– COVER STORY · S3E149

Radhika Duggal has walked away from corporate comfort, built a brand with her bare hands, and met a dog who once mauled her with nothing but forgiveness in her eyes. This is the story of a woman who keeps choosing to begin.

By Sangeeta Relan May 2026 The AboutHer Show

There is a particular kind of woman who does not wait for permission. She does not wait for the stars to align, for her children to grow up, for the fear to pass. She simply decides. And then she begins. Radhika Duggal is that woman, though she would probably laugh if you said it to her face. She would tell you she was just adapting. She would tell you she was just doing what felt right.

But look at the full arc of her life and the pattern is unmistakable. From a boarding school in Ajmer at twelve, to the sales floor of the Taj and the Hyatt in Delhi, to the corridors of a Dubai hotel where she walked into a general manager’s office and essentially said, “Let me run this.” From a decade at Kankei to the quiet, deliberate step away from the corporate world in 2015. And then Sattika, her saree brand, born not in a boardroom but at an exhibition stall at the Taj Man Singh, because a weaver watched her sell his neighbor’s jutis with such ease and grace that he walked over with a question she never expected.

She has been a hospitality professional, a sales leader, a Dubai expat, a consultant, a solopreneur, a mother who planned her son’s entire wedding on Canva. She has also survived being mauled by a pet husky and, in one of the most striking acts of emotional courage I have heard in years of doing this show, walked back to meet him.

When we sat down together for The AboutHer Show, I had known Radhika for years. I had always known her as dynamic, as someone who moved through life with an unusual kind of self-possession. But the details of her journey, which she shared with remarkable candor, reminded me of something I believe deeply: that the most extraordinary lives are often the ones lived quietly on their own terms.

The foundation of who Radhika is was laid early, and it was laid largely by her father. A chief engineer in the merchant navy, he had traveled the world from a village in Rohtak, and he carried that openness into the way he raised his daughter. He did not tell her what was right or wrong. He told her to speak for herself and stand by what she believed.

She tested that lesson almost immediately. When her father hoped she would become a doctor, she sat the premedical exam and did not clear it. He asked her to try again. She sat him down instead. “Papa,” she told him, “you always told me to stand for what I believe in. And today I am telling you: I am not meant to be a doctor.” Her father, to his credit, listened. He let her go.

“He never told me what was right or wrong. He always said: believe in what you are doing. Speak for yourself. Stand by it. That stayed with me at every single stage.”

RADHIKA DUGGAL

What followed was not medicine but mass communication, studied at the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, then one of the most prestigious institutes in the country. And it was during her internship there, spent in the public relations department of the Taj Hotels, that she discovered what she actually wanted. Not journalism. Hotels. The energy of those spaces, the diversity of people, the art of making someone feel truly welcome. She was nineteen. She already knew.

Her first role in hospitality was not glamorous. She stood at the reception desk of the Oberoi Hotels, handing over room keys, fresh from one of India’s most respected communication institutes. She was not resentful about it. She was paying attention.

That desk, she understood, was the first point of contact. It was where the tone of a guest’s entire experience was set. And that understanding of tone, of what it means to make a person feel seen and safe the moment they walk through a door, became the thread that ran through everything she built in sales and marketing. She was not, she would tell me later, selling a product. She was selling a service, an experience, comfort, trust, value.

“It’s all about creating value and trust. Being able to hear what people want. Sometimes even understanding what they want before they speak.”

She moved through the Hyatt, building relationships, reading rooms, learning the particular intelligence of hospitality. By the time her husband’s career took them to Dubai, she had already built something real.

They moved to Dubai when their older son Rishab was barely two. It was exciting and disorienting in equal measure. A new country, a new culture, a child who needed her, a career she was not willing to abandon. Within three months, she was back at work at the Hyatt Dubai. The general manager there had worked with her in Delhi and knew exactly what she was capable of.

