Susan Josi - The Insatiable Pursuit of Possibilities: For there's always more life to be lived
Human beings are amazing. The more I meet and write about different people, the more convinced I become of this one truth: when someone focuses on something they truly love, their learning and growth enrich the lives of the people around them too.
This is my first article for The Flower Age.
The idea for this site was born during a 10-day workshop where I was talking about my writing. The expert in the room, Brigitte André, www.brigitteandre.com life coach and mentor, believed in my ideas. She gave me the confidence to think about expanding my existing site, called A Mixed Bag of Thoughts, which can be found at https://lekhawrites.blogspot.com/, covering a variety of subjects.
If you would rather listen to this story, here's the audio link. Please consider following my podcast. Brigitte also nudged me towards creating a niche I would genuinely enjoy exploring. I didn't have to think for too long. I love writing about women, and many of my articles have been based on the stories of women in my life or women I have already featured.
One of my most popular posts so far has been about Uma Ramakrishnan, a runner and artist who started running at around 60, after she retired.
Retirement = Reset, Reinvent, Rebirth
That story made me wonder: what if my new blog could become a space for women whose lives continue to unfold long after the conventional milestones have been crossed?
And so, The Flower Age was born.
I chose the 40-and-beyond category because I'm in that age bracket myself, and I feel I can relate to the women I want to feature here. These are women who have already lived a substantial part of their lives, but whose stories are nowhere near finished.
So, it is with immense pleasure that I introduce Susan Josi, a woman who discovered running as she was approaching retirement and then proceeded to discover much more of herself in the years to come.
Susan is a concentrated pack of energy, intelligence, vision, camaraderie, organisational skills and what I can only describe as mama-wolf energy. She has a thirst for conquering the unknown. Give her a new skill to add to her kitty and she will do everything needed to acquire it, with a combination of bravado, discipline and brilliance.
As a young woman, Susan was the younger of two sisters who grew up with middle-class parents in Bombay. Her father was a government employee at BEST and her mother was a teacher. She knew her father's motto well: I can give you this much opportunity to study and make a life for yourself. She for one was not going to waste it.
Susan dreamt of becoming a doctor. However, her score fell just short of what was required to study medicine in Bombay. Her conservative Christian parents wouldn't allow her to travel and live outside the city. So, Susan chose the next career that appealed to her: pharmacy.
She got into a select class of just 15 students at what was then known as UDCT (University Department of Chemical Technology) in the Pharmacy department. There, she was part of a gang of 12 girls who dominated the three boys in the class. The formation of this rogue female team, whom they eventually called the “Dirty Dozen,” probably laid the foundation for Susan's ability to lead, work with a team and thrive in the company of women.
After learning pharmacy, the conventional paths are usually R&D or Quality Control. Before Susan had to decide which direction she would take, she landed a three-month position as a Sales Officer in a company. The senior she worked with turned out to be someone from whom Susan would learn a great deal. She soon began to understand how a business was actually run. Meanwhile, her results were announced and Susan stood second in the college.
Her entry into the Master's programme at the same college was not only guaranteed, but she also won a scholarship. Susan began her thesis and research. While finishing her Master's, she got a job as a Production Assistant and quickly moved into R&D at another company.
Then came another opportunity. Susan was selected for a six-week UNIDO scholarship to learn about Pharmaceutical Technology at University of Ghent, Belgium. During those six weeks, she met students from 22 countries and began to understand how differently people could think and live when they came from different parts of the world. These first moments of exposure to the wider world were precious for young Susan. She says they helped open her mind.
Just as much as Susan seemed to be learning from others, the university in Belgium also noticed the bright young woman and her potential. The six weeks turned into six months. Along with the work, Susan experienced her first European winter. She was even offered the opportunity to do a PhD at the university and stay on. Susan, however, was homesick and refused. Her company back home also wanted her to return.
When she returned to work, she enrolled for a management course at NMIMS and, around the same time, got married to Josi in an arranged marriage. Being a curious person who wanted to learn and experience things, Susan did everything in her capacity to understand her in-laws and integrate into the family as well as she could. The result was a relationship with her husband's family that became as comfortable and close as the one she had with her own. This was important because Susan had already decided that she didn't want to continue in her research-related job. It wasn't the long-term career that she wanted. She was much more attracted to marketing.
