The Duo

One complete approach to life.

“Vinod provides the momentum. Vamshi provides the direction. The road provides the education.”

The Lab is not taught by consultants who read about partnership. It is taught by a partnership — one that has been arguing productively for over two decades and has the motorcycles, the spreadsheets, and the one washed-out road in Bhutan to prove it. Between them, they are approximately one whole-brained decision-maker. The trick, which is the whole point, is that they remained two. They met, fittingly, at 108.

The Mover · Right brain

Vinod Achanta

A man of considerable energy, considerable confidence, and a relationship with departure times that is, at best, philosophical. He has started companies, convinced people of things they had not previously believed, and once installed a three-digit reflex — 108 — in the chest of a city with no budget and a great deal of persistence.

Twenty-two years across enterprise IT, AI, real estate and healthcare — “idea to sale.” Retail innovation for Nestlé, Samsung and Nokia; CMO at exit of Apollo Homecare; ₹340-crore sales books across PBEL and Vertex; founder of DIAS Works, Nubes Opus and AInfra. He navigates by the reasonable certainty that roads connect to other roads.

EMRI 108 · MarketingApollo Homecare · CMOVenture builder

vinodachanta.com →

The Measurer · Left brain

Vamshi Bathini

A man who packed three days before a fifteen-day ride and who carries a physical map not because he mistrusts technology but because he has correctly identified that technology does not operate at Baralacha La. He has a 90-day plan in his head at all times. The plan has a contingency column. The contingency column has been used.

Chief Architect & Head of Technology at CallHealth, with over twenty years in process quality, consulting and transformation. An ASQ Six Sigma Black Belt and ICMG Top Global Chief Architect, he was National Head of Quality at EMRI — the one who could tell you, six months later, that the city had started dialling 108. Without his measurement, the mover's enthusiasm is anecdote.

EMRI 108 · Head of QualitySix Sigma Black BeltICMG Chief Architect

Twenty years, several states

The partnership that became a book.

It began in 2008 with an ambulance and a number nobody knew to call. It continued onto motorcycles — Ooty, Bhutan, Leh, Shillong — and a great many places between and beside that the plan had not originally specified. They have fixed engines with cigarette foils, navigated by a moped's tail light, ridden 200 km at 40 km/h on a broken floating bush, and stood at the highest motorable road in the world while one of them experienced what the medical community calls acute mountain sickness and the other called a “temporary recalibration.”

The plan has survived contact with the momentum for over two decades — which is either a testament to the plan's quality or evidence that some plans are simply stronger than the forces acting upon them.