Varnika had access to business long before she was old enough to study it formally.
For years, she could see the products, customers, conversations and decisions around her. What changed was when she stopped treating that proximity as experience in itself. She began asking to understand what was actually happening underneath it.
Business was never an abstract career choice for Varnika. She had grown up around an operating tea and coffee vending business and was already comfortable with the language of customers, products and markets.
But familiarity creates its own problem - When something has always been around you, it is easy to assume you understand it. Varnika gradually began testing that assumption. Instead of remaining on the outside of the business, she started spending time across its different functions: customer conversations, sales, accounts, logistics, machine servicing and day-to-day operations.
At a trade exhibition in Delhi, that exposure became particularly tangible. She helped prepare the stall, learnt the product closely enough to demonstrate it, interacted directly with prospective customers and observed how interest at an exhibition had to translate into follow-up afterwards.
The experience gave her an early view of business that was far less tidy than the diagrams in a textbook.