Having a large network of contacts, Susan sought advice from people who knew the industry and understood her circumstances. One of them told her he was willing to give her a chance in marketing, but there would be a salary cut and she would have to travel all over India. A tough choice for someone who had just had her first baby. But her family stepped in to support her, and she spent the next three or four years working first as a Product Manager and then as a Marketing Manager. Then came her second child. This made things more challenging, but luckily Susan had a full-time maid who was a real blessing.
Over the years, Susan realised that the Indian pharmaceutical industry had an unmet need. She was working in marketing but realised that she was handling much of what ideally an agency should have been doing. She was busy creating material for pharmaceutical products to be presented to doctors, working with graphic designers and doing the research herself. She began investigating the space and realised that there wasn't a single advertising agency dedicated specifically to healthcare.
One of her contacts Nitin Dixit, with whom she travelled on her work-home route, had a design agency. As they began discussing Susan’s point of view, those conversations eventually led to the birth of a new organisation and partnership. Together, they would go on to create a marketing agency specialising in healthcare, with Susan taking charge of the healthcare side while her partner focused on other aspects.
She was something of a pioneer in the space, combining her pharmaceutical and marketing backgrounds. Clients and brands came relatively easily, and the first year itself proved that the venture had real potential. Susan and her partner worked together for four years. Eventually, however, their long-term visions began pulling them in different directions and Susan decided to leave.
She then entered into a partnership with Sangeeta Barde , a woman whom destiny and luck brought into her life at that juncture, and together they founded an agency focused completely on healthcare called Sorento which had an interesting tag line - Science of Seduction. Very soon, the agency began attracting attention. Then came a joint venture with Ogilvy & Mather, which Susan once again seized as an opportunity to learn. She absorbed everything she could: how they handled clients, how they understood business, how they anticipated what clients needed. She sharpened her strategic skills, and the company grew from its beginnings in 2004 to a team of around 85 employees by 2017. During this period, several large companies wanted to acquire what Susan and Sangeeta had built. Susan calls themselves “runaway brides” because they kept getting away from potential suitors. They weren't ready to give up what they had built. Not yet.
Finally, in 2017, the company was acquired by Havas , a French MNC which housed the world’s largest healthcare agency (Havas Health & You) and Susan worked with the acquiring organisation for another five years as part of the deal. She became head of the South East Asia & Middle East region until the end of her illustrious corporate career.
And that is where Susan's Flower Age really begins.
Susan had already been blooming professionally. She had taken dreams, ideas and possibilities and repeatedly turned them into action. But the end of her professional path gave her an entirely different canvas. She approached this new phase of life with the same attitude that had shaped her career: What don't I know yet? What can I learn? What can I experience? For a woman who was always curious, there was so much to discover. She wanted to know more, try different things and allow change into her life.
When I speak to Susan, one thing is immediately obvious: her life is full of people. She has always built her path alongside others, giving as much as she can to every relationship that matters to her in any way. So perhaps it was never very likely that retirement would be boring.
It was then that a good friend Pushpa, an ultrarunner, suggested that she start running. Susan had always dismissed the idea, like most of us do, saying that she didn't have the time. She even told Pushpa that since she worked from home, running was easy for her friend, not for her. All the classic excuses. Except Pushpa landed up one morning at Susan's home with a trainer. So now Susan had no choice. And since Susan didn't want to run alone, Josi had no choice either.
They started training with Shayne D'Costa, and slowly Susan began paving her way towards a new passion. In the beginning, she remembers falling several times during her runs. But the presence of a trainer every day got her out there, giving it her best. Within six or seven months, she had run her first 5K. In 2018, she ran a local 10K race and then went on to run the 21K at TMM, the Tata Mumbai Marathon, in 2019. She has just completed the Satara Half Marathon, making it her fourth consecutive participation in the race.
