Reeti Jana grew up knowing what she would eventually do. Her family had run a nursery business for a century by the time she was old enough to think about a career, and she says she always knew business is where she would end up. What she didn't know yet was whether the years she spent first, in a conventional job, including a stint at Deloitte, would actually be useful once she got there. That question, whether corporate experience really helps you run a business, gives episode 8 of the Deep Down Show its title and its spine.
Her guest credentials are specific: Reeti Jana is the fourth-generation entrepreneur behind Shyamacharan Nursery, now rebranded as Seedheart, a horticulture business based in Baidyabati that traces back to her ancestor Shyama Charan Ghara and was formally started by Amulya Charan Ghara. She now runs it alongside her father, Sidhartha Jana. Host Barun uses her as a case study for a question that recurs across this podcast: what does it actually take to keep a Bengali family business alive for a hundred years, and what changes when the next generation takes it from a courtyard nursery to a name people can look up online.
The conversation ranges wider than business alone, into art, language, caste and the Bhagavad Gita, but it keeps returning to one thread: Reeti Jana's discomfort with measuring her life against other people's yardsticks, whether that's a bigger car, a "better" job, or someone else's idea of success.
From a corporate job to the family nursery
Reeti Jana studied commerce, not entirely by conviction, she admits, but partly because it was where she did well after failing to see the point of the science-versus-arts sorting that Bengali schools push students into. She pushes back on the assumption, common in that system, that only "less intelligent" students end up in commerce while science is reserved for the sharper ones.
She credits her parents for not being the kind of Bengali parents who insist a child become an engineer or doctor. Her own parents, she says, told her to figure out what she wanted and go after it, and she calls herself lucky for that. Along the way she also trained in classical dance and developed an interest in learning languages, alongside a regular corporate job.
That job included time at a firm she names as Deloitte, where she says the concrete skill she picked up was learning how to properly put together and deliver a presentation to a client, something she considers a genuine, transferable takeaway from corporate life. It's this kind of specific skill, rather than the job title itself, that she and Barun use to test the episode's central question: corporate experience gives you tools, she suggests, even if it doesn't teach you how to run a labour-dependent, low-margin business like a plant nursery.
During the COVID lockdown, before she formally stepped into the family business, she also picked up painting, and briefly got interested in NFTs and digital art as that space was heating up, before deciding the direction wasn't for her. She frames art, in general, as something meant to express rather than to impress, a distinction she returns to when the conversation turns to glamour later in the episode.
Four generations of Shyamacharan Nursery
The nursery's own history, as she tells it, goes back to Shyama Charan Ghara, who worked the land and tended plants alongside the gardeners (মালি) employed on other estates; the business that eventually carried his name, Shyamacharan Nursery, was started by Amulya Charan Ghara. Between then and Reeti Jana's generation, the family also ran other businesses, including a sweets trade and a leather trade, both of which eventually shut down.
She describes the nursery going through a real low point, roughly forty years before this conversation, before her father, Sidhartha Jana, took it on with fresh capital and rebuilt it from a struggling state.
Asked what she sees as the single biggest challenge across her three predecessor generations versus her own, she turns the question back toward the present, which is where the conversation's most concrete material lives.
The labour problem in horticulture
Horticulture, Reeti Jana says plainly, is not a high-margin business. The single biggest problem she names for Seedheart today is labour: finding, organising and retaining workers for tasks like digging and planting takes constant effort, and the returns don't leave much room for error.
She has been talking to people in agritech about partial solutions, including mechanising some of the physically hardest work, such as digging soil, so that manual labourers can be freed up for tasks that genuinely need human expertise, like the finishing work around a plant's base. The resistance, she says, doesn't come from cost. It comes from belief: workers and the surrounding community are convinced that soil dug by a machine isn't as good as soil dug by hand, a perception she is still trying to work around rather than override.
She connects this back to a wider pattern she sees in the labour force: many workers, given the choice, would rather leave agricultural work for an ordinary city job with what looks like a more comfortable, "glamorous" lifestyle, even if the actual security or pay isn't necessarily better. That observation becomes the bridge into the episode's most quoted segment.
"Glamour is a scam"
Reeti Jana's central argument, previewed at the top of the episode, is a line she puts simply: "Amar success ta ke ami jei onner parameter a compare korchi, okhanei somossa" — the problem begins the moment I start comparing my own success against someone else's yardstick.
She applies this to consumption as much as to career choices: a car, a house, good food are not inherently "luxuries," she says, they're often genuine needs, but the moment the reason for wanting a better one becomes because someone else has one, that need turns into a trap. Her stated fix is to compete against your own past performance, this month against last month, this year's targets against last year's, rather than against a neighbour or a peer.
She widens this into a broader critique of glamour itself: people confuse how good something looks on social media with how good it actually is to live, and that confusion, more than any material lack, is what drives dissatisfaction, including among the labourers she works with who chase city jobs for the image rather than the substance.
Privilege, dharma and the Bhagavad Gita
Reeti Jana is explicit that she doesn't see her own position as something everyone starts from equally. She calls the century-old business behind her a privilege, one that most people, including many of her own workers, don't have, and says that awareness should translate into concrete support: helping fund or guide people trying to start a new venture or a new labour initiative from nothing.
