start with a junior into a professional who became a high-performing and well-respected team member.
This is the final stage of her alchemy. Her scientific curiosity, honed in biotechnology, is now guided by a powerful human-centric compass. Her abundant empathy, once a source of incapacitating pain, is now her greatest strategic asset. It allows her to build relationships, navigate conflict constructively, and see the human potential within every team member. It is the driving engine of her work and the unshakeable foundation of her leadership premise. The healer who could not bear it has become a leader who understands that the most effective way to heal a system is to mentor the people within it. She did not just prevail over her demons. She put them to work.
"Don't be a boss. You can become a mentor. Try to act like a mentor".
What I Learned From Kashika Madaan
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A calling can be a contradiction. Your greatest gift can also be the source of your greatest vulnerability. A profound sense of empathy can feel like an unbearable liability before it can be honed into a strategic asset.
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Self-preservation is the foundation of strength. Before a leader can confront the world's battles, they must first learn to navigate their own "bearing limits." The strategic retreat to a safe distance is not an act of cowardice but a necessary act of building the capacity to endure.
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Witnessing transforms empathy into a mandate. There is a profound difference between knowing about suffering and witnessing it firsthand. Direct confrontation with a systemic wound can obliterate carefully constructed defenses and turn a passive feeling into an unavoidable call to action.
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Trauma can be alchemized into purpose. Personal pain, when it resonates with a larger systemic injustice, can be transformed from a source of private suffering into a public mandate. Fighting for others can become the way to heal the version of yourself who could not fight.
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True leadership is mentorship. The most effective way to heal a system is to mentor the people within it. Redirected empathy, channeled into guiding and developing others, is the ultimate expression of leadership. It's not about overcoming your demons, but putting them to work.