It’s okay to fall if you know how to get up, says Meerah Rajavel of Palo Alto Networks

Born and raised in Virudhunagar, a small town near Madurai in Tamil Nadu, Meerah Rajavel got married at the age of 20, as soon as she completed her engineering degree in 1992. While the pursuit of a higher education was not really frowned upon, early marriages were the norm in her community.

“All my cousins married way younger than I did. A week after I completed my course, I got engaged, and a month later, I was married. My parents were very supportive of my education, but despite good grades, I could only travel up to Madurai for higher education,” she recalls.

Introduced to computers while she was in the tenth standard, Rajavel, now Chief Information Officer at Palo Alto Solutions, started off with basic programming and games. She was also in the first batch when computer science was introduced as a subject. It was a natural progression to continue with the subject in Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai.

While she may have married quite early, it became the turning point in her life. After moving to Bengaluru to be with her husband, Rajavel started applying for jobs. It was a time where campus placements were few and far between and even while applying for jobs, there were a few questions related to her marital life that she’d always had to answer.

“There was prejudice. I would pass all rounds and in the final one, someone would say, “Oh! You are married? Will your husband have a job transfer? Are you planning to have children? And then, they would reject. My husband was very supportive and would always tell me that it was their loss, not mine,” Rajavel says. He remains her biggest supporter and cheerleader.

A technologist at heart

It took a few months to land a job as a programmer in a small company, Lotus Infotech, where she worked on turnkey projects for large corporations. After three years, she decided to take a break after her daughter was born. Her company was supportive and asked her to come back whenever she was ready, quite unheard-of in those days. However, she resigned from her job and spent a few months in her hometown with her family for around 10 months.

“I was curious as to what was happening in the industry, though I was not ready to go back to work. I just walked into Infosys for an interview in 1996 and got the job,” she recalls.

Within a short period, she joined the product engineering team, with Nortel Networks as a client. The company asked Rajavel if she could spend time at the client’s location in North Carolina for around six months. It was a tough decision to move away from family, but fortunately, her husband moved to California for a project with his company.

She joined her husband, took up a job with a startup–laying the foundation for a diverse career spanning 25 years across top IT companies that include Cisco, McAfee, Forcepoint, and now as Chief Information Officer at Palo Alto Networks.

She remains a technologist at heart, while striving towards outcomes.

“I look at technology as a means to an end–producing an outcome, whether it’s for the greater humanity, society, or a specific outcome for a small set of the population. Working in tech companies, either in product engineering or building products, I wanted to be a practitioner, to build and implement them. My motivation was to learn the business in a broader context without losing the edge of technology,” she adds.

Every challenge is an opportunity

When she joined Cisco in 2001, Rajavel became intrigued by cybersecurity that continued after she moved to McAfee.

“I Love You was the first bug that was introduced as a fun thing. And malware is a big social, economic, and political problem and is critical to infrastructure and this got me interested in cyber security,” she elaborates.

Rajavel oversees a 1,000-member team in Palo Alto, “responsible for all technology in the company for the enterprise to run.”

“We are a cybersecurity company, building products that secures our customers. There is a product organisation, that’s also a technology organisation, but they focus on building products for our customers. Anything other than that, it is technology I am responsible for. For example, it could be as simple as running our 44 offices across the globe to applications that are used by customers, and they come to us for problems and more. My team is responsible for providing these business infrastructure and technology infrastructure capabilities that run the company,” she adds.

Rajavel has traversed her career by looking at every challenge as an opportunity, rather than a roadblock. And it’s about how you handle it.

“Sometimes, we think too much about risk taking. But if you play it in your head, what is the risk you are taking? What are the consequences of the risk and ask yourself if you are okay to accept that. It makes you more confident and instead of looking at what could possibly go wrong, you will start looking at what you need to do to make it right. It’s okay to fall if you know how to get up. But practice on getting up, and not falling. Again, if you are not falling, you are playing safe,” she says.

However, she’s also aware women don’t have it easy. While there may be many women entering the tech industry, there are not many at the top. And, for that, she says, there should be system guidance and support in the system.

She believes the first fall typically happens between the manager and someone at the VP level, mostly due to family commitments. The second one, between the VP and Director level, is very challenging due to some unconscious biases that may creep in.

“The standards may not always be gender neutral. They may say, “Oh, she’s very good, but she’s not assertive, or she’s too aggressive, she needs to tone down. But I can say it’s getting better.”

Being a mentor has always been a two-way street for Rajavel.

“I learn a lot from my mentees too. So, I believe it’s a joint learning. My job as a mentor is to let them discover their passion, bring a curiosity to problems, be open to others’ point of view and be on a continuous learning path,” she says.