She went further than she had before. She noticed that the hotel had been outsourcing the management of its dining membership program, the Club at the Hyatt, to an Australian company called Hotel Dynamics. She watched the program. She watched what they were doing. And one day she walked into the general manager’s office and made him an offer: let me run this in-house. He hesitated. She persisted. He trusted her.

Within the year, she was managing a team of fifty women, running the entire program, and delivering a level of profitability the hotel had never seen from it, because it was no longer paying substantial international fees to an outside company. She describes that period with barely concealed delight, even now. A team of fifty women, diverse in culture and background, moving together toward a shared goal.

“The more you adapt to change and learn to take it in your stride, the more it helps you on a daily basis. Change is the only constant. I decided I was not going to let myself get bogged down.”

RADHIKA DUGGAL

When Radhika reflects on the kind of leader she was in those early years, she is honest about it in a way that takes courage. She was result-driven. Focused on outcomes. Structured to the point that people used to say of her, with a certain wry affection: it’s her way or the highway.

She does not wince at the memory. She understands it. She was proving something, both to herself and to the management that had taken a chance on her. But she also recognized, over time, that leadership is not a destination you arrive at with the right numbers. It is a relationship you build on the way there.

The shift, she says, came when she stopped measuring the journey by the end result and started understanding that the people around her were the journey. That empowering them, giving them space to make decisions, allowing the team to be a pool of contributions rather than a set of instruments, was what made any of it worth doing.

And it was not only work that taught her this. Her sons taught her too. There was a time, she says with a warmth that fills the room, when you could tell a young child to do something and there was no argument. And then they grew. And they had opinions. And they looked back at you and said, “No, Mom, that is not happening.” The only way forward was to evolve with them, as it is the only way forward in any relationship worth keeping.

Her second son Raghav arrived in 2000, and Radhika did what thoughtful people do at turning points: she paused and reflected. Hospitality was demanding of time in ways that a young mother with an infant and a six-year-old needed to reckon with. She made a considered choice and joined Kankei, a direct marketing company working in brand alliances and partnerships, in what was meant to be a part-time arrangement.

Of course it did not stay part-time for long. Within six months she was a full-time employee, heading a division called Brand Barters, building alliances with credit card companies and banks, leading a new team in a city away from the company’s Bombay headquarters. The work was different from anything she had done before. She adapted to it quickly, as she tends to do, because curiosity has always been one of her great strengths. She wanted to learn. She was always game to explore.

The year she stepped away from corporate life and went independent is often framed, by those telling her story, as a leap. She prefers a different word: wiser. Because for Radhika, reinvention was never about doing something completely new. It was about taking what she already knew and doing it better, with more intention, with more freedom, and with the clarity that comes only from decades of paying attention.

She set up a consultancy. She took clients she had already built trust with at Kankei. She was choosy, deliberately so. She could not put her fingers in every pie, and she knew it. She chose instead to do fewer things exceptionally well. The years between 2015 and 2018, she says, were some of the most satisfying of her professional life. She was growing. She was in balance. She was entirely her own.

“Reinvention, to me, is not starting something new. It is starting something wiser. Taking your own personal journey and doing it better than you did before.”

She has loved sarees since she was nineteen, since the day a training manager at the Oberoi told her she had to pin her pallu and she calmly negotiated her way out of it by promising it would not fall. She grew up picking sarees from her grandmother’s cupboard, from her aunt’s, finding in the drape of a good fabric something she can only describe as poetry. The flow of the pallu. The caress of the fabric. The pleat. For her, it was always like that.

But the story of how Sattika was born is not a story she planned. It happened at an exhibition at the Taj Man Singh in 2018, where she had gone to help a friend sell jutis. She wore a saree that day, because of course she did. She spent hours picking up jutis, putting them down, laughing with customers, selling with the ease of someone for whom selling is simply honest conversation. And in the stall right beside them was a man selling tussars. Beautiful tussars that no one was stopping to look at.

