It Started With One Silence
It started in schools.
Siddharth was working as a school counsellor when he noticed something that should have troubled everyone. Teachers were expected to hold some of the hardest conversations in a student's life. About exam stress. Identity. Grief. Anxiety. The quiet unravelling that first appears as slipping grades or unusual silence.
Most had no structure, no tools and often no training for any of it. The students who needed the most support tended to get the least, not because anyone had decided that, but because nobody had built anything to make it easier to give.
So he built something. A set of conversation tools for schools, structured enough that a teacher could pick them up with confidence, without needing years of clinical training first. He called it Guftagoo.
It worked in the places it reached. But something else became clear the longer he spent inside schools. The silence he had noticed there was not really about schools at all. It was about what happens whenever one person is responsible for another person's wellbeing without ever being given the words to ask about it properly.
Then he began noticing the same pattern elsewhere.
In homes, where parents and teenagers shared a roof and increasingly little else.
In offices, where managers reviewed performance every quarter but had never once asked a colleague what they actually valued.
At dinner tables that had grown quiet not from anger, but from habit. The kind of talk that keeps a household running, but rarely tells you anything about the person standing in front of you.
The shift that followed was not a change in mission. It was a widening of one. If the tool worked for a teacher trying to reach a student, it could work for a parent trying to reach a teenager. That became Udaan.
What surprised him was that Udaan wasn't teaching parents something new. It was revealing something that had always been true about people. The beliefs had been there all along. The product helped reveal them. There were six. About being seen. About safety before honesty. About attention as the first act of love. Those beliefs became the Book of Beliefs, the foundation everything else here is built on.
Guftagoo still begins in the same place: with the belief that important conversations become possible when someone knows how to begin.
Perhaps you have noticed a silence of your own.
We are not trying to fix every conversation. We are trying to make the important ones a little easier to begin.
Siddharth Varma is a clinical psychologist and educator who has spent his career helping teachers, students and families have conversations they often don't know how to begin.
Across schools in India, he worked with students, teachers and families before building the conversation tools that became Udaan and Guftagoo Works, with more still taking shape.
SidLabs is the studio he founded so these conversations can happen even when he isn't in the room.