Life 2.0 — An Update
Continued from here : https://shipraamit.com/72-hours/
What I wrote in December 2024, for me, was a turning of the page. What I’ve come to realise, though, is that some pages turn more slowly than others. And this one has given me a great deal to think about.
Since December 2024, my body has been through five surgeries — four on my heart, one on my right shoulder. I have been in extraordinarily good hands throughout, and I am well. But that is the honest context for everything that follows. Bodies keep score, and mine has been keeping score diligently. I am listening to it now.
Next April I turn 55. It’s a number I’m entirely comfortable with. I have never been someone who runs from the arithmetic of age — I’ve always preferred to face numbers directly, understand what they mean, and make decisions accordingly. And what 55 means, given everything my body has been through, is simply this: the mind and the body have limits, and pretending otherwise has never been my style.
So I have made a decision. And I want to share it with you the same way I’ve always tried to share things — directly & honestly.
Where It All Began
I was twelve years old when my father returned from a work trip to Russia. He brought back a Zenith camera. I don’t think either of us knew, in that moment, what he was actually handing me.
That camera became one of the great loves of my life. I have travelled to over 50 distinct countries (somewhere around 150 international trips), and I cannot recall a single trip — not one — where I did not have a camera with me. It was as instinctive as carrying a passport. The curiosity that camera gave me at twelve has never left. It simply evolved, over the decades, from a hobby into a craft into a studio into fifteen years of something I am genuinely proud of.
My father gave me that camera without knowing he was handing me my second life’s work. Years later, he would drive me to the hospital in seven minutes flat, sit outside an ICU without leaving his chair for hours, and cry for only the second time I have ever seen him cry in my life. The man who accidentally started all of this was also the man who made sure I survived long enough to finish it. I have thought about that more than I can say. There are not many ways to thank someone for something that large — but I intend to spend the years ahead trying.
What The Camera Gave Me
I spent nearly twenty years in financial services before retiring on my 40th birthday. Boardrooms, balance sheets, mergers, acquisitions — I was good at it, and I found it deeply satisfying. But I was also curious about what else I might be capable of. That curiosity is what led me, in March 2012, to open this studio.
Going from boardrooms to mood boards was one of the most genuinely enjoyable challenges of my life. The financial mind craves certainty — models, projections, outcomes you can stress-test. Photography gave me none of that. It gave me an eight-day-old newborn, a set theme, a narrow window of time, and the instruction to make something beautiful. It pushed me creatively in ways I hadn’t anticipated and unlocked a side of myself that the corporate world had never had much use for.
What I came to understand, somewhere across those fifteen years, is that both careers were built on the same foundation: trust. In financial services, people trusted me with their money and their futures — things they had spent lifetimes building. In photography, families trusted me with their most irreplaceable moments — things that could never be recreated. I have spent my entire professional life being trusted with things that cannot be replaced. That is not something I take lightly. It is, I think, the thread that runs through everything.
The camera didn’t just give me a second career. It gave me a second education — in patience, in creativity, in the particular joy of making something that a family will hold onto for the rest of their lives and beyond.
The Hardest Shoot I Ever Did
My heart attack was on December 11th, 2024. I was discharged from hospital on the 15th.
On the 18th, I did a newborn shoot.
I want to be clear about why, because it matters. I did not do it to make a point or to prove anything to anyone. I did it because I have spent fifteen years educating families about why the timing of a newborn shoot is everything. The window is narrow — days, not weeks — and I have always treated that with complete seriousness. Being among the first newborn photographers in India, I felt a responsibility not just to my clients but to the understanding of this craft. You do not reschedule a newborn’s first days of life.
In fifteen years, I have never cancelled a shoot or changed a schedule. Not once. A heart attack was not going to be the exception — not because I was being reckless, but because some commitments are simply larger than the circumstances around them. I showed up, with swollen hands and a body that was still finding its footing, and I did that shoot with the same honesty and care I have tried to bring to every one of the 8,000 that came before it.
I narrate this because it is the most accurate description I have of what this work has always meant to me.
What I Will Remember
After 15 years of photographing in my studio shoots, people expect me to have a favourite. I don’t — and I think that’s the point. Every family that came through these doors trusted us with something irreplaceable, and each of those moments carries equal weight for me.
