It started with one pointed question to Nikhil Kamath at a business school event. It ended with Anaheez Patel's name trending across India.
Patel, a 27-year-old NYU Stern MBA student and former Vogue India professional, confronted Zerodha co-founder Nikhil Kamath at Columbia Business School's India Business Conference 2026, asking him why he chose to speak at a business school if he believed MBA programmes lacked value.
Kamath responded with characteristic humour, saying he was there to meet "future wealthy people"- a remark that drew laughter in the room but quickly went viral online.
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The backstory: in November 2025, Kamath had said during a YouTube Ask Me Anything: "In my personal opinion, colleges are dead. If you're 25 and going to an MBA college today, you must be some kind of an idiot." Patel had already pushed back on Instagram then. The Columbia face-off turned what was a social media exchange into a full-blown national conversation.
Now, three days after the clip went viral, Patel has written a detailed LinkedIn post responding to the attention. "72 hours of breaking the internet in India," she began, quoting NDTV Profit's description of the episode as "one of the most talked-about business education debates of 2026, with professionals and students divided over whether experience or formal education matters more in today's economy."
She described coming from a family where education was non-negotiable. "My father, a marine engineer; my mother, a teacher; my sister, a paediatric surgeon." She also wrote about the domestic help at her home whose daughters her parents ensured received an education. "Today, her older daughter holds an MBA from an institute in Mumbai," Patel wrote. "So when I speak about education, it's not abstract. I've seen firsthand what it can do."
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On the question everyone seemed to be asking, where did she get the nerve, Patel was direct. "I have a spine, and I believe in using it. We've normalised a kind of intellectual politeness where we sit around ideas we don't agree with, simply because it's easier. I've never found that particularly useful. Respectful disagreement, when grounded in logic, is how better thinking happens."
She also acknowledged that Kamath, for his part, didn't dodge the moment. In a separate note, she wrote: "Nikhil Kamath is a chill guy who grew on me."
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