Susan likes running hill marathon as it's less crowded. I can tell you personally that it's much harder though. That explains the crowd thinning out :)
Today, Shayne and the people in their building still train together three days a week. Around 10 to 12 people show up for these group runs on any given day. Susan runs because she loves the idea of being able to discover any place with nothing more than a good pair of shoes. She loves being outdoors and, when she visits her daughter in Boston, being fit enough to discover all the lovely places on her two feet. She runs 8 km every alternate day, with a long run of 10 to 15 km on Sundays.
And then running opened another door. Susan became confident and fit enough to fall in love with trekking. Because trekking requires strong legs, she began strength training on the other three days of the week. She started going to ‘Twalkars – Fit Life’ and training there with Satyen. She soon realised that strength training was an important part of overall fitness.
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| Centre manager of Twalkars - Deepak & trainer Satyen Shirke (in black) |
Then came another idea: a family trek along with a friend Satish. They organised everything. Susan convinced her family, planned the logistics, encouraged everyone to train and worked around everyone's schedules, even though her daughter lived overseas. In 2025, Susan, Josi and their children completed the 5,800-metre ascent of Kilimanjaro, with the final 11 km taking place in temperatures of around -21°C.
One would think that was enough. After all, we all hear people say, “I've worked so hard my whole life. Now I just want to relax,” haven't we? I have now vowed never to say those words. Because Susan’s secret is that she doesn't work at all! Rather, what she does never feels like ‘work’. She plays with each new hobby until it becomes an all-encompassing part of her life. Then it becomes a passion. And her enthusiasm is infectious enough to pull the people around her into it too.
Which is how Susan discovered scuba diving. In February 2023, she decided to train in the sport. There is an online theoretical component followed by a pool session. Of the small group of six candidates, only four completed it, and Susan was the oldest. She then travelled to the Maldives for her certification. This part of the story fascinated me because it shows how often the biggest barriers are the ones we create in our own minds.
Susan was underwater at a depth of 18 metres and kept bouncing up and down. The objective was to stay low and learn to control her buoyancy and centre herself. That way, there is no unnecessary expenditure of energy and therefore less chance of panicking. When she returned to her hotel, she found a note from her trainer. He asked her to look back at her notes and work on her breath control because the actual certification test was the next day. Susan sat down for the entire evening. She concentrated on her notes, her memory of the training and her breathing exercises. The next day, she excelled in the test and earned her PADI certification.
Since then, she has dived in the Maldives, Bali, Thailand, Malaysia and India, including Vengurla on the Konkan coast. She has completed a total of 53 dives and has also obtained her 30-metre Advanced Dive certification in Malaysia recently. She has dived on shipwrecks and among coral reefs. Next month, she will travel to Australia to dive at the Great Barrier Reef. So much done in so little time!
Remember how we all say we don't have time? Maybe it isn't always that we don't have time. Maybe we just don't prioritise the things that make us feel alive. Susan does!
Susan believes that we should all be able to get back up when we fall and learn not to become overly concerned with every mishap in life. She believes a certain level of detachment helps us live a fuller life, unburdened by the past and the endless what ifs.
She says that perhaps running her own venture helped her develop those skills. When you are responsible for a sizeable number of people, you can't break down every time something goes wrong. Problems will come. Dwelling on them is a choice.
Today, Susan is busy dreaming about improving her swimming skills. She has also started working with a global philanthropic organisation called SVP (Social venture partners). SVP mentors small scale NGO founders to create a sustainable social purpose organisation. And perhaps that is what I find most inspiring about her. She hasn't retired from life. She has simply retired from one version of it.
And that, to me, is the essence of The Flower Age.
The years after 40, 50, 60 or beyond don't have to be about slowing down unless that is what we genuinely want. They can also be about discovering what we didn't have the time, courage or opportunity to discover earlier.
Susan is a wonderful example of that. She is still learning. Still finding new things to love. Still exploring. Still gathering people around her and giving the people who find their way into her life, her all. I think there is something all of us can learn from that.
Susan's Insta handle is https://www.instagram.com/susanjosi/
You can hear me read the article out loud by clicking directly on the link here https://open.spotify.com/episode/7c3S6iaA4Kwa73VfIjLkjb?si=Gi6WU50TT1iHrM5pUEOhsQ or on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music Podcasts on the channel 'Movement - Lekha Warrior Writes'.
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