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He watched her all day. As they were packing up, he came over. His English was limited. But his question was simple: will you sell sarees with me?

The next morning, he arrived at her door with a hundred sarees.

“I draped that first tussar and it was just such a comfortable drape. The pleats, the colour, the sheen, the fabric. I thought: this has to go to as many people as possible.”

RADHIKA DUGGAL ON THE BIRTH OF SATTIKA

Sattika was born from that meeting. A brand that is, at its heart, a love letter to handwoven fabric and the women who wear it. Radhika sources every saree. She models them. She shoots them, often with the help of her domestic help Meena Didi, who has quietly become indispensable to the whole operation, mixing videos and learning exhibition display and building her own small confidence along the way. Radhika speaks about Meena with the same warmth she reserves for her closest people. That is not incidental. That is exactly who she is.

In the summer of last year, Radhika was mauled by a pet husky named Frosty while walking in her condominium. It was serious. The kind of experience that leaves marks that are not only physical. When she speaks of it now, her palms still get a little damp at the memory. It was very hard, she says simply. Very, very hard.

What she chose to do next is the part that has stayed with me since she told it.

When she recovered and returned to her morning walks, she made a conscious decision. She would go back and encounter Frosty again. Not because she was fearless. But because she understood, deeply and practically, that the only way out of the fear was through it. And the only way through it was forgiveness.

She thought about what had triggered him. The neon shirt she was wearing. The animated way she was talking, arms moving, completely unaware of him. She thought: he is an animal. He acted on instinct. Something in that moment told him he needed to protect himself, and he did not know any other way.

“If I have to come out of it and regain my own calm, I need to forgive. I need to forgive the situation, the fear I was carrying, and the act that happened. Forgiveness is really the key. There is no other way.”

RADHIKA DUGGAL

Eight months on, every time she walks past and Frosty sees her from a distance, he goes down on all fours and just stares at her. The people around her tell her to look away. She does not. She turns toward him and says quietly, “You’re a good boy.” She does not go near him. But she does not look away either. There is something in that refusal to look away that tells you everything you need to know about Radhika Duggal.

I asked her, near the end of our conversation, what she would say to women who believe they have missed their moment. Who feel that too much time has passed, that the window has closed, that the world has moved on without them.

She did not pause.

“It is never too late,” she said. “Never. Every experience, every setback, every small achievement over the years, all of it helps you do what your heart truly seeks. It is all in the mind. The world is changing. People are doing all kinds of things. Do not stop yourself. Try it out. The worst that can happen is that it does not work. At least you gave yourself a chance.”

She said it with the particular conviction of someone who has tested the principle and found it to be true. Not as a motivational slogan. As a fact about her own life.

A woman who learned to stand up for herself in her father’s living room in Rohtak. Who talked her way into a general manager’s office in Dubai and walked out running a team of fifty. Who met a stranger at an exhibition and built a brand from the fabric he brought to her door. Who was bitten and afraid and chose, anyway, to go back.

It is never too late. She would know.

01

Self-belief is learned, not inherited
A father who said “stand by what you believe” gave her the single most useful tool she ever had.

02

Adaptability is a skill, not a personality trait
Radhika chose, at every turn, to see change as something to move with rather than resist.

03

Leadership is the journey, not the destination
The shift from “my way or the highway” to genuine empowerment took years and real self-awareness.

04

Reinvention is not abandonment
Going independent in 2015 was not a departure from her career. It was the fullest expression of it.

05

Forgiveness is a practical act
Going back to meet Frosty was not sentimental. It was the only way she knew to reclaim her own calm.

06

It is never too late
This is not inspiration. For Radhika, it is a personal, tested, lived truth.

Listen to the full conversation with Radhika Duggal on The AboutHer Show, Season 3 Episode 149. Available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and Audible. Follow Sattika on Instagram for Radhika’s handwoven saree collection.