About Me - Kalpesh Desai

I am an entrepreneur, board member, and writer.

I have built and exited two technology companies. Today, I’m the founder and CEO of Agile Financial Technologies, a software product company serving insurance and investment management firms across thirty-five countries. Alongside my executive role, I sit on the boards of companies in retail, manufacturing, supply chain, and investment platforms. My work there is practical: governance, growth, and the hard decisions that come with scale.

Most people call me KPD. Some call me Kal.

I write poetry because it is where I can think without having to arrive anywhere. It is where leadership, work, failure, and love stop being ideas and start becoming experiences again. Things I cannot resolve in meetings or strategy decks find their way onto the page.

I write about relationships as they are lived, not as they are explained. About marriage, family, loyalty, resentment, care, and the small negotiations that happen every day between people who choose to stay. I write about work from the inside of it—pressure, responsibility, ownership, and the cost of decisions that do not come with clean endings.

Some of my books are quiet. Some are direct. Some are uncomfortable. What connects them is simple. I am trying to understand what it means to take responsibility for your life without hardening yourself in the process.

I share parts of this work on Instagram (@kalpeshdesai.official), including spoken-word pieces and fragments from my books in progress.

My first book, Jasmines in Her Hair, is about love, healing, and learning how to stay. More recently, I published What the Train Left Behind, a short literary work on migration and memory. It was listed as a hot new release in Amazon’s literary fiction category.

I’m currently working on two books.

Anywhere but Here traces my entrepreneurial life through lived-in moments rather than milestones.
Not on My Watch looks at leadership and ownership from inside the work, not from theory.

If you would like to connect professionally, I am on LinkedIn.

If you are interested in my spoken-word poetry, you’ll find that on Instagram.

Title: Jasmines in Her Hair

Subtitle: Poetry for the Soul

Summary: Jasmines in Her Hair is a collection of romantic poems that delve into the distinctions that have come through life’s journey, covering love, loss, pain, reconciliation, and finding love again. If everything exists inside of language, then it is the love of language that makes loving that much more exciting. And what better way to explore the profound themes of love, heartbreak, loss, trauma, healing, letting go, self-love, acceptance, personal transformation, growth, clarity, inner peace, and self-esteem than through the medium of poetry? This book will demonstrate that every relationship can be treasured and that there is as much relief in releasing ourselves from our past as there is in finding someone who gives our ability to love a new lease of life. By providing valuable insights into the personal growth process, this inspiring book encourages readers to reflect on a compelling message: you give the greatest gift to your precious self when you start mending your heart’s wounds. Beautifully written, Jasmines in Her Hair is a journey from the first throes of passion to when one finds their way to the soulmate they have been waiting for their entire life.

Jasmines in Her Hair

Title: What the Train Left Behind

Subtitle: Information not available

Summary: What the Train Left Behind is a literary short story collection set in the long aftermath of the Partition of India and Pakistan. Rather than returning to the moment of rupture, this book listens to what followed: how ordinary people adjusted to borders drawn after lives had already begun. Across spare, interconnected stories, Kalpesh Desai traces how a single people, divided by lines, continued to live familiar lives, eating the same food, speaking the same language, while slowly drifting apart. Set in everyday spaces such as homes, offices, ration queues, and courtyards, these stories follow the quiet decisions that shape destinies. A clerk delays a record. A mother teaches a safer sentence. A letter returns unopened. A song is lowered before the verse ends. What changes here is not loud or sudden, but persistent, settling into habit, language, and inheritance. Written with restraint and moral clarity, What the Train Left Behind offers a deeply human portrait of Partition's legacy across generations. This book will resonate with readers of literary fiction, diaspora communities, and anyone interested in how historical events continue to shape private lives. It is especially suited for book clubs, intergenerational conversations, and readers drawn to quiet, morally attentive storytelling. This is not a book about borders being drawn. It is about how they learned where to live.