Before software, I performed at street corners. Nukkad natak — street theatre — with a college society in Delhi. A dozen of us in black kurtas, one dafli, a chalk circle on hot concrete, and an audience that owed us nothing.
That's the education. A theatre audience has paid and sat down in the dark; it will forgive a slow first act. A street crowd is in the middle of going somewhere. Ten seconds of curiosity, bought with a drumbeat, and after that you keep every spectator by earning every moment. A vegetable vendor with a queue forming was the most honest critic I ever performed for. He doesn't walk away to be cruel. He walks away because his life is more interesting than your play, and changing that, briefly, was the job.
The form gave no sets, no microphones, so it forced a discipline I didn't have words for yet: nothing in the circle that doesn't work. Every line audible from the back, anything indulgent cut by the second performance because you'd watched it lose the crowd at the first.
I notice the chalk circle most in meetings now. A steering committee, a client demo, a case for some platform decision — people treat these as captive audiences. They aren't. Attention still walks away, just invisibly, behind polite faces and open laptops. I learned what that moment looks like on concrete, at nineteen, and what it costs to win it back.