On Co-Writing: What Manzile – Ek Khwahish Taught Me About Collaboration

Co-authoring a poetry collection is a different kind of vulnerable than co-leading a technology program. In a business partnership, you can retreat to your lane — I own the architecture, you own the commercial terms — and still call it collaboration. Poetry doesn't allow that kind of division. Every line in Manzile – Ek Khwahish had to survive being read by another writer who had just as much right to change it as I did. That's a much smaller place to hide than a boardroom.

The first thing to unlearn: ownership

Years of enterprise work condition you to think in terms of ownership — this deliverable is mine, that decision is yours, here's the RACI chart so nobody is confused about who's accountable. Co-writing poetry breaks that instinct almost immediately. A verse that started as mine would come back changed in ways I hadn't anticipated, and the honest, uncomfortable truth was that it was usually better for the change. The title itself — Manzile, meaning destinations, and Khwahish, meaning a wish or a longing — captured something neither of us would have landed on writing alone. Real collaboration isn't two people executing the same vision in parallel. It's two people arriving somewhere neither of them had fully pictured before they started.

The best line in the collection is rarely "mine" or "theirs" anymore. It's the version that survived both of us caring about it.

Where the partnership-building instinct actually helped

If there's one professional skill that did transfer cleanly, it's this: knowing how to disagree with someone whose judgment you respect, without either person walking away from the table. Years spent building joint go-to-market programs and cross-border partnerships taught me that the disagreements worth having are about the work, never about the person — and that discipline mattered just as much line-editing a verse in Hindi as it did structuring a partnership agreement. The difference is that in poetry, there's no contract to fall back on when you disagree. There's only whether the two of you still trust each other's ear.

What I'd tell anyone about to co-write something they care about

Be willing to lose arguments you were technically right about, if the version you're outvoted on serves the piece better. Say the uncomfortable thing early — "I don't think this stanza is working" — rather than letting it calcify into resentment. And accept that the final work will belong to neither of you individually, which is uncomfortable if you're used to keeping score, and is exactly the point if you're trying to make something neither of you could have made alone.

Manzile – Ek Khwahish taught me that collaboration, done honestly, costs you a version of control you didn't realize you were holding onto. What it gives back — a work genuinely shaped by two people instead of one, and a trust that survived the editing process — is worth far more than the version of the poem I would have written by myself.