Gayathri Nayagam has a master's in international business. And at a point in her life, she wanted to work at Jebel Ali's Free Trade Zone. She fell in love, got married and moved to the small temple town of Thenkasi in South India, where her husband's family had a decades-old business.

Gayathri has a practical streak and a work ethic that helped her get through some of the most difficult stretches in her life. In a free-wheeling conversation, she talks of how a South Indian girl who didn't know a word of Hindi survived in Muzaffarnagar., where even the medium of instruction in the school was in Hindi

And how she bought a woman's touch to a business that had been run by men for generations.

Discover how she embraced her uniqueness and escaped the expectations of others.  ...