What I will remember most is not any single shoot. It is what this team was capable of when we decided to aim higher than was comfortable.
At the height of the studio, I set us a challenge: 1,000 shoots in a single calendar year. Most people in this industry would have raised an eyebrow. We didn’t treat it as a stretch target — we treated it as a statement of intent. We finished the year at 1,170. I don’t think any of us fully believed it was possible until we were on the other side of it.
And then there was cake smash week — specifically, one particular October that none of us will forget. Every year we dedicated a week to cake smash shoots, and it was always one of the most joyful, chaotic, frosting-covered weeks in our calendar. But one year, in a six-day window, we did 44 of them. Forty-four. The studio smelled of sugar for days. The energy was something I have never quite experienced anywhere else.
That is what I will carry forward. Not the numbers — the feeling inside the numbers. The particular electricity of a team that trusted each other and refused to settle.
The Photographs That Became the Last
There is a part of this journey I have never spoken about publicly. I am going to speak about it now, because to close this chapter without acknowledging it would be dishonest — and dishonesty has never been something I could live with.
Some of the families who walked through our doors are no longer complete.
I don’t know the exact number. I have never been able to bring myself to count. But across fifteen years — and especially across the terrible silence of the Covid years — I have received calls and messages that no photographer ever prepares for. A parent, a spouse, a sibling, reaching out not to book a session, not to ask about prints — but to tell me that someone was gone. And that the last photograph their family had of that person, the last real one, the one that would sit on the mantle and travel through generations and be held by people not yet born — was one that we took.
I do not have words for what that feels like. I have tried, many times, to find them.
During Covid, it happened more than once. Families we had photographed — newborns, first birthdays, maternity sessions full of hope and anticipation — were suddenly navigating a loss so abrupt that the world hadn’t even finished processing it before it arrived at their door. And somewhere in the wreckage of that grief, they would find our photograph. And sometimes, they would call to tell us.
I took those calls alone. I never passed them to the team. That was not their weight to carry — it was mine.
But the one that has never left me — the one that I carry in a place I cannot name — is the call from a parent who had lost their child.
I will not share details. That grief belongs to them, not to this page. But I will tell you that there is nothing in twenty years of financial services, nothing in fifteen years of photography, nothing in five surgeries or the hardest days of my own life, that has come close to the particular devastation of a parent’s voice on the other end of a phone, telling you that their child is gone. And that the image we made together — in this studio, under these lights, with these hands — is now the image they reach for when they need to remember what their child looked like when the world was still whole.
That is not a responsibility I chose consciously. But it is one I have carried, and will carry, for the rest of my life.
I want those families to know — the ones who called, and the ones who never did but whose loss I somehow came to learn of — that I have not forgotten. Not one of them. That the sessions we did together were not ordinary work to me, even before I knew what they would become. And that the knowledge of what those photographs now hold has made me understand, more deeply than any award or milestone ever could, why this work mattered.
A photograph is never just a photograph. I knew that. But some families taught me just how much weight those four words can carry.
To every parent who has outlived their child, and who has a photograph from this studio somewhere in that grief — I am so deeply sorry. And I am quietly, profoundly honoured that we were trusted with a moment that became, in ways none of us could have known, irreplaceable.
The Families — All 8,000 of You
Eight thousand shoots means eight thousand families. And when I let that land properly, it is genuinely staggering.
Thousand+ newborns, placed in our hands in their first days of life. First birthdays, siblings, maternity sessions, children who came back at one and two and five and arrived one afternoon with a brand new baby brother or sister in tow. Families who found us in the early years and stayed with us across a decade. Parents who are now showing their teenagers photographs taken when those teenagers were six days old and smaller than a football.
We didn’t just photograph moments. We built the visual memory of an entire generation of families in this city. Somewhere out there, images from this studio will outlive all of us — sitting in albums, appearing on walls, travelling forward through families in ways none of us can predict.