That leads into a longer, more philosophical stretch of the conversation with Barun about dharma and spirituality, in which she distinguishes spirituality, her own individual path, from religion, the shared framework it often gets folded into. She names the Bhagavad Gita as her biggest self-help book, one she says she had recently finished reading in full. The two also discuss India's caste-based reservation system, with Reeti Jana arguing that eligibility should weigh financial background more heavily alongside caste, since a well-off applicant and a genuinely disadvantaged one from the same reserved category don't need the same support.
Asked what she'd change if she were a politician, she points to accountability, invoking the idea that power should come with responsibility, and says she'd want leaders held to that standard when it comes to discrimination against underprivileged groups.
Does bookish education actually help?
The episode's title question resurfaces late, when Barun asks Reeti Jana directly whether her formal education, and by extension the years she spent studying and working before joining the business, has been practically useful. Her answer is mixed. She's skeptical of an education system that trains students to solve abstract textbook problems, the kind of exercise where you calculate how fast a train is travelling, without teaching skills people actually need, like basic financial literacy.
On that note, she credits YouTube creators for doing better work than schools at teaching people practical financial knowledge, things like how the stock market works, which she says she picked up largely outside any classroom. It's a pointed answer to the episode's premise: not that corporate experience or formal education is useless, but that specific, transferable skills, like giving a good client presentation or understanding your own finances, matter far more than the credential itself.
From Shyamacharan Nursery to Seedheart
By the end of the conversation, Reeti Jana turns to where she's taking the business next. Shyamacharan Nursery has been rebranded as Seedheart, with its own website and social presence, and her stated ambition is to stop thinking of the business as a regional, Bengal-based nursery and start building it as a pan-India brand. She says her broader motivation is simply getting more people interested in growing plants at all, treating that as worthwhile regardless of scale.
Who is Reeti Jana
Reeti Jana is the fourth-generation entrepreneur of Shyamacharan Nursery, a century-old horticulture business in Baidyabati, West Bengal, founded by Amulya Charan Ghara and named after his father, Shyama Charan Ghara. She now runs the business, rebranded as Seedheart, together with her father, Sidhartha Jana. Before joining the family business she held a corporate job, including time at Deloitte, and pursued classical dance, language learning and, during the pandemic, painting.
Why this conversation matters
Most Deep Down Show guests are building something new. Reeti Jana is doing the harder thing in some ways, inheriting something that already has a century of weight behind it, and deciding what of that to keep, what to mechanise, and what to rename. Her account of the nursery's near-collapse and her father's rebuild, roughly forty years before this recording, sits in the same territory as Deep Das's story of starting over in the rags-to-riches episode, and her insistence on measuring herself against her own past rather than her peers echoes the spiritual framing Avelo Roy brings to entrepreneurship in his startup and spirituality conversation.
The specific, useful part of this episode isn't the philosophy, though. It's the reminder that a labour shortage in horticulture isn't solved by hiring harder, it's tangled up with what workers themselves believe counts as a good outcome, whether that's machine-dug soil or a city job with better optics. Reeti Jana doesn't claim to have solved that. She's just decided which problem is actually worth her time.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Reeti Jana?
Reeti Jana is the 4th-generation entrepreneur of Shyamacharan Nursery, a century-old horticulture business now branded as Seedheart, based in Baidyabati, West Bengal. She runs it with her father, Sidhartha Jana, after previously working a corporate job.
What is Shyamacharan Nursery / Seedheart?
It is a century-old family horticulture business founded by Amulya Charan Ghara and named after his father, Shyama Charan Ghara, who worked alongside gardeners tending plants and lawns. It has since been rebranded as Seedheart, and Reeti Jana says her current goal is to grow it into a pan-India brand rather than a regional one.
Did Reeti Jana work a corporate job before joining the family business?
Yes. She describes a period working in a corporate role, including time at Deloitte, where she says she learned how to properly structure and deliver client presentations. She discusses with host Barun whether that corporate experience actually helps in running a business.
What is the biggest challenge facing Shyamacharan Nursery / Seedheart?
Reeti Jana names the labour problem as the biggest challenge: horticulture is a low-margin business and organising manual labour takes constant effort. She has been networking with people in agritech about mechanising some tasks, such as digging, but says workers and the local community resist the idea, believing manually dug soil is better than machine-dug soil.
What does Reeti Jana mean by 'glamour is a scam'?
She argues that people chase a glamorous lifestyle, cars, houses, and food, not out of need but because they are comparing themselves to others on social media. Her stated principle is that comparison should be with your own past self, not with other people, and that the problem starts the moment you measure your own success by someone else's parameters.
What does Reeti Jana say about privilege in business?
She calls having a hundred-year-old family business a privilege that most entrepreneurs and workers do not have, and says she wants to use that privilege to help people who are starting a business or a job from nothing, including through funding or support for new labour and new ventures.
What book does Reeti Jana call her biggest self-help book?
She names the Bhagavad Gita, which she says she had recently finished reading completely at the time of this conversation. She connects it to a broader discussion with Barun about the difference between religion and spirituality, and about the meaning of dharma.
