Dear KOM-ers!
We’re so happy to feature a new book giveaway!
Please enjoy this excerpt from “Desi 2.0” by Sonny Garg.
There are 2 ways to enter to win a FREE copy:y
- Leave a comment below with your email address (so we can contact you)
- Email us at KOMWriting@gmail.com with the Subject: Desi 2.0 giveaway entry
The winner will be randomly selected on 8/17/26 and announced on our website and social media. *
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Desi 2.0 is a powerful journey through the crushing expectations placed on children of South Asian immigrants, the seductive danger of “achievement addiction” and a transformative path to discovering you were always enough.
Sunil “Sonny” Garg grew up immersed in the archetypal Desi-American Dream: excel in high school, attend an Ivy League university, become a doctor or lawyer and attain the wealth and status that would validate his parents’ sacrifices. Anything short of perfection meant failure and was met with mental, emotional and physical abuse.
This relentless programming propelled him to the University of Chicago and Harvard, a White House fellowship and a C-suite position at a Fortune 125 company. Yet as his external successes mounted, so did an internal emptiness. Achievement became his addiction, each milestone a desperate attempt to prove he deserved acceptance and love. Meanwhile, his relationships withered. Constant comparison, unexplained rage and deteriorating health left him asking: Who have I become?
After a profound moment of reckoning, he began the painstaking work of dismantling his childhood programming to create what he calls his “Minimally Viable Me.” In doing so, he discovered that his worth wasn’t something he needed to earn. He was already loved. Already enough. Simply by being.
Brutally honest and warmly funny, Desi 2.0 speaks to anyone who’s felt imprisoned by inherited expectations, measured their worth through accomplishment or found themselves living someone else’s life.
Excerpt: The Question That Changed Everything
“What are you chasing, and why?”
Six words. Spoken over flaming saganaki at a Greek restaurant in downtown Chicago. In early 2013, those six words shattered the carefully constructed narrative I’d built around my life and forced me to confront truths I’d been hiding from for too long.
I was forty-six years old, sitting across from my dear friend Tim, having just shared what should have been exciting news: I’d been named to the executive committee of Exelon Corpora tion, one of the country’s largest power and utility companies. This was supposed to be the next logical step in my ascent to becoming a CEO, my entry into what the Aaron Burr character in the Broadway musical Hamilton called “the room where it happens.”
My friendship with Tim had begun about five years prior when we were selected to be Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute, a program designed for folks in their late thirties or early forties who had achieved success and yet were feeling a longing for something more. The Fellowship had alumni like Reed Hastings and Reid Hoffman—and any other tech giant who had the benefit of their parents naming them some spelling of Reid and who explored ideas like a good life, values-based leadership, and moving from success to significance.
Tim, always generous in spirit, responded to my news by saying, “Dude, that’s amazing. You’re on the executive committee of a Fortune 150 company?”
Yet, to my utter surprise, I blurted out, “My life sucks.” Without missing a beat, Tim offered that simple yet devastating question for which I, someone who prided himself on always having a quick response, had absolutely no response.
That night, I engaged in an exercise that I had learned at Aspen. We would divide our lives into four dimensions—work, family, self, and community—and ask ourselves, “What do we want in each of those dimensions?” And then ask, “Why do you want those things?”
For the first time that I could remember in a long time, I was willing to be honest with myself about the “whys” driving my “whats,” and I didn’t like what I found. Despite achieving everything my Indian immigrant father had dreamed of (Ivy League education, corporate success, civic leadership), I could claim alignment in exactly none of the four key categories.
It was not so much that my life sucked but that my life did not feel like mine. I felt empty—disconnected from my wife, my daughters, and myself. I seemed to have been living a life that suddenly felt foreign to me, as if I had been living someone else’s script rather than my own life.
I’d experienced what I came to call my David Byrne Moment, and I found myself asking the Talmudic-like question posed by Byrne, the lead singer of the band Talking Heads, in the hit song “Once in a Lifetime”: “Well . . . how did I get here?”
This is the story of how I got there, how I found my way out, and how I worked to break the addiction to achievement and validation from others and the cycle of conditional love that had shaped my family and then tore it apart.
This story is about the difference between what I now call “Desi 1.0”—the traditional South Asian American Dream of endless achievement and external validation—and “Desi 2.0”: recognizing that we are all worthy of love not because we achieve but because we are.
* By entering this contest, you give consent to Kind Over Matter to use your name for promotional purposes on our website and on all social media.
NOTE: You can purchase Sonny’s book from the publisher or on Amazon.