But here is what I don’t say often enough: those 8,000 families gave me something too. Every parent who handed us their newborn with nervous, trusting hands. Every child who laughed at exactly the right moment. Every family that came back year after year, not because they had to, but because they chose to — they shaped me as profoundly as I hope our work shaped their memories. They gave me purpose on the ordinary days, perspective on the difficult ones, and the daily reminder that what we were doing here actually mattered. I received far more than I gave, and I want that said plainly before this chapter closes.
To every family who trusted us — thank you. There were, across fifteen years, a handful of occasions where I could not meet someone’s expectations, and I hold those honestly. But 99.9% of the families who walked through our doors left with something real and lasting. That is the only number that truly matters to me.
You were never just clients. You were the reason the lights came on every morning.
The Team
A studio is not its founder. It is its people.
Everything this studio became — every record, every milestone, every family that left feeling seen — was built by a team I could not be more proud of. Let me say their names properly, because they deserve that.
Priyanshu, Priyansh, Harsh, Madhuri, Deepika, Surbhi, Vikram, Shipra, Ria, Jayati, Nisha, Kanchan, Dolly, Asmita, Karan, Dev, Ruby, Shruti, Abhay, Shweta, Sarita, Dakshita, Priya, Anil, Jasmine, Rahul, Ritu, Puja, Bhawna, Shivam, Shivani, Sarupriya, Samuel, Ashi —
You were collaborators. You were the people who showed up, who held the light, who sat in a room when I said “we’re going to do something we’ve never done before” and responded with curiosity instead of hesitation. We traveled together, challenged each other, and built something that none of us could have built alone.
I built the idea of this studio. You built the studio itself. That distinction matters to me, and I hope it matters to you.
Whatever comes next for each of you — and I have no doubt it will be significant — carry with you the knowledge that you were part of something real. I won’t forget it.
Shipra
Five procedures in eighteen months is a medical experience. But it is also a human one — and no one has carried the human weight of it more than Shipra.
For a wife and mother to watch her husband go into surgery multiple times, to spend days in ICU waiting rooms, to hold herself steady for everyone around her while managing her own fear and exhaustion — that is not a small thing. It asks something of a person that most people are fortunate never to be asked. Shipra gave it, every time, without complaint and without wavering.
She also kept this studio running alongside me through months when I was not at full strength, and did so without ever making me feel the gap. She has been, throughout all of it, exactly who she has always been — composed, capable, and quietly extraordinary.
I owe her time. Proper, unhurried, fully present time. And that is a debt I intend to begin repaying in March 2027.
The Decision
This studio opened in March 2012. March 2027 will be fifteen years. That is when I will draw the curtain — not because anything has gone wrong, but because fifteen years feels like the right and complete shape of this chapter. I would far rather close something intentionally, at its fullest, than let it fade into something lesser.
In the next seven to ten months, the winding down begins.
I want to be honest about what has led me here, because honesty is more useful than sentiment. I am approaching 55. My body has been through five procedures. The physical demands of this work — the hours on your feet, the weight of a camera held for a full shoot, the energy a great session requires — will become increasingly difficult to meet at the standard I hold myself to. And I do not do things at less than that standard. Those who know me know this is simply true.
But there is something equally important: I have achieved everything I set out to do here, and considerably more. I wanted to build something that families in this city would trust with their most precious moments — and for fifteen years, they have. Stopping now is not defeat. It is completion.
At 55, the body asks for a different pace. The mind, however, is as restless and alive as it has ever been — and that is something I am actively and enthusiastically solving for.
What I Would Tell My 2012 Self
Honestly — not much.
I plan carefully. I think clearly. And when I look back across fifteen years of decisions made in this studio, I find very little I would choose to do differently. The challenges were real, but they were the right kind — the kind that stretch you rather than break you. The handful of moments where I fell short of someone’s expectations have stayed with me not as wounds but as honest reminders that excellence is a practice, not a destination.
I would tell my 2012 self: the creative side of you that you’re about to discover is going to surprise you. Let it. Don’t be impatient with the learning curve of going from balance sheets to mood boards — that curve is the best part.
And perhaps: pay a little more attention to the body. It will need you later.
Saahir
In the emergency room on December 11th, 2024, I screamed one name. Over and over, until the room heard it.
Saahir.
