In a city that never stops moving, Monika Sachin Awate built something that asks people to slow down, sit at a table, and taste home.
There is a particular kind of Mumbai grit that cannot be taught in a classroom — the kind that comes from growing up in the lanes of Byculla, commuting for a Commerce degree at one of the city’s most storied institutions, and clocking work hours long before anyone owes you a paycheck. Monika Sachin Awate has that grit. It shows in the way she talks about her cafe, Rajdarbar Misal — not as a business plan executed on schedule, but as a decade-long apprenticeship in patience, numbers, and people, finally arriving at its rightful destination.
An Education in Two Parts
Monika’s schooling took her through Sir Elly Kadoorie School and Junior College in Byculla, a neighbourhood that has quietly produced generations of Mumbai’s working professionals without ever asking for the spotlight. From there, she went on to Sydenham College of Commerce & Economics — widely regarded as among the city’s finest addresses for a Commerce education — to pursue her graduation degree.
But Monika’s real education ran on two tracks at once. While lecture halls taught her the theory of business, three years spent working as an accountant at a domestic office taught her its practice — how to reconcile a ledger, manage expectations, and, perhaps most importantly, stand on her own financially while still a student. It is a detail she doesn’t dramatize, but it is the hinge on which the rest of her story turns: self-reliance, chosen early and kept close.
The Ledger Years
Graduation didn’t slow her down — it launched her, straight into the commercial heart of Fort, Mumbai, as an Accounts Assistant with a shipping company. It was a modest starting point by design, not by accident. For nearly two years, Monika sat with balance sheets and reconciliations, learning the unglamorous grammar of business — the kind no MBA can substitute for.
Ambition, in Monika’s telling, has always looked like movement. She soon moved to another shipping company, this time taking on Accounts Payable and Receivable in full — the two-way current of any functioning business. It was here that she stopped simply recording numbers and started understanding what they meant: cash flow, credit cycles, the quiet leverage of getting paid on time.
That steady climb earned her something bigger — a seat at a Turkish multinational, where she stepped into the role of Finance Specialist. She calls it a turning point, and it’s not hard to see why: an MNC environment moves faster, demands more, and rewards precisely the discipline she’d spent years building. Monika didn’t just keep pace. She rose. Year on year, responsibility by responsibility, she climbed the organisation’s ranks until she reached its very top — Managing Director.
It is the kind of arc more often talked about than lived: from Accounts Assistant to Managing Director, inside a single career, inside a single decade. Monika speaks of it with quiet pride, not as a boast, but as proof — the long way is still a way.
A New Beginning, Written Together
And yet, the Managing Director’s chair was not where the story chose to end. Today, Monika is stepping into an entirely different kind of leadership role — alongside her husband, Sachin Awate, building their own Misal House business, Rajdarbar Misal, from the ground up.
She is careful with the framing, and it matters: this is not a retreat from a corporate career, but a redirection of it. The financial discipline she built at Fort’s shipping companies, the operational fluency she earned at the Turkish MNC, the boardroom instincts of a Managing Director — all of it now goes into a cafe counter, a kitchen, a brand the couple can call entirely their own.
“This is not an ending, but a new beginning,” Monika says of the venture — and it reads less like a tagline than a philosophy. Rajdarbar Misal isn’t Monika starting over. It’s Monika and Sachin starting together, with two decades of combined professional grit behind a single bowl of misal.
The Founder’s Philosophy
What sets Monika apart isn’t just the trajectory from Accounts Assistant to Managing Director — plenty of professionals climb corporate ladders. It’s that she chose, at the height of that climb, to build something of her own instead of simply staying comfortable at the top.
In an industry often dominated by big investors and franchise money, Rajdarbar Misal stands out as something rarer: a husband-and-wife-led brand rooted in genuine corporate expertise and lived experience. Monika isn’t running a misal house because the corporate world let her down. She’s running it because she built, ledger by ledger and promotion by promotion, everything required to run it — and something new — extremely well.
Rajdarbar Misal is the misal house business run by Monika and Sachin Awate, currently building its footprint in Mumbai — one bowl of misal, and one satisfied customer, at a time.
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