Sony Kumar's BLOG

As a child, I was convinced that space was home and the stars were my parents. Earth felt like a temporary stopover — a place I was visiting, not a place I belonged. I didn’t understand humans, not really. Their emotions were too complex, too unpredictable, too fragile.

Then my grandfather died.

I didn’t understand death, but I understood my mother’s tears. Watching her cry like a child made me realise that humans break in ways I couldn’t yet comprehend. I thought my grandfather might come back. I thought death was reversible. I was wrong, but I didn’t know that yet.

My grandmother told me that God made me like everyone else because He must have a plan for me. So I spent months imagining what that plan might be. I imagined flying like Hanuman, imagined saving people, imagined languages no one had heard before. Eventually I gave up. I told her I didn’t know God’s plan. She told me His plan was that I should study.

But studying made me dizzy.

I wasn’t good at memorising. I couldn’t remember what I had for breakfast, let alone pages of textbooks. I thought I was a basket case. But I kept trying because it made my parents happy. The only thing I truly loved was imagination — the one place where I felt free, where I could build worlds, solve problems, and write on walls and trousers without fear.

I remember once telling my mother that I didn’t know what I wanted to do in life, but I liked the idea of travelling the world and learning. And when I die, I wouldn’t want people to cry for me. I would want them to smile, knowing that a part of them became part of me, and a part of me became them.

General knowledge was my one refuge. I was good at it. It made sense.

Eventually I left India. I was still a teenager, and it was hard — brutally hard — but suddenly the world started making sense. Within a year, people were calling me a genius. I didn’t understand it. How could someone who struggled in school suddenly be a genius? But life didn’t give me time to question it. I needed food and shelter. I needed to survive.

When I felt sad, I would sit outside in the snow until the cold confused my sadness away.

Teachers were kind. People were kind. I still had no ambition, no plan. I worked all sorts of jobs, sometimes just to exhaust my body so my mind would stop thinking.

Then I met a girl who liked my mind — who encouraged it, who made me believe it wasn’t a liability. She told me to imagine flying to the moon and back. So I did. I sat in libraries and gas stations trying to figure out how to reach the moon without chemical rockets. Rockets felt primitive. I wanted lasers — laser highways, laser communication, laser everything.

Sometimes I still look for that girl — the one who could truly see me. I would tell her that I trusted her the way I trust my mother. And if I could leave her my mind, I would, because some days it becomes too heavy to carry alone.

Then she died.

And like my grandfather and aunt, she didn’t come back. I was angry at death. Furious. Why was it irreversible? Why couldn’t I visit her and return? But anger doesn’t feed you. Anger doesn’t pay rent. So I turned to money.

I studied money. Then I studied more money. Then I studied commerce. Then business. Still nothing made sense.

Money felt like a flawed idea that everyone worshipped. I tried to worship it too, but I couldn’t. Yet ironically, I became good at it. Very good. In my twenties, I had millions in my bank account. It meant nothing to me, but it meant everything to others.

I wrote about markets under pseudonyms. I warned about companies like Enron. I met secret groups of short sellers. I sat with central banks and asked why they weren’t embarrassed by monetary policy.

Then one September day, I lost two close friends. Again, death. Again, irreversible.

I moved to London. Over time, it became home. My son was born here — the most precious human in my life. Like me, he doesn’t care about money.

After losing my parents and my eldest sister, I finally stopped fighting death. I realised it wasn’t evil. It was renewal. It was intimate. Romantic, even. One day, I want to die on the moon, looking at Earth, smiling with love in my heart.

But before that, I want to improve the human condition.

Not because it’s my mission. Not because it’s God’s plan. But because it’s what I want to do.

And somewhere along this journey, I learned something essential: when you are built from pain, pain loses its ability to crush you. It becomes raw material — something you can shape, something you can build with. It becomes the reason you can sit with someone else’s suffering and not turn away. It becomes the source of empathy, care, and compassion. It becomes the quiet strength that lets you hold another person’s pain without collapsing under your own.

And the truth is, I don’t know much about God. But if the Gods exist, I would like to give them a long hug and ask if there is anything I could do for them. Because being a God must be the hardest thing possible — a burden I will never be able to carry.

This is why I’m building HARLEY of LONDON — a vision shaped by everything I’ve lived, lost, imagined, and understood. I want to redesign the architecture of money so it works for people, not the other way around. I want people to realise that the greatest asset is themselves — their health, their wellness, their lifestyle, their humanity.

And through all of this, one thing has remained constant:

I keep my most precious things in my imagination.

Not because I’m hiding them, but because imagination is the only place where nothing can be taken from me. It’s the only vault where loss cannot reach, where death cannot erase, where meaning cannot decay.

It’s where my story began. It’s where my story continues. And it’s where my story will end — perhaps on the moon, smiling at the world I tried to make a little better.