A few hours later, after the heart attack, they brought him on a screen from London. He said two words: “Emory University.” I said two words back: “Heart attack.” Four words between a father and son — his best day meeting my worst, held together by something that needed no further explanation.
That boy — who once struggled academically, who found himself at a boarding school in London and came back a young man, who got himself into one of the finest universities in the world through nothing but his own grit — is now studying business. And I will tell you plainly: he is smarter than I am. He challenges my thinking. He wins arguments at the dinner table with a precision and confidence that I find genuinely impressive. He is already making his own decisions and charting his own path with a clarity that took me considerably longer to find.
There is a particular joy that a parent feels when a child stops needing to be guided and starts choosing to include you instead. That is where Saahir and I are now. It is, without question, my favourite place we have ever been.
Closing this chapter means being present for his. Not partly, not between shoots, not tired at the end of a long day — but fully, consistently, in the way that the years ahead deserve. That is not a sacrifice. That is, for me, the whole point.
Two Careers, One Very Full Life
It may not be common, but I have lived two complete professional lives — and I am grateful for both of them in equal measure.
Twenty+ years in financial services. Fifteen years behind a camera. Two entirely different worlds, two entirely different versions of myself, and the great fortune of having been genuinely fulfilled by each. One taught me precision, discipline, and the confidence that comes from operating at the highest levels of a demanding industry. The other taught me creativity, patience, and the particular satisfaction of making something that outlasts the moment it was made in.
Together they have given me more — emotionally, financially, mentally — than I could have designed if I had tried. I have been stretched in directions I didn’t know I could stretch. I have surprised myself, repeatedly, across five decades. Not many people get to say that about one career. I get to say it about two.
As for what comes next — the mind will not sit idle. I manage a stock portfolio of significant size, and that work keeps the analytical engine exactly where it needs to be. There is also a quiet pull toward one more chapter in financial services — one more merger, one more acquisition, one last engagement in the arena I once knew so well. Whether that happens remains to be seen. But the instinct being alive at all feels like a good sign.
The Temple
This studio has been a temple to me. I say that simply and without exaggeration.
I have spent the better part of fifteen years inside these walls. I have created here, argued with myself here, pushed past what I thought I was capable of here. I have watched babies grow in this space. I have watched a team grow into themselves here.
When the last day comes — when I close the door on fifteen years — I don’t expect grief. What I expect, and what I hope for, is the feeling of someone who built something complete. A grateful heart. Folded hands.
That is enough. That is, in fact, everything.
To Anyone Standing At Their Own Crossroads
I am aware that some of you reading this are not here simply because you know me or follow this studio. You are here because something in these words is speaking to something in your own life — a decision you are circling, a chapter you sense is ending, a version of yourself you are trying to make peace with.
I won’t offer advice. I am not qualified to tell anyone how to live, and I wouldn’t presume to try. But I will say this: there is a profound difference between a chapter ending and a story ending. I have never felt more certain of what I want, more clear about who I am, or more genuinely excited about what comes next than I do right now, at 55, closing the most creatively fulfilling chapter of my life.
Completion is not loss. It is, if you let it be, the most dignified thing you can give something you have loved.
March 2027
My father handed me a camera when I was twelve years old. He didn’t know he was starting something. I didn’t know I would spend the next four decades never putting it down.
This studio opened in March 2012. It will close in March 2027. Fifteen years — complete, intentional, something to be deeply proud of.
My parents will be in their mid-eighties. They gave me everything, including, on at least one occasion, my life. They deserve time — unhurried, undivided, the kind you can only give when you are no longer always somewhere else.
Saahir will be twenty and already moving. I intend to move beside him.
And I will be 55 — clear-headed, grateful, and with more road ahead than behind if I take care of the vehicle.
The camera that started all of this belonged to my father. The studio that it built belongs to everyone who walked through its doors. And whatever comes next belongs, finally, to the years I have been saving.
There is no sadness in this. There is no looking back with anything other than pride and gratitude. This is simply a person who has lived one chapter fully and is ready — genuinely, enthusiastically ready — to begin the next one.
The camera is still in my hands. For a little while longer, and entirely on my own terms.
— Amit