Everything Is Relational | Kanwal Matharu

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Kanwal Matharu is a cornea surgeon, Fulbright scholar, and global health educator who has spent his career building pipelines between American academic medicine and under-resourced communities around the world. He's also my friend—we met when he was a freshman at Princeton and I was working in residential life, and I've watched him navigate the distance between idealism and institutions ever since.

In this conversation, we talk about what it means to align your career with your faith, what he learned about strategy and relationships as a young trustee on Princeton's board, and why he's come to believe that "soft relations carry so much more weight" than procedural wins. We also talk about the costs of the path he's chosen—the isolation that comes with subspecialty training, a called-off engagement, and sitting cross-legged in borrowed slippers on his last day in Egypt, practicing patience after everything went sideways.

This is a conversation about service, sacrifice, and what it means to keep going when the story isn't as clean as you thought it would be.

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