Introduction
The day Ritika Wadhwa was born, her grandmother walked into the hospital upset. Her first grandchild was a girl. That single reaction set the tone for a childhood spent inside a patriarchal structure Ritika would spend the next four decades quietly, then loudly, refusing to accept.
By the time she sat down with Sope Agbelusi on Everyday Leadership, Ritika was CEO and founder of Prav Global, a cultural intelligence consultancy she had built in eight months after twenty-five years in corporate roles across India, the UK and Canada. Her story is not a straight line from ambition to success. It is a story about two sudden deaths, a shirt left unworn in a cupboard, and the moment she finally stopped trying to fit in.
The flower that blooms no matter what
Ritika's mother gave her a story about her own name. She told her that Ritika meant a flower that grows high in the Himalayas, in the snow, and blooms regardless of the conditions around it. It was not the literal meaning. Her name actually relates to the coming of spring. But the story her mother invented became the frame Ritika carried through every hard chapter that followed: losing her father, arriving in the UK, standing in a supermarket aisle working out whether she could afford juice or milk, and later losing her mother too. Whatever the facts of etymology, the story her mother told her did the work a true story needed to do.
A father's belief, and the day it ended
Ritika's father wanted her to become an IAS officer, the highest civil service position in India. He told her every day that she was intelligent, capable, and that the world was hers. That belief set an expectation few Indian fathers of his generation placed on daughters. Later, as Ritika grew more aware of the risks women faced navigating daily life in India, she told him she wanted to sit the exams for the Indian Police Service instead, inspired by a senior woman police officer she admired [CHECK: name given in transcript as "Kiran BTY", almost certainly a well-known Indian IPS officer, but the exact name is ASR-garbled and should be verified before publishing].
That plan ended when her father died suddenly in an accident when she was seventeen. The family flew out immediately. When Ritika got home, she opened his cupboard and found a shirt she had bought him with her first pay packet, still hanging there, unworn, saved for a special occasion he never reached. That was the moment she decided life was too short to wait for permission to live it. She has called herself a rebel ever since, on her own terms, not anyone else's label.
What patriarchy looked like up close
After her father's death, the men in the extended family stepped in to decide what was and was not acceptable for Ritika and her siblings. Her mother, widowed at forty-two with three children, took over the family business anyway, against backlash, because she knew no one would provide for her children the way she could. Watching her mother do that alone became one of the clearest leadership lessons Ritika ever received: gender does not have to determine what you are capable of carrying.
When Ritika later landed a job at a top advertising agency in India, her professor brought in a cake to celebrate. Her extended family's reaction was different: they told her she could not go to work, that it would bring shame on the family, and offered to give her money instead. She went to work anyway.
Fitting in, everywhere, for twenty-five years
Ritika's career moved from India to the UK, back to India, on to Canada, and back to the UK again. Every relocation meant proving herself from scratch. Looking back, she describes a through-line she did not see clearly at the time: she was never fully herself in any of those rooms. In an Indian advertising agency, she could not join the late-night bar culture where deals and bonds were made, because it was not safe or acceptable for her to be out at 2am. In UK and Canadian offices, she was the one who did not get the Christmas jokes, did not know the television programmes people grew up with, and was mocked for how she pronounced her own name because Hindi does not distinguish between the sounds of V and W. Head down, work hard, and let the work speak for itself was the strategy she was raised to trust. She has since concluded it does not work. The work does not speak for itself. You have to speak for the work.
The Zoom call that changed everything
The pivot point arrived, unglamorously, on a pandemic-era video call. Managing a toddler, home-schooling an older child, and a chaotic meeting at the same time, Ritika looked at her own tile among the grid of colleagues and had a moment of total clarity: this was not what she wanted for the next twenty years of her working life. She did not yet know what she did want. She hired an executive coach and spent six months working through it, on one condition: the coach had to help her find a passion without asking her to take a step backwards in her career.
That process surfaced diversity, equity and cultural intelligence work as the thing that made her eyes light up, drawing directly on her lived experience as a woman, an immigrant, and part of the global majority. She took a cultural intelligence role during a period, in the wake of George Floyd's murder, when that work suddenly had real organisational urgency. It was the first time in her working life she felt genuinely purpose-driven rather than simply competent.
Networking without the transaction
Purpose changed how Ritika built relationships. She describes her approach to networking as fundamentally non-transactional: she is not looking for an exchange, she is genuinely curious about what someone is trying to achieve and whether she can help. That reframe, she argues, is also the answer for people who find networking uncomfortable or who identify as introverts. The advice is not to force yourself into rooms you hate. It is to get clear on the goal driving you, and let that goal walk into the room instead of your discomfort. Two or three real conversations in a night beats working the whole room if that is what is authentic to you, but you still have to show up somewhere.
Losing her mother, and finally jumping
Three years after the pandemic epiphany, Ritika resigned from her corporate role with no plan, into a three-month notice period, without another job lined up. Friends told her to bet on herself, that the parachute would show up once she jumped. She registered Prav Global, meaning impact in Hindi, and had the company, VAT number and website live within three weeks.
The final push came from a second, devastating loss. Her mother, who had no known health issues, had a heart attack in her sleep and did not wake up. Losing both parents suddenly, twenty-five years apart, hardened the same lesson twice: life is short, and regret is worse than risk. Ritika chose the colour yellow for Prav Global, the colour of turmeric, because turmeric transforms everything it touches.
Building without fear
Asked directly whether any of her fears about the business had materialised, Ritika said none had. Not because the business carried no risk, but because she had stopped needing to mask or fit in, and because she measures the downside honestly: worst case, she loses some money and gets another job, since she knows her own track record. She also credits a feeling of being watched over since her mother's death, a presence she treats as protection rather than superstition. Her ambition from here is explicit: a seven-figure business, a team she is proud of, and enough reach into senior leadership rooms, in the UK and in India, to shift how organisations actually behave, not